The late pulp filmmaker Sam Fuller began his directorial career in 1949 with I Shot Jesse James, and wrapped his final big-screen film, Street Of No Return, in 1989. In the intervening 40 years, he created a cinematic universe filled with crusty reporters, unsentimental soldiers, cynical gunmen, and sexually experienced women, and he worked with whatever resources were available, bleeding out low-budget B-pictures and applying the same grit to his few higher-budget projects. The new-to-DVD Street Of No Return has the seedy, blacked-out look of an '80s video-store shelf-filler—the interiors lack a sense of defined space, while the exteriors are dominated by trash-strewn, bonfire-lit alleys—but it's still a Fuller film in every sense. Keith Carradine stars as a Neil Diamond-like pop star who falls in love with dancer/model Valentina Vargas and decides to take some time off from the celebrity grind. A gang of contrarians, including Carradine's lovestruck manager and Vargas' mobster boyfriend, nix the singer's plans by having his throat slit. From there, Street Of No Return develops into a fairly routine revenge story, as a scraggly, destitute Carradine (looking uncannily like his brother David) manipulates cops and crooks alike to get another shot at the conspirators. The back half of the film doesn't offer much that can't be found on Showtime at 2 a.m., but Fuller applies the full force of his imagination to the setup, jumping back and forth in time with clean match-cuts and giving the show-business and Dumpster-diving environments equal doses of lurid hyper-realism. Carradine the bum gulps dripping water from broken pipes, and hides behind enormous milk boxes stamped "Good For The Whole Family." Carradine the idol makes dispassionate love to Vargas, after which Fuller whip-pans around the room, catching glimpses of the lovers' naked bodies. These touches of directorial grace don't exactly redeem Street Of No Return, but they do liven up what might have otherwise been a dull grind. The DVD adds a commentary track by Carradine (whose memory of the production proves faulty), as well as 30 minutes worth of insightful interviews and footage from the set. None of the disc's features pretend that the film offers more than effective genre storytelling, although those with an eye for thematic significance may note how Fuller keeps bringing the action and dialogue back to the crotch. One of the first lines of dialogue has a street person dismissing the potential pestilence of an alcohol-drowned mouse, saying "Every germ in it was deader'n my cock," and at a climactic moment, a bad guy takes a bullet to the groin. With Street Of No Return, Fuller ended his career by taking literal shots at the virility that fueled his characters' violence.