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Posts Tagged ‘Troma’

Citizen Toxie: The Toxic Avenger IV

Wednesday, March 9th, 2022

After the one-two punch of THE TOXIC AVENGER PART II and THE TOXIC AVENGER PART III: THE LAST TEMPTATION OF TOXIE in 1989, the live action Toxic Avenger sat out the entire 1990s. He missed grunge, the rise and fall of Death Row Records, Hypercolor shirts, everything. During that time Lloyd Kaufman oversaw The Toxic Crusaders cartoon, went to court with New Line Cinema, and directed three non-Toxic movies: SGT. KABUKIMAN N.Y.P.D. (1990), TROMEO AND JULIET (1996) and TERROR FIRMER (1998).

By now Troma had become some sort of institution, with a younger generation working for them for little or no pay because they grew up on the movies. It was also a harder time to create humor more tasteless than what was popular. Kids had seen Tom Green pretend to hump a dead moose on cable, the whole world had been charmed by Cameron Diaz with semen in her hair, and Jackass started airing a month before CITIZEN TOXIE came out. In 1996 Troma had given a limited release to a 1993 indie called ALFRED PACKER: THE MUSICAL (retitled CANNIBAL! THE MUSICAL) by young filmmakers Trey Parker & Matt Stone. The following year, Parker & Stone’s South Park started on Comedy Central and became a pop culture phenomenon. It was during South Park season 4, while the two Troma-boys-made-big were being canonized as the edgy provocateurs and envelope-pushing satirists of their era, that the fourth TOXIC AVENGER movie finally hit the screen. (read the rest of this shit…)

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Posted in Comedy/Laffs, Monster, Reviews | 30 Comments »

Toxic Crusaders

Tuesday, March 8th, 2022

Murakami Wolf Productions was an American animation studio founded in 1967 by Jimmy T. Murakami and Fred Wolf. Murakami was an animator at the UPA studio and then co-directed the live action Roger Corman films HUMANOIDS FROM THE DEEP and BATTLE BEYOND THE STARS in addition to animated features like WHEN THE WIND BLOWS and segments of HEAVY METAL; Wolf had been an animator on The Alvin Show and The Flintstones before directing such hippie era TV artifacts as The Point, Free to Be… You & Me and Puff the Magic Dragon. In the late ‘80s the toy company Playmates hired Murakami Wolf’s new satellite studio in Dublin to produce a mini-series based on a culty black-and-white comic book to test the waters for a possible line of action figures. It was called Teenage Mutant Ninja Turtles, and you may remember the hubbub – cowabunga, fight for rights and your freedom to speak, Michelangelo is a party dude, etc.

Several years later, after the entire world had been shaken to its core by the effects of Turtle Power, I guess it seemed to some of those guys like any weird underground shit could be magically turned into a massively lucrative, completely inexplicable pop culture phenomenon. According to Lloyd Kaufman’s book, an agent named John Russo asked if he’d ever considered making his unrated gore and boobs franchise THE TOXIC AVENGER into a G-rated kiddie cartoon, and introduced him to Buzz Potamkin, Emmy-nominated producer of the Berenstain Bears cartoons, the Cartoon All-Stars to the Rescue anti-drug PSA and Hawaiian Punch commercials. Potamkin and Murakami Wolf proposed turning THE TOXIC AVENGER into a kid friendly cartoon – an idea that became one 13-episode season of The Toxic Crusaders, which aired in syndication between March 1st and May 20th, 1990. (read the rest of this shit…)

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Posted in Reviews, Cartoons and Shit | 9 Comments »

The Toxic Avenger Part III: The Last Temptation of Toxie

Wednesday, March 2nd, 2022

“I don’t have a life. I have a half life!”


I’ve discussed in the previous TOXIC AVENGER reviews how I watched THE TOXIC AVENGER and THE TOXIC AVENGER PART II over and over again in my teenage years and that they helped form my weirdo sensibilities. I remember that all very vividly. The part I did not remember is that THE TOXIC AVENGER PART III: THE LAST TEMPTATION OF TOXIE came out the same year as part II! It doesn’t seem that close together in my memories. I guess time passes slower in the mind of a high schooler.

I did not like this one as much, so I didn’t watch it as many times, and all I remembered was thinking it was funny that he gets to fight and kill the Devil. Many of our great franchises such as ROCKY and THE FAST AND THE FURIOUS have not yet been able to face off with Satan. Toxie already got to do it in part III. Good for him. (read the rest of this shit…)

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Posted in Comedy/Laffs, Comic strips/Super heroes, Monster, Reviews | 3 Comments »

The Toxic Avenger Part II

Monday, February 28th, 2022

THE TOXIC AVENGER didn’t catch on right away. Troma had trouble finding many takers, but the Bleecker Street Cinema in Greenwich Village showed it as a midnight movie and it was so successful they ran it for more than a year. This secured a cult reputation that helped it become an actual hit on video. But according to the book All I Need To Know About FILMMAKING I Learned From THE TOXIC AVENGER by Lloyd Kaufman and James Gunn, Kaufman never really considered a sequel until a misinformed buyer approached him at the 1987 Cannes Film Festival to secure the German rights to the sequel and he just went along with it.

(Like most of that book I suspect that story is exaggerated, but we know at least that they didn’t rush one into production. In Prince terms, part I is the year of PURPLE RAIN, part II the year of BATMAN. Entirely different eras.)

THE TOXIC