Interviews
Ryan Kruger Calls ‘Street Trash’ a Standalone Sequel and Gory Love Letter to ’80s Cinema
Fried Barry director Ryan Kruger gives a new spin on the 1987 cult classic Street Trash, relocating the melt madness to Cape Town, South Africa, where the growing divide between rich and poor has changed the world as we know it. But Kruger will be the first to eschew the “remake” label, referring to his new film as a standalone sequel.
The filmmaker wrote Street Trash to be accessible for newcomers, while slyly referencing details and events from the original to make this new movie a continuation of the goopy, melty world introduced by director Jim Muro in 1987. Kruger took painstaking measures to even recapture the ’80s aesthetic, both through practical effects and shooting his reimagining on 35mm. It also helps that Kruger grew up as a massive fan of Street Trash.
“As a kid growing up in the ’80s and ’90s, Street Trash was one of those films that my friends and I would sit up watching on my little TV late at night,” Kruger tells Bloody Disgusting. “We’d either have it on VHS, or it would be on TV. I was a fan of the original, and over the years, as it got older, I went back and watched it. So, when Justin Martell and Matt Manjourides approached me to do the film after I made Fried Barry, I was like, ‘Hell yeah, that would be amazing.'”
But how do you approach Street Trash in the modern world? The director explains, “It was one of those things straightway where there’s a big fanbase for the original film; I’m a part of that fanbase. But at the same time, I really respect the original film, but I wanted to stay very far away from trying to copy the original in any way. What I loved from the original, obviously, is the prosthetics. It was the ’80s, and it was just the tone and feel of ’80s movies. We were very lucky that we actually got to shoot on 35mm, just to give it that eighties film look. And all the prosthetics, but all in all with the whole film.”
Kruger reiterates that he doesn’t consider his film a remake. “It’s in the same world as the 1987 original film. We actually mention stuff from the original film. So for me, it’s always been more of a sequel. For the original fans, it’s actually a sequel. For a new audience it can be a standalone film.“
The commitment to the ’80s meant that Kruger wanted the film’s effects to feel authentic to the period, too. “I wanted to keep it very, very ’80s, very old prosthetics when it came to anything with the blood and the goo and everything. I looked at the original. It’s such a big part of the original. It was just really coming up with those ideas. I guess it just falls under the story as well of how each of these melts happened. It was that bottle of booze that went around and these guys that were drinking it. With this, it was the government. It wasn’t in drink form in some of the film, but gas. So, it was coming up with those different ideas of the melts. And sitting there with the prosthetics people, really coming up with ideas.”
Kruger continues, “Can we do this? Can we do that? You know, is this possible? It was fun. I always say if I didn’t do directing or acting, I probably would have gone into animatronics and prosthetics. So yeah, it was a lot of fun just coming up with these different ideas and then trying to push the boundaries compared to the original. Push for more blood and the goo. It’s almost like a little bit darker, in a way, when people melt. We actually did some pickup shots, and that’s just because we wanted to push it a little bit more with prosthetics.“
In the niche subgenre of melt horror, the 1987 film stands out in part for the colorful nature of the melting. The unlucky denizens that drink tainted Tenafly Viper dissolve into vibrant colors of goo. “That’s such a big thing for the original,” Kruger agrees. “There’s a whole generation that doesn’t even know what the fuck Street Trash is. The color was a big thing. If you happen just to be watching the film and see this purple or yellow or orange goo, you’d be like, ‘What the fuck?’ This is meant to be blood, you know. We wanted to use different colors just to push it. Obviously, prosthetics are a big part of the ’80s, but it’s also the color… it’s that multicolored goo. That’s that’s what Street Trash is, you know.“
While the homeless population in the original film often splintered into factions and fought amongst themselves, the new film centers around a ragtag group of eccentric but ultimately sweet misfits. They form a tight-knit group that pushes back against a corrupt government attempting to snuff them out of existence, and its members include Shuraigh Meyer as “Pap,“ Lloyd Martinez Newkirk as “Wors, “Joe Vazas as “Chef,“ Sean Cameron Michael as “Ronald,“ Donna Cormack-Thomson as “Alex,” and Gary Green as “2-Bit.”
Ryan Kruger says of his motley bunch, “It’s very important for me, no matter what movie you make, that you have characters that you love and sympathize with. There are a lot of genre movies that get made, especially in the low-budget horror world, where there are a lot of characters that are just shit, and you don’t care for them. When writing this film, I didn’t want to just make it a gore film. It’s very easy just to make a gore film. You have to have a good story. You must have good characters, and you’ve got to be able to care for them.“
The filmmaker also voices a unique character in the film: an imaginary puppet named Sockle. Kruger explains, “It was really fun. I’ve never really done voice work before. I’m working with the character 2-Bit, played by Gary Green, who played Fried Barry. 2-Bit probably took way too much acid in his life, too many drugs, and he has this imaginary friend. Only he can see this character. It was like a support character for 2-Bit and Gary Green, too, so I could bounce off him and work very closely. Gary looks amazing, just the way he looks. He’s got such presence. But to have this character as a drug addict and have this imaginary, inappropriate, funny friend… It was just fun to bounce back and forth. Then I was also smoking. So when I was doing this voice the whole time; my voice would really hurt at the end of the day.”
