Stream It Or Skip It?

Vintage ooze meets modern sludge in The Toxic Avenger (now streaming on VOD platforms like Amazon Prime Video), a remake/reboot/rewhatever of a 1984 Z-schlock cult fave about an ultraviolet mutant-meltface quasi-superhero. The original film, a product of infamous junk-cinema studio Troma (which helped launch the careers of Oliver Stone, J.J. Abrams and James Gunn), spawned sequels, cartoons and even a musical, thus forming the most stupidest IP this side of the Leprechaunverse. Fringe filmmaker Macon Blair writes and directs, and, surely against some sort of odds, managed to rope in Peter Dinklage, Kevin Bacon, Taylour Paige, Elijah Wood and Jacob Tremblay to star, instead of some bottom-scale Hollyweirdos who are just happy to do bizarre shit in front of a camera. Not that there isn’t some bizarre shit happening in front of a camera here, mind you, because that’s pretty much why these movies exist in the first place. But is it bizarre enough to make us care? That’s the question.  

The Gist: I don’t have a firm grip on the geography of St. Roma’s Village. It’s a city, but it’s a village? And it has boroughs, e.g., the Depressing Outskirts, where the average poor folk dwell, and Ye Olde Shithead District, the realm of the rich. Among the Shitheads is Bob Garbinger (Bacon, R.I.P.D.), a sneering vanity case who lives in a manor dubbed Chudhaven and owns a snakeoil supplement company called BTH, which blatantly pollutes the waters. Living in the Outskirts is Winston Gooze (Dinklage, Pixels), a sad-sack BTH janitor who’s single-dadding things for his troubled doofling of a stepson Wade (Tremblay, The Book of Henry), who’s stunted and depressed in the wake of his mother’s death by cancer, presumably from the BTH runoff. Does Wade attend Nuke ’em High? No, but also sort of yes? This is all rather cartoonishly dystopian but also realistic in the sense that cretin developers are trying to gentrify regular-folk properties and health insurance companies perkily deny lifesaving coverage. There are also men’s-rights/transphobe assholes trying to make up for their teensy wangs by waving guns around. Either way, one thing’s clear: This town needs an enema!

While an investigator, J.J. Doherty (Paige, Mack and Rita), seeks to expose Garbinger’s eco-malfeasances, avoiding his ghoulish brother Fritz Garbinger’s (Cooties’ Wood, who resembles Gru as an Addams Family character) goons, who look like an unhealthy melange of pro wrestlers, dime-store Juggalos and Mad Max extras, and play in a nu-metal band called Killer Nutz that makes Saliva sound like Stravinsky, I was feeling confused and disoriented. There’s some got danged WORLD BUILDING going on here, and it’s dense and bewildering, because this level of effort isn’t usually applied to movies with budgets consisting of a half-pallet of nickel rolls. But that’s enough money to pay for some prime needle drops, including Savatage’s ‘Hall of the Mountain King,’ a Judas Priest non-hit and a Motorhead number that isn’t ‘Ace of Spades,’ and this is not a sentence of criticism, but rather praise. It’s quite the capital-A Aesthetic Blair has crafted here. 

Where was I? Right: Winston is miserable, and only gets more miserabler when he’s diagnosed with fatal brain problems, which is where the health insurance “comedy” comes in, resulting in Winston’s attempt to beg Bob Garbinger for help, which goes nowhere, so he decides to steal from BTH, which finds the Killer Nutz on his ass, and the end up killing him and dumping his corpse into a vat of toxic waste, which turns him into a green-skinned, Popeye-armed mutant (physically played by Luisa Guerreiro, with Dinklage’s voice dubbed in) who can rip your colon out with his damn bare hands, and who has a detachable eyeball that’s mitten-clipped to his skull by his optic nerve. Quite the string of events here. Pep-talked by a local hobo-guru played by The Jesus Lizard singer/real-life crazyman/hero and role model to children everywhere David Yow, Winston soon becomes the savior of St. Roma, wielding a toxic-sludge-soaked mop that can melt a mofo’s face off, and a large schlong that blasts purple acid whizz, sure to come in handy in a tight spot. And so the Shitheads should be worried. Very worried.

What Movies Will It Remind You Of?: A longtime collaborator of filmmaker Jeremy Saulnier, Blair cops a few moves from Green Room’s punk-rock aesthetic, nips a bit from Terry Gilliam’s Brazil and is a gonzo extension of the oddball tone Blair wielded in his other directorial effort, 2017’s I Don’t Feel at Home in This World Anymore. You could also lump this Toxie in with inevitably less-successful remakes of cult classics like Friday the 13th, Willard, Texas Chainsaw Massacre and all those.

Performance Worth Watching: Any chance to see Yow tame his drunken-brawler stage antics to play a grimy transient lunatic philosopher who prolly has bugs in his beard is – well, not that different from perceived reality, but we should embrace it anyhow. 

Memorable Dialogue: Winston Gooze/The Toxic Avenger’s vaguely inspiring mantra: “Sometimes you gotta do something.” Please note the lack of an exclamation point.

Sex and Skin: A couple sets of boobs at a Killer Nutz concert, two instances of prosthetic wangs, one mutated and one relatively regular even though it’s a bit too big to be truly “regular.”

Our Take: Credit Blair for the sheer effort he puts into Toxic Avenger: This is a surprisingly dense narrative touching on parental angst, terminal illness, ecological destruction and the war between the haves and have-nots, within a reasonably well-considered melange of ’80s nostalgia and 21st-century sensibilities, best represented by the blend of practical effects (rubber masks, yay!) and CGI (digital blood, boo!). Of course, all this is spiced up with gore, beheadings, dick jokes, overt/accidental references to A Clockwork Orange and an instance of a Kevin Bacon mutant beast being whanged in the nuts with a toilet, which is something you just don’t see every day. 

Not that the movie is particularly good, mind you – although being “good” was, is and never will be a goal of any Toxic Avenger movie. It’s s’posedta be bad, you know. But it’s also s’posedta be more entertaining than it is. It’s more silly than provocative of emotion or thought – it just doesn’t fulfill any hopes of a no-holds-barred “UNRATED” gleeful skewering of everything in sight. It’s sporadically funny at best, with fist-to-nose satire and grotesque caricature. And it’s shabby around the edges, which might be endearing if it didn’t feel like it was hopping gracelessly from one to the next. Fans of this franchise may enjoy the Easter eggs and inside jokes, and there’s a bit of perverse glee to be weaned from watching excellent actors apply themselves to unapologetically dopey material. But a decontextualized quote from Paige’s character sums it up perfectly: “Too much, too much.”

Our Call: Eh. I struggle to muster much enthusiasm for this Toxic Avenger. There’s some stuff to like , especially for you Toxies out there, but the rest of us may find it more tiresome than amusing. SKIP IT.

John Serba is a freelance writer and film critic based in Grand Rapids, Michigan.