The owner of a liquor store in Greenpoint, Brooklyn, New York City finds a case of cheap booze ("Tenafly Viper") in his basement.

Meanwhile, an overzealous cop (Bill Chepil) is trying to get to the bottom of all the deaths, all the while trying to end the tyranny of a deranged Vietnam War veteran named Bronson (Vic Noto), who has made his self-proclaimed "kingdom" at the junkyard with a group of homeless vets under his command as his personal henchmen.

In an NBR profile, he later said: "I wrote it to democratically offend every group on the planet, and as a result the youth market embraced it as a renegade work, and it played midnight shows.

[10] In 2010, Arrow Video released a two-DVD set in the UK featuring the documentary Meltdown Memoirs along with a previously unavailable featurette with Jane Arakawa and the booklet 42nd Street Trash: The Making of the Melt written by Calum Waddell.

The film holds a 67% rating on review site Rotten Tomatoes, where critic Walter Goodman of The New York Times said of it, "It claims no redeeming social value, and you don't have to be a Supreme Court nominee to question whether the Founders could have foreseen anything like it when they wrote the First Amendment."

[13] The film has since gained a cult following among horror fans on the internet, owing in part to the minor character role of an obnoxious kid being played by infamous contestant Ian Benardo from reality TV shows So You Think You Can Dance?

[15] Brian Eggert of Deep Focus Review criticized the film's attempts at shock value, saying, "around the time an unsuspecting bum inadvertently urinates on another, causing the pee-victim to chop off the offending man’s penis, while at the same moment, not far away, a would-be rapist engages in necrophilia with the corpse of a gang-rape victim, I decided Street Trash wasn't my cup of tea... all I saw was a desperate attempt to get a reaction.