The original Street Trash was an exercise in cheerful bad taste that has its cult following, but it’s not so beloved that the thought of a reboot/ sequel is going to make too many fans clutch their pearls at the thought of a sacred cultural artefact being tarnished. In fact, the idea of the director of the singular nightmare picaresque Fried Barry, Ryan Kruger relocating the action to near-future Cape Town is quite an appealing one. However, Street Trash 2024, while more narratively consistent than its predecessor, is a far less memorable piece of colourful splatter.

As in the original, the plot centres around a group of assorted unhoused, junkies, dropouts, and unfortunates contending with a toxic compound that causes those exposed to it to melt in a cascade of sloughing flesh and multi-coloured goo. Whereas the 80s version was spread throughout Brooklyn in bottles of cheap liquor, in Cape Town a fascist mayor is using a gas variant to purposely eliminate the homeless. A small and close-knit surrogate family of those targeted decide to fight back against the threat.

Mindful of the way political sensibilities have changed over the last 35 years, Street Trash aims for far less all-purpose offence than the makers of the 1987 version. So, expect more thematic depth and less casual racism and misogyny. Also, while there is still a scene with a severed penis, the mangled genitalia doesn’t get thrown around in a twisted game of hot potato in this version. Wokeness gone mad, I tell you.

All things are relative, and Kruger’s vision will still be beyond the pale for moat people. The homeless characters aren’t the butt of most of the jokes here, but there is still a series of jarring, discombobulating series of tonal shifts as Kruger and his team show the effects of the gas again and again ad nauseum. There is social commentary to it all, but by the time large groups of derelicts are being rounded up and bundled into chambers to be gassed en masse, the blunt historical parallels are directly butting heads with the splatter-flick execution.

But how are the effects themselves? Because, being honest, that’s what draws the audience; the freaks, the weirdos, the folk who watch F1 for the crashes. And the gore is largely in the spirit of the original. There’s nothing quite as mad as the infamous ‘toilet melt’ here, but there is still something both horrific and strangely carnivalesque in someone clawing their face off in agonised desperation as green, pink, and purple gunge sprays from bubbling pustules and their bones liquify and give way. The practical work is a little more sophisticated perhaps, but feels like a celebratory continuation of the 80s vintage.

But while the main attraction is present and correct and more than satisfactory, the other elements are more of a mixed bag. The acting is variable, but far from the worst the genre has to offer. Sean Cameron Michael is surprisingly soulful as Ronald, the de-facto leader of the group through being the least befuddled. Alex (Donna Cormack-Thomson) is a suitably capable heroine, and Fried Barry himself, Gary Green basically plays a variant of the role in the amiably psychotic 2-Bit.

Green’s role is rather emblematic of the film itself. The plot feels like a mash-up of Neill Blomkamp‘s allegories for racial and class inequality District 9 and Elysium with the atmosphere and underclass reprisals of They Live. This sense of the familiar leaves Street Trash as a much less interesting film than Fried Barry. It also lacks that movie’s sense of place, which has equal repulsion and affection for Cape Town after dark. The focus is firmly on the characters, but too often they’re a little one-note to take the burden. The Brooklyn setting, a suitably decaying and disintegrating urban jungle, is one of the strongest aspects of the original, and not having that here feels like a missed opportunity.

The reception for this new iteration has been one of general disappointment and it’s hard to disagree with that assessment. It’s the collective gasp of a crowd watching a striker balloon the ball over a gaping goalmouth. It’s tricky to see how it could have gone wrong.

In selected cinemas from Fri 10 Jan and on digital platforms and Blu-ray from Mon 17 Feb 2025