Man, a Hollywood remake of THE TOXIC AVENGER has almost happened a million times since, what, the ‘90s? I always thought something like that would be funny or interesting or maybe even good. For a while they said it was gonna be for kids, a live action version of the cartoon Toxic Crusaders. Fifteen years ago it was gonna be from the director of HOT TUB TIME MACHINE with Arnold Schwarzenegger as the villain (but he did TERMINATOR GENISYS instead? I love you Arnold but you gotta get your priorities straight). Later it was gonna be the director of SAUSAGE PARTY, a movie I did not finish but I wondered if an animator would want to give us a goopy partly animated Toxie I thought that could be cool. But it became more promising when Macon Blair, the star of Jeremy Saulnier’s MURDER PARTY and BLUE RUIN, and director of I DON’T FEEL AT HOME IN THIS WORLD ANYMORE, signed on to write and direct. That was in 2019, so that’s how many years I’ve been waiting just for this version. One of my friends saw it at Fantastic Fest two years ago and raved about it, but it went without a distributor until finally the TERRIFIER people Cineverse picked it up. These things take time I guess.
It’s hard to live up to all that, but I still had a great time with Blair’s transmutation of my questionable childhood favorite. It has some of the spirit of what we love about the original, blended with a concoction of entirely new active ingredients. It’s not the same story or even the same character, Melvin Ferd. Instead Peter Dinklage (THE THICKET) plays Winston Gooze, who is also a janitor (this time at a sinister pharmaceutical company called Bi-Toxiphetamine Hydroxylate) but he’s a grown man whose wife died of cancer and now he struggles to make a connection with his teenage stepson Wade (Jacob Tremblay, THE PREDATOR). If I had been guessing what the TOXIC AVENGER remake would be about the entire time they were developing it I would’ve needed at least a couple more months to come up with that one. That may be the single most surprising change from the original: this one is sincere about some things.
When Winston is diagnosed with a deadly brain disease his health insurance won’t cover the medication he needs, even though his own employer makes it. CEO Bob Garbinger (Kevin Bacon, WILD THINGS) says he’ll make things right but then he and his assistant Kissy Sturnevan (Julia Davis, PHANTOM THREAD) just lock Winston out of the building and pretty soon after that we have this movie’s version of the accident that turns Winston into this movie’s version of The Toxic Avenger, a hideously deformed creature of super human strength and slightly bigger size than Peter Dinklage. He ends up on the run with a whistleblower, J.J. Doherty (Taylour Paige, ZOLA), because BTH wants them both dead.
Here’s where it starts sounding more like a TOXIC AVENGER movie: The main goons trying to kill Toxie and J.J. are a nu-metal band called The Killer Nutz, who are managed by Bob’s brother Fritz (Elijah Wood, NORTH, looking like the Penguin in BATMAN RETURNS). Their leader is an ICP type clown rapper (Julian Kostov, LEATHERFACE, FIGHT OR FLIGHT), but also they have DJ Cool Cthulu (Neda Spasova), who speaks the language of the Old Ones, and a muscleman guitarist in a chicken mask (Spencer Wilding, GREEN STREET 3: NEVER BACK DOWN), and a hype man/breakdancer (Dimitar Bozhilov) who wears a Zodiac Killer cloak, does gratuitous flips and always wants to do parkour. It’s set in “St. Roma’s Village” instead of Tromaville, a place with the same quality of being populated by the most random assortment of violent wackos possible, and Toxie will find himself turning them into piles of goo.
Some may not like the amount of digital FX used in the cartoonish gore, so you’ve been warned, but there’s some funny shit in there. There’s a sort of out-of-control id so for example he seems really annoyed by one killer’s goatee so he tears it off, causing greater injury than you’d assume, as if the beard is a vital organ.
The original was a super hero origin story in a time when there weren’t very many super hero movies. I’m glad this doesn’t push that button too hard, but I did get a kick out of the dramatic shot rotating around Toxie posing on a rooftop like Batman (but he turns out to be taking a pee [don’t worry this scene contains important plot information]).
In a way THE TOXIC AVENGER has taken on meaning beyond the actual story told. I might be in a small percentage who will notice that the original was a satire of the ‘80s fitness craze, set around a gym with vain and cruel jock bullies (who are also hit-and-run serial killers) as the villains, none of which this remake has anything to do with. (And doesn’t need to.) One of the few scenes from the original that’s directly adapted is the armed takeover of a fast food restaurant, but in this modernized version the attackers are men’s rights assholes called The Nasty Lads who are protesting a chain called Mr. Meat changing its name to Miss Meat. They think it represents a demasculization of American or some shit even though we can see from all the signage that it’s a Hooters type sexualizing gimmick. (Amazing that this has been on the shelf for two years and then was released the same week that real life nasty lads thought that Cracker Barrel simplifying their logo was communism.)
In the 1984 movie’s restaurant siege the bastards kill a blind woman’s guide dog and attempt to rape her but Toxie rescues her and she becomes his girlfriend for the rest of the series. Here there is a blind woman in the scene who really doesn’t need Toxie’s help, does not become his girlfriend and is even played by a blind actress (Margo Cargill). So yes, this is a TOXIC AVENGER with more respect for women, and (not necessarily related) a far less horny one. I could be wrong but I don’t remember seeing any boobs. We do get to see Toxie’s dick (which is large and silver) (spoiler), but not in a sexual context.
The original was a goof but it was genuine exploitation, this is a more enlightened movie and the above mentioned scene, or even Toxie’s acceptance of his stepson wearing fingernail polish, could almost be bait to get some dipshit to claim Toxie Has Gone Woke. I heard that somebody said the remake doesn’t work because it’s not transgressive, and I don’t want to dismiss the criticism – the eagerness to cross lines of taste does give movies like the original a feeling of danger and don’t-give-a-fuck-ness that even an indie-spirited remake like this one may never be able to match. But I also wonder what would count as transgressive now. Would it have to be a rape scene, or AIDS jokes like TROMA’S WAR, or r-word jokes like CITIZEN TOXIE: THE TOXIC AVENGER IV? Because I don’t see that type of thing improving this one. I think part of why some of us latched onto Troma despite a ridiculously bad watchable-to-unwatchable ratio was the goofy likability behind that supposed transgression – the refusal to take anything seriously, the love of misfits and weirdos, the broad but true-to-life view that the bad guys are corrupt mayors, polluters, racist cops and rapist jocks and the good guys are friendly, ugly freaks, fat guys who go nutzoid, and the people of Tromaville who love “watching excellent movies and dancing in the streets.” It seems to me Blair is someone who grew up with some of those ideals and is putting a personal and modern spin on them. We still have polluters, now also greedily exploiting people’s health problems (even their own employees). We still have evil drug dealers, but they do it legally. We still glorify the hideously deformed creature but also the more down-to-earth freaks like an awkward teen who really wants to do a weird dance performance at the talent show. (That part reminded me of Trent Harris’ The Orkley Kid, where Crispin Glover wants to lip sync to Olivia Newton John.)
One thing I think the remake – edited by Brett W. Bachman (CAMINO, MANDY, PIG, COMPANION) and James Thomas (BORAT, BRÜNO) – does transgress against is the expected rhythms of jokes and storytelling. It has an odd, off-kilter feel, you sort of have to get into the flow of it. Maybe that’s a post Adult Swim/Tim and Eric sensibility or something, but whatever it is it feels fresh in a Toxic Avenger picture. The most extreme example is SPOILER the post-credits scene that seems like a Skeletor “I’ll be back!” type stinger but abruptly cuts away to a surprisingly long tutorial on how Toxie makes his grilled cheese sandwiches. It’s like they were trying to come up with what would be most opposite a sequel tease, but actually it does make me want a part 2 just to hang out with this guy more.
The thing is just loaded with oddball gags, including the most entertainingly ADR since ON DEADLY GROUND, with unseen people reacting to the events. It’s very clear that even through post-production they were all trying to crack each other and themselves up, and if something did that it stayed in, the stupider the better. To me some of the best stuff is the jokes that seem almost like non-sequiturs but make just enough sense to tickle me, like the bizarre homage to Master Blaster from MAD MAX: BEYOND THUNDERDOME, or the training-montage-style dissolves that seem to imply that the gibbering crazy homeless man in the woods (David Yow of the Jesus Lizard and Scratch Acid) is Toxie’s wise sensei teaching him to master mop fighting even though there is no wisdom or mastery evident.
I’ve long respected Bacon for (like Ethan Hawke) being open to interesting genre movies and never phoning it in. Here he gets to be sillier than usual which is fun even if I wouldn’t rank it among his top performances.
I was surprised to learn that Dinklage doesn’t quite play the Toxic Avenger. Like Mark Torgl before him he plays the guy who turns into the Toxic Avenger (a much bigger and more nuanced role this time). He also fulfills the Kenneth Kessler role of voicing the monster hero, while Luisa Guerreiro (SNOW WHITE) does the Mitch Cohen thing of actually being the one under the makeup, credited as “Toxie (The Bod).” Dinklage reportedly performed the whole movie on video and Guerreiro, a movement expert, took the job of mimicking him very seriously. Whatever you make of that, it’s a really good performance through expressions and movements. And the makeup is excellent, reworking the original look with an infusion of hot rod art and Garbage Pail Kid energy. I love his blue veins, his Popeye forearms, his nasty boils and welts, his mismatched sweatband and spiked gauntlet. I’m neutral on his droopy eye being solid black like an alien’s, but obviously I love that he can pull it in and out and use it like a periscope. You don’t usually get removable eyeballs in a movie about how fucked the American health care system is. But when you do that’s cinema. That’s why we go to movies.
September 9th, 2025 at 7:59 am
– i never got the impression that BTH made any real medicine, let alone the specific medicine that winston needed? if they did have something that really worked and that they could sell for a lot of $ their stock probably would not have been tanking?
*SPOILER BELOW for the appearance of boobs in toxic avenger (2025)*
– there are a few of what seem at first like ironically gratuitous boob shots of people lifting their shirts in excitement when toxie is doing his Overkill karaoke, but then they are immediately followed by the actual punchline which is a shot of someone whipping their dick around in a circle in excitement. i laughed!