Wild Wednesdays: The Streets Run Red

“The Streets Run Red” has little to offer the average mainstream audience, but gorehounds craving some sick depravity should be satiated.

Welcome to your weekly dose of the extreme, my Morbidly Beautiful readers.

Thanks to our friends over at Wild Eye Releasing, I’ve come into possession of some of the most vile, sick, disgusting, and wonderful independent horror around from Wild Eye’s “Raw & Extreme” line of films. We started this limited series with a bang, reviewing The Spanish Chainsaw Massacre. If you read that one, you know what you’re in for. Now, I’m back to review The Streets Run Red. 

The story (if you could call it that) centers around a serial killer known as The Kubrick Killer who is recounting his crimes to a couple of the worst detectives in the history of cinema. That’s basically it, as far as the story goes.

The film starts off with our violent taskmaster essentially gutting a woman on a roof while she crawls away topless. Then we get a title card, followed by our killer decapitating a man at a bus stop, leading to his arrest.

The rest of the film is told through a mixture of flashbacks of him killing people and the present time with the two awful detectives who act so poorly that they’ll make you wish you were getting your eardrums ripped out. One is particularly awful, and he also loves using terribly racist language towards the killer; fuck that guy in particular.

This 2017 film is directed and written by Paul McAlarney. He’s also a special effects make-up artist and sound engineer, which makes sense.

The gore and sound are the two highest points of this movie.

To be fair, they may be the only high points of the film.

I need to make something clear regarding my film coverage because I believe in honesty when it comes to art. I am biased in that I will give indie films with little to no budget a lot more room to stretch before I start shitting on them because, many times, indie horror is purely a work of passion. I will rarely ever shit all over indie horror.

And then, there are movies like The Streets Run Red that just don’t have anything to offer outside of the gore. But, honestly, the gore is what we’re here for!

McAlarney has got something going wrong upstairs if he wrote this movie because, holy shit, this film is the epitome of extreme for extreme sake — and that’s coming from someone who has watched all three AUGUST UNDERGROUND films multiple times.

This one takes what you think is fucked up in extreme horror cinema and wipes its ass with it.

There’s a particularly insane kill scene where our central antagonist removes a pregnant woman’s fetus, tries to impregnate the hole he just made, shoves the fetus back in, and then decides to “paint” his new Forbidden C-Section art with… well, there’s no way to dance around this, he paints it with cum that he has in a bowl.

Yes, I just said that.

I don’t know when he made the nightmare chowder, nor do I know which Kubrick film this was supposed to be an homage to. If I had to guess, I’d say Eyes Wide Shut.

That scene is one of many that take the line and push it off a cliff.

If you’re looking for a gorehound’s delight, this is it.

I’ll also give this one a shout-out for the soundtrack and visuals because the look is sort of this neo-noir dreamscape that looks awesome, and the sound is a techno-synth track that definitely does a lot to carry the film through when it drags.

But really, The Streets Run Red is absolutely only for people who are okay with very mean, extreme violence and a visual treat. Everything else about it is something you can pass on.

But for those who are down to test their gag reflex and give this symphony of violence a chance, it’s on Tubi.