Flasz On Film

Remaking The Toxic Avenger, Lloyd Kaufman’s iconic Troma flagship, is tricky. It’s not about retelling the story or redesigning the hero, but about engaging with what the original stood for. It was a gnarly, nasty piece of exploitation cinema with a very distinct sense of humour and cultural awareness that was already in a conversation of its own with mainstream Hollywood-derived cinema and the Roger Corman corner of fast and cheap knock-off entertainment alike. And through it, the Troma crowd was making a cultural statement themselves.  

While Corman was aiming to entertain the masses with what he had at his disposal and thus created trashy B-movie stuff, Kaufman’s film was intentionally aiming to be a piece of schlock that mocked mainstream entertainment, glorified indie exploitation, and made fun of genre filmmaking with deliberately awful line deliveries and completely superfluous nudity, sexual violence, and lurid characterizations.  

Therefore, the very idea of resurrecting this cult classic, which dates as far back as 2010 when Arnold Schwarzenegger was supposed to be involved in some capacity, required the filmmakers to decide how they wanted the movie to be positioned vis-a-vis the original.  

Eventually, after years of debating and ideas ranging between going down a family-friendly route once explored by the Toxic Crusaders cartoon and blasting whole hog into the realm of modern grindhouse, the film came together written and directed by Macon Blair, who is best known as a Jeremy Saulnier habitué, with Lloyd Kaufman’s own on-the-record blessing, which indicated that either Blair had a good idea about how to evoke the spirit of the original or at least how to tip his hat towards it.  

The result is a halfway house between these approaches: it keeps key story beats but reinvents everything else to carve out its own niche. The Toxic Avenger is still a movie about a guy with a mop who takes a dip in toxic waste and becomes an unlikely monster superhero, but it’s very much a different guy and a different mop. And with it comes the realization that the intent behind this movie is not exactly aligned with what a hardcore Troma fan would reasonably expect. After all, we’re not in the 1980s anymore. Times have changed and in the current climate, something like the original has very little right to exist in the mainstream of the cultural consciousness. It still winks and nods at Kaufman’s work, if only to placate the fanbase, but for this new movie to succeed, the filmmaker in charge of the project needed to identify what Kaufman lampooned and figure out how to transplant it into the current cultural setting.  

In contrast to the 1984 original that openly paid homage to, mocked and satirized such classics as The Creature from the Black Lagoon, Frankenstein, Swamp Thing and the body of exploitation movies like The Last House on the Left, The Warriors and others, Macon Blair’s reinvention had a different mission. For once, many classics Kaufman’s film referenced are now even further removed and it probably wouldn’t have been as powerful to wink at A Clockwork Orange, Taxi Driver or The Texas Chain Saw Massacre as it was forty years ago. Instead, the new-and-improved The Toxic Avenger must look at the current popular culture from a similar angle.  

Thus, the film has a whole bunch of comic book movies, Edgar Wright spoofs and modern Rob-Zombiefied grindhouse to plop into its meat grinder in order to serve it as a gruesome and exploitative meat loaf that is suitable for consumption by fans who might have developed completely different sensibilities to those who have enjoyed the original four decades ago. Blair’s film attempts to apply the Troma tradition of purposefully making a movie that looks like a piece of trash and mocks the kind of stuff we have been fed continually over the last ten years.  

The titular toxic avenger is played by Peter Dinklage, a man whom nobody would ever expect to see in the role of a superhero and whose involvement in the modern franchise-laden culture had been thus far confined to playing a villain in X-Men: Days of Future Past, a minor character in Thor: Love and Thunder and a voice role in Transformers: Rise of the Beasts. Instead of a gang of murderous punks straight out of a Tobe Hooper movie, he’s about to take on an evil business magnate (Kevin Bacon) who holds the local community in a vise, is married to the mob and suffers from a serious case of the God complex. A story about drugged out yobs roaming the streets wouldn’t work now because that’s not our current concern and therefore it is not what the movie ought to lampoon.  

Instead, it trashes the profit-driven healthcare industry, corporate villains who ruin the planet in pursuit of capital gains, and the manipulative sway of media mangling the truth while hoping for clicks and the complete desensitization to violence we have developed in the process as a society.  

And to this end, The Toxic Avenger succeeds as it crafts its blend of self-aware satire, splatter-heavy action and an utterly heightened tone that clearly draws from Kaufman’s crib sheet before being passed through an overdrive pedal with its levels set by Quentin Tarantino, Robert Rodriguez, Rob Zombie and Edgar Wright. In short, Blair’s take on this character offers the kind of counterbalance to the mainstream that Troma did back in the day while using tools that modern audiences are likely to champion. It’s a gross and bombastic piece of overdriven schlock that works for our current sensibilities and does not require the viewer to detune their ethics.  

The movie just works. It trots along in fountains of fake blood, crass humour and the kind of cultural commentary you’d expect out of the more evolved episodes of South Park as it positions Toxie as a modern antithesis of the MCU superhero and a crass, trashy take on the likes of Deadpool or Lobo. It goes places mainstream blockbusters would never go with its acid piss scenes, Stuart Gordon-esque special effects, rank comedy and flashes of wildly heightened violence, but retains enough class to belong in the same conversation.    

The problem that The Toxic Avenger has, however, is that in contrast to the movie it salutes, it doesn’t have the same aura of incompetent authenticity. The filmmakers here have had way more resources at their disposal, more combined experience in how movies are made and more entertainment acumen to instinctively know how to put together something that works.  

Meanwhile, the original was raw and weirdly innocent in its attempt to exploit the medium of filmmaking and that’s not something you can easily manufacture. We have to understand that Blair’s movie has the same relationship with its predecessors that Robert Rodriguez’s Machete and Planet Terror had.  

It’s a piece of performative grindhouse that only lacks fake stock damage and artificial cigarette burns while underneath it all it is simply a well-made film. So, if you’re pursuing a piece of Kaufman-esque trash that looks and feels real and rough, you might not be able to find any of it in Macon Blair’s The Toxic Avenger. Its relationship to this modality of filmmaking is subtler, as I hope I outlined above. And on top of it all, it’s hard to make a movie that looks cheap when you have money to burn, just as it is hard to play authentic-sounding punk music when you hire a group of well-trained session musicians for the gig.  

This is just the contract the movie wants you to enter. It’ll be fun if you let it entertain you on its own terms and maybe, with a little thought and outside commentary, you might find just how smart it is. But if you’re expecting to see a piece of trash homaging another piece of trash and carrying out its original mission of upsetting the mainstream using 80s-specific tools, you’ll be sorely disappointed. It’s a perfect spoof of the modern blockbuster, one of the best superhero movies made in recent years, and a great evolution of grindhouse sensibilities, but if you’re after grisly stuff that looks as though it was funny to nobody but the filmmakers themselves, you might want to go back to rewatch the original or, failing that, check out a Rob Zombie flick instead.