Street Trash

After taking fellow vagabond Alex (Cormack-Thomson) under their wing, a group of individuals living rough on the streets of Cape Town uncover a government plot to do away with the homeless community permanently through the use of a gruesome chemical weapon known as “V". With their very existence on the line, Ronald (Michael) and his gang must form unstable alliances and risk everything to make sure they don’t become nothing.

Street Trash, a sequel of sorts to the 1987 cult film of the same name, is writer & director Ryan Kruger’s follow-up from his deservedly multi-award nominated and winning comedic sci-fi horror Fried Barry. There are a few returning faces here, both Gary Green, who played the titular Barry, and Sean Cameron Michael returning as Ronald, swap roles here with Michael taking the lead of this band of displaced misfits and Green’s 2-Bit helping fill out a cast of vibrant, eccentric and shall we say, rather colorful characters.

Ronald is the affable leader, who recruits Alex to show her the ropes and the glue that holds them all together. There’s Chef (Vaz, also returning as part of the Fried Barry alum), the sage elder of the group with unmatched street-life know-how and a unique perspective on fairy-tale morality and message. Rounding off, we have the aforementioned Green as 2-Bit, mostly silent but always accompanied by his foul-mouthed imaginary friend Sockle as well as twins Pap (Meyer) and Wors (Newkirk) and the mostly off-screen (bar a hand or two) Offley (Kruger).

Each one much like the film, is as crazy and out there as the next, but with all clearly having an immensely good time and giving no less than one hundred percent. It’s this band of brothers and sisters that must come together to take down the over-tanned and downright despicable Mayor Mostert (Grier, themselves fully committed to the cause), a bubbling cesspit of vitriol and hate who will stop at nothing to wipe them all out once and for all.

And, as fans of Fried Barry might expect, Street Trash is a crazy film and, as its opening moments will very much prove, not one for the faint-hearted. You would very quickly lose track trying to keep count of how many body parts pop or squelch or are indeed pulled/chopped/snapped off in-between all the crude knob gags, and although it does end up eventually repeating its tricks somewhat, its impressive array of practical effects is just exactly the sort of thing fans of the gross-out, body-horror genre will lap up, especially so in the finale. Also surprisingly, it's a film that actually says a lot, class divides, civil unrest and over-policing are all tackled here to create a film that ultimately culminates in a messy affair that keeps you rooting for the underdogs.

Definitely not to everyone's taste, but for those with the appetite for cranked-up body horror, in Street Trash a buffet of delights awaits.