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. (read the rest of this shit…)
BEVERLY HILLS COP: AXEL F is a perfectly entertaining, perfectly obvious long-awaited nostalgia sequel, perfect for streaming once and forgetting. Eddie Murphy (
ZOLA tells a wild road trip story that, I feel, doesn’t amount to much, but it’s worth it for the ride, and for the telling. The big hook is that it’s based on the 2015 “now iconic series of viral, uproarious tweets” (source: A24films.com), something that’s not only emphasized in the marketing, but noted on screen at the beginning. The official onscreen title is @zola (which is actually the Twitter handle of some wedding company, not author/protagonist A’Ziah “Zola” King), the main characters are often looking at their phones and monotonously speaking aloud their texts to each other, and there’s a notification sound heard frequently throughout the movie – I was never really sure if it was meant to be diegetic or not. Admittedly all that sounds stupid, but when it comes down to it this is really just “based on a true story.” Not even entirely based on a true story told in an unusual medium, because a Rolling Stone article about the whole affair…
