THE TOXIC AVENGER (2023)

Low-budget splatter fest, The Toxic Avenger (1984) gets a slicker, bigger-budget remake. The original Troma flick may have been hugely influential on the likes of James Gunn, but some may argue it hasn’t aged well with its gratuitous sex scenes, tasteless jokes, and crude gore. While the original focused on a bullied high school student caught in the middle of a prank, this 2020s update is a more socially conscious take on the outcast vigilante story. With the toning down of some of the more bombastic elements, The Toxic Avenger loses some of its charm and becomes another low-budget superhero film.

Winston Gooze (Peter Dinklage) is a janitor trying to stay afloat as a single stepfather to a lonely teenage son (an underused Jacob Tremblay). When he finds out he has an incurable brain condition that his company’s insurance won’t cover any experimental treatment for, he has to come up with another plan. This plan involves begging the CEO of a crooked health company, Bob (Kevin Bacon), to help cover his treatment. When the multi-millionaire cruelly denies Winston any help, the janitor seeks revenge.

On his vendetta, he encounters environmental activist JJ (Taylour Page), who is on a mission to take down Bob and his corrupt company, which has only become richer as the townsfolk have become sicker and poorer. She has evidence that his health products and chemical plant are giving people cancer, including her late mother.

This mission soon goes awry when Bob’s Juggalo-esque rock band cronies attack Winston, causing him to fall into a vat of toxic waste. While it cures his health issues, it also leaves him a mutated mini-Hulk. Winston spends the second half of The Toxic Avenger as a bulked-up, eye-patch-wearing, super-strength green mutant. The updated look is a little too busy and artificial. In certain shots, Winston distractingly looks like he’s wearing a costume rather than his skin becoming grotesquely green and mutated.

JJ and a newly transformed Winston go on the run from Bob, his metalhead minions, and Bob’s brother Fritz (a superbly creepy Elijah Wood). The Toxic Avenger loses its way in the second act, jumping too quickly to get the characters from A to B and losing the serious plots set up in the opening scenes. When the film doesn’t know where to go, it always turns to violence. The fight scenes aren’t awfully exciting to look at, but the over-the-top blood splatter is delightfully zany.

The Toxic Avenger’s practical SFX elevate this film higher than they should. The movie is almost too polished in its execution and could have benefited from the grungier aesthetics of the previous incarnation. The gore is still the most creative element of this movie, even if sometimes it mismatches some of the serious topics brought up in the screenplay. This film may have benefited from embracing the low-budget bargain bin feel of the Troma original.

Lisa Guerreiro wears the green suit as Dinklage takes on the voice work after his chemical-induced transformation. The loss of Dinklage as a performer is instantly felt as Guerreiro takes over Winston’s physicality. Taylour Paige and Jacob Tremblay are also wasted, their more nuanced characters lost in the craziness of violence, gore, and gags. Luckily, Kevin Bacon and Elijah Wood understood the assignment as campy villains who wouldn’t feel out of place in the 1960s Batman television show. Julia Davis’ minor role as Bob’s assistant is also memorable, as the star is clearly having a ball, even if the British comedy icon feels like a left-field casting choice for the movie.

The eco-warrior, corrupt government plot is the most interesting element of this film, and the most wasted potential. An intro with a reporter (Shaun Dooley) threatening to reveal what is causing the high illness levels in St. Troma’s Village doesn’t really go anywhere, and JJ is wasted in favour of slapstick gore. It’s almost impossible for a film like The Toxic Avenger to balance its important message of the damage big business is doing to the health of poorer areas, and wanting to see clown-rocker-goons decapitating people with swords.

The Toxic Avenger lands in an odd space of being too subdued to be considered a true retelling of the so-bad-it’s-good classic, but not good enough to stand on its own feet. The script lacks the satire and tongue-in-cheek tone for the over-the-top blood splatter to really work. It’s somehow too well-made to effectively nail what made the original so beloved. While the production is elevated, the writing isn’t, so it sits in a strange no man’s land of trying too hard to be above the source material but not good enough to keep up with its 21st-century action-comedy peers.

There is still a place for the ’80s type of camp horror flick, and The Toxic Avenger should lean into this more. The Terrifier films, as love/hate as they are, perfectly execute the poor taste of splatter horror. Because The Toxic Avengers’ script plays it too straight, the zanier gore elements often feel out of place. While it’s fun to see a metal band/gang in clown face paint get their arms blown off, it doesn’t always match the more serious tone of a polluted town that the writing wants to explore.

The Boys knows how to perfectly satirise the superhero genre. Its writers perfectly dissected the tropes and characters to their essence to subvert how problematic the films and the fandom are. The Toxic Avenger never quite manages to fully capture how to laugh at the genre. Instead, it often comes across like a bad superhero knock-off that has nods to the Swamp Thing and the Incredible Hulk, yet never commits to subversion, satire, or even a good joke.

The writing suffers from not being funny enough. The film’s humour is a mix of tired meta gags and low-hanging fruit that isn’t trying too hard to do anything daring. The Toxic Avenger wants to be something more disruptive than it actually is. Is this a film about corruption and an environmental disaster, a film about a single father who led to the extreme demise of the American healthcare system, or is it a dumb slasher about a mutated janitor killing people with a toxic mop? The script is not smart enough to be everything.

Fans of the 1984 original (and its poor sequels) will likely be disappointed in this sanitised, more accessible update. The original, directed by Michael Herz and Lloyd Kaufman, was noisy, gory, funny, and groundbreakingly crude. This retelling, written and directed by Macon Blair (I Don’t Feel at Home in This World Anymore), is a little too soft-spoken and polite to truly nail why The Toxic Avenger is a cult classic.

USA | 2023 | 103 MINUTES | 1.85:1 | COLOUR | ENGLISH

Cast & Crew

director: Macon Blair.
writer: Macon Blair (based on ‘The Toxic Avenger’ by Lloyd Kaufman).
starring: Peter Dinklage, Jacob Tremblay, Taylour Paige, Julia Davis, Jonny Coyne, Elijah Wood & Kevin Bacon.