Ryan Kruger made Fried Barry and if you like that movie, well, good news. His reimagining of Street Trash, based on the 1987 movie, will probably delight you. Gary Green, who played Fried Barry, plays just about the same role in this.

Produced by Vinegar Syndrome and shot on 35mm, this has the Tenafly Viper booze being replaced by drones that give unhoused people in South Africa a case of the melts. There’s also Sockle, a little gremlin that shows up for some reason, which I have no idea why, as this Cape Town-set future of 2050 is about Ronald (Sean Cameron Michael) and his gang of weirdos — Chef (Joe Vaz), Pap (Shuraigh Meyer), Wors (Lloyd Martinez Newkirk) and 2-Bit (Green) — helping Alex (Donna Cormack-Thomson) adjust to life on the streets.

It’s Street Trash for people who were upset by the first movie and the fact that it didn’t just pretend to be transgressive but was wildly and violently odd. Or, as the review on Comic Book Resources wrote, “While Muro’s original film is notoriously cruel and ugly, Kruger wanted to create likable characters who the audience could root for.”

Or this line: “The original film’s jarring juxtaposition of slapstick comedy and severe misogynistic violence has proven to be too much even for seasoned gorehounds.”

I don’t know, I’m getting sick of the stripmining of my past, as I’m sure all old people get to be at some point. It got to the point that at the end, when they use Buckaroo Banzai’s line “Wherever you go, there you are” I reacted with an exasperated groan.

Anyways, this movie.

Mayor Mostert (Warrick Grier) has learned how to take the body melting results of the New York incident to get rid of undesirable people. He sends his cops into the streets to make it happen, all while people excessively swear at one another and make jokes like, “If two vegetarians get into a fight, is it still called a beef?”

The end of this goes full action movie and at least has some action and the practical effects are fun, even if the rest of the technical parts of the movie — the ADR is rough and it seems like the sound is low in others — lack. You could just watch this to see people melt in different colors and be told the sledgehammer plot and get past it. Or, you know, you could wonder why this movie spends so much time dissecting the pedophilic qualities of other stories instead of applying a critical lens to itself and, you know, actually being a halfway decent movie.