The commitment to ’80s cinema extends beyond Street Trash for Ryan Kruger. The filmmaker tips us off to Easter eggs hiding in plain sight: the costume designs. “In all my films, I put in a lot of little Easter eggs. Little nods to different movies that I enjoyed growing up,” he teases. “Some people will pick this up, and some people might not pick it up, but a lot of the characters in the movie are based on them. For example, Alex’s character. If you look at her wardrobe, it’s Ripley from Aliens. 2-Bit has red overalls and yellow gloves based on Roger Rabbit and Ronald, our lead guy. He was based on Robin Williams’ The Fisher King. And then you’ve got Chef, who is Stanley Kubrick if you look at his jacket, hair, and his glasses. Then, the two guys who are part of Rat King’s men are Snake Plissken and The Duke from Escape from New York. If you look at the wardrobes, it’s all ’80s and ’90s movies with the characters.”
Street Trash releases on Digital on November 19, just in time to get melty this Thanksgiving.
Interviews
‘Rubberhead’ Director Nick Taylor on FX Maverick Steve Johnson, Practical Effects, and Seven-Year Journey
Horror journalist, producer, and podcast host Nick Taylor moves into the director’s seat for his feature debut with illuminating documentary Rubberhead: The Life & Monsters of Steve Johnson.
It chronicles the wild life and career of SFX maverick Steve Johnson, based on the multi-volume book series Rubberhead: Sex, Drugs and Special FX, and those familiar likely already know Rubberhead isn’t your standard horror documentary.
Johnson is responsible for so many memorable movie monsters, having worked on Fright Night, Poltergeist II, An American Werewolf in London, A Nightmare on Elm Street 4: The Dream Master and Night of the Demons, to name a few. He’s also extremely candid in ways that feel atypical in this industry, open about his failures as much as his successes.
“It was a natural progression for sure,” Nick Taylor tells Bloody Disgusting of his transition into filmmaking ahead of Rubberhead‘s world premiere next week at the Fantasia Film Festival on July 23. “I think with my podcast, I got adept at interviewing people and pulling creative lessons out of them, which was the point of my podcast. I wanted this movie to be sort of a creativity pill for artists where if they’re starting a project or feel creatively stuck, they could watch this movie and be inspired and get actual practical creative lessons.”
Taylor’s background in PR and marketing also organically led him down this path.
He charts the course from book promo to documentary director: “But also Bloody Disgusting had a lot to do with this movie because in the very beginning when I first met Steve, I was helping him promote his book and I said, ‘Hey, I got a marketing background and a journalism background. Let me help you promote this book. I’ll just pitch stories from your life to the media, and we’ll see what happens.’ And John Squires wrote an article about Steve making Slimer under the influence of tons and tons of cocaine, and that went fairly viral.”
“For a week, it was story time with Steve,” Taylor continues. “He would tell me a story from his life, and every story was about a major movie, a major director, lots of drugs and alcohol and insanity. I would write them up, and I think John published about three or four of them. So huge shout out to John Squires because that was really great. So yeah, there were definitely a lot of outgrowths of my journalism background that definitely contributed to this movie.”
Rubberhead condenses the multi-book series into a cohesive feature film with a breezy runtime, sparking the obvious question as to how Taylor approached condensing Johnson’s life down to an under 2-hour documentary film.
“That was one of the more difficult parts of all of this, because we had enough for a series or an epically long six-hour fan documentary,” he answers. “But from day one, I did not want to make a fan documentary. I love them. They’re a lot of fun, but I did want the movie to stand on its own two feet as a character-driven portrait of an artist and a time period and a technology, that being practical effects. I did want to be objective. I didn’t want to make this too long. I wanted to make it re-watchable. So I think we just really had to focus on what the narratives were that we wanted to tell. So there were some basically almost cliché archetypical mythic narratives present in Steve’s life. We could have made this way longer, but we wanted to keep it short. But luckily that’s why you have special features.”
Johnson quickly proves to be an engaging subject thanks to his self-effacing wit and frank self-reflections; expect no shortage of stories about how drugs factored into the height of his career or the failures it wrought.
That rare quality was an asset for Rubberhead, Taylor confirms. “He does not shy away from anything about the drugs, the addiction, the bridges burned, the mistakes made, the lessons learned. He just is honest about all of it. He’s had a lot of time for reflection, and he’s done a lot of reflection, so he doesn’t shy away from any of it, which is huge because it’s very refreshing. I don’t think a lot of people are that way, at least in this industry from what I can see. So I think it was hugely beneficial. We wanted to lean into that, and we wanted to make this sort of a gonzo Hunter S. Thompson sort of wild tale through Steve’s overall life.“
Condensing his life into this doc was a slow and steady process for Taylor, too. “It’s been almost seven years. It’s been a labor of love. We’ve been as indie as it gets. We would shoot what we could when we could, and then we would edit when we could. Then after a while it all came together.”
In a way, making Rubberhead brings Taylor’s horror fandom full circle. It turns out that the very film that sparked his interest in the genre and practical effects also comes with an amusing Steve Johnson anecdote.
Taylor explains, “My gateway for sure was Beetlejuice. I saw that at a very young age; I think I was four or five. I felt somebody had shown me, my soul. I get a little emotional thinking about it. There was something about that movie that felt so strange and unusual, but also felt so familiar. It was spooky, but it was fun, and it was lighthearted, and it had humor, but it also had this macabre celebration to it that I just really got into as a kid. I felt somebody had shown me my own soul. And funny story, Steve got fired from Beetlejuice because Tim Burton gave him his hand-drawn designs and Steve’s like, ‘Oh my God, these look like kids did them. This is not what you want. I know what you want. I’m going to redesign these for you.’ And Tim Burton was like, ‘Yeah, no, you’re not.’ So yeah, funny story.”
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