After two years in search of a distributor, the remake of 1984’s The Toxic Avenger is finally set to hit theatres on August 29. It’s billed as a remake, but by necessity it’s really a reboot. To make Toxi palatable to modern audiences, director Macon Blair (I Don’t Feel at Home in This World Anymore) had to strip the property to its bones and sift through its steaming DNA for parts unspoiled by the original’s controversial reputation.
In its overly long first half, this star-studded reimagining of The Toxic Avenger takes a more mature approach, replacing the simple health club horror of the original with a story about corporate greed, a broken healthcare system, and, of course, family. Where the movie comes alive is in its second half, when it ditches subtext and dives headfirst into gross-out comedy and senseless violence. Unfortunately, it ditches structure too.
In this adaptation of The Toxic Avenger, Winston Gooze (Peter Dinklage) is a down-on-his-luck stepfather working as a janitor for a shady supplement company run by the villainous pharma-bro Robert Garbinger (Kevin Bacon). Mistaken for a nosy investigator, Gooze is shot in the face by Garbinger’s goons and dumped into a pool of chemicals, mutating him into Toxi, an unkillable rubber-suited monster. After escaping to the woods, Toxi learns the martial secrets of his radioactive mop from a jenkem-huffing hobo and sets out on a crime-fighting rampage to clean up the streets and expose Garbinger’s corruption.
“You can’t manufacture Troma’s chaotic magic with seasoned directors and award-winning actors, even if most of them phone in their performances.”
The story is as deep as it needs to be, yet it manages to feel convoluted despite very little actually happening. I’m not suggesting that The Toxic Avenger remake needs to be a screenwriting masterpiece, but it suffers from some fundamental structural problems—most glaringly, the pacing. Nothing is given room to breathe; each scene races by with rapid cuts and an endless stream of jokes, almost all of which fall flat. The movie is so preoccupied with cramming in references and gags that within 20 minutes, the whole experience dissolves into noise.
Like the original, the film is little more than a collection of tasteless scenes. Unlike the original, only a few of them are memorable. The movie attempts to recapture the trash-tier cinema vibe of 80s Troma by deliberately incorporating poor filmmaking, but it just doesn’t work. As poorly produced as Troma’s The Toxic Avenger was, its charm came from the absolute chaos of its production and the inexperience of its crew. You can’t manufacture that magic with seasoned directors and a cast of award-winning actors, even if most of them (Kevin Bacon aside) phone in their performances.
Fans of the original will find a lot to love in the over-the-top violence, references, and obscene spirit of the remake, but will still feel something missing. What’s missing is authenticity. It’s clear that the production team loved the original, but it’s also clear that they knew they were making something that needed to generate revenue. The movie was given the green light to be disgusting and juvenile, but forbidden from being offensive. Which, in retrospect, was the secret sauce.
1984’s The Toxic Avenger isn’t a movie I have a special reverence for. It’s exploitative, sleazy, and ultra-violent, which was never my thing. Still, I’ve always been interested in it as a cultural artifact. It was a passion project from degenerate monster-movie fans who wanted nothing more than to make something gross. It’s not a classic, but it serves a similar purpose: an obscene inukshuk signalling a very peculiar transitional period in movie history. Something that could only have been made in the ’80s.
Lloyd Kaufman’s film was a swan dive into the cinematic dumpster. It was vile, shoddy, and cringy, but its backstroke through the trash was so gleefully authentic that Toxi lodged in the public consciousness like a tapeworm. The franchise became so iconic that a film best known for a graphic child-murder scene was somehow adapted into a Saturday morning cartoon.
The Toxic Avenger was also a key inspiration for an endless stream of straight-to-DVD titles in the era that followed. Over the past decade, grimy, low-budget gorefests have experienced a resurgence, dominating the lesser-trafficked corners of nearly every streaming service. Rarely, though, does one get an actual theatrical run. The Toxic Avenger (2023) is the perfect example of why.
“Movies like this just aren’t meant for wide release, because to make The Toxic Avenger marketable, it had to be neutered.”
Movies like this just aren’t meant for wide release. Theatre chains want to make money, which means they need something marketable. To make The Toxic Avenger marketable, it had to be neutered. But the soul of a Troma movie sits in those very neuterables, so when the ugly bits are removed, the heart is sure to follow.
When the remake is working, which is rare, it simply recreates the best bits of the Troma era movies. It just doesn’t do that enough. The practical effects are legendary, but they’re constantly undercut by some of the worst CGI I’ve ever seen.
There’s a band of cartoonish murderers called The Killer Nutz that would feel right at home with The Diaper Mafia from Citizen Toxie: The Toxic Avenger IV, but the story gives them almost nothing to do. The Killer Nutz and their Riff Raff–adjacent manager, Fritz Garbinger (Elijah Wood), are scene stealers. They ground the movie in the silliness of the franchise’s later entries, feeling like a mishmash of Purge villains and Juggalos. The chaos they bring to the screen is unabashedly fun and carries the fever-dream energy you might expect from the villains in a John Waters Batman movie.
The Toxic Avenger franchise is best left in the past, or at the very least, on the small screen. If you haven’t seen one of the originals or only half-remember watching it decades ago, it doesn’t hold up. The effects are gnarly, and the jankiness is fun, but everything that burned Toxi into the cultural memory has gone sour. The remake knows this and trades transgression for dick jokes and more gore, because doing anything beyond wearing its skin would make the film unsellable and likely unwatchable. In the end, the compromises made to get this released leave it a little of both.
