The Most Offensive Film Ever?

Street Trash (1987)

Some movies are made for the sake of art; some movies are made for the sake of money; and, then there's Street Trash.  It seems the only reason Street Trash was made was to offend.  What group, you ask?  Everyone.  Every single person alive.

The movie tosses off jokes mired in multiple -isms (racism, sexism, classism, etc.), scatological humor, rape, necrophilia, and generally every taboo subject you can think of, plus a few you probably didn't know existed.  This intention to offend is nothing new, even within the decade it was created given that the 1980s was the decade that gave us Troma Films, but what sets Street Trash apart from its many low-brow peers and imitators is the sense of craft with which the offensiveness is set upon us.

Make no mistake; this is no literary achievement.  There's no subtext to the plot exploring the plight of New York's downtrodden homeless population.  This is the purest form of exploitation in that it seeks to garner entertainment from the sad, pathetic lives these characters lead.  No character here is ever presented with the opportunity to lead a better life, and even when they harbor such illusions, their dreams are still caught trapped by the muck and filth that surrounds them.

BUT, and this is a very large but, the exploitation here is tossed at us to such an absurd degree it eventually lapses into the realm of parody.  And a deceptively clever parody, at that.  Where Troma would simply be content to mess around with bodily fluids, Street Trash launches them at us in full force -- homeless men are introduced to a rare alcohol that causes bodies to melt, explode, and disfigure into incomprehensible shapes and colors.  It's almost as if Andy Warhol decided to rip control of his '70s exploitation films from the hands of Paul Morrissey and try to one-up George Romero in the gross-out category.  The death set pieces fuse pop art camp with horror movie gross, creating a surreal vision that no filmmaker has been able to match since.

This cleverness also extends to the characterizations, which, while no great achievement, play with what had by then become genre conventions.  The main villain of the film, Bronson, is a deranged Vietnam vet who can't let go of the violence he perpetrated while in 'Nam.  This type of character was an extremely tired stock character used not only in the exploitation genre (Rolling Thunder, The Farmer, etc.) but also in mainstream cinema of the era (Platoon, Casualties of War, etc.).

Here, Bronson is a far stranger creature.  While outwardly visions of war fuel his racist paranoia, he finds himself attracted to a female character of unspecified Asian heritage.  In his dementia, she becomes intertwined with the Vietnamese he killed during the war, adding an oddly sympathetic aspect of self-loathing to what should be a one-note villain.  While you never end up feeling sorry for Bronson as a character, there are moments when he passes from stock villain to a damaged, ragged reality.

And in what is probably the cleverest aspect of the film, Street Trash subverts traditional depictions of New York as a cultural and intellectual epicenter by throwing its low brow pedigree in your face.  For the entire duration of the movie we follow homeless men drinking themselves into literal messy, splatter-filled graves.  Nary an intellectual comes within vomiting distance of the screen, although, the movie displays a disgusting wit about itself.  So in that sense, Street Trash owes as much to gross-out existentialist writers like Georges Bataille and Charles Bukowski as it does violent horror features of the previous decade.

But really, this probably the best way to summarize the experience that is Street Trash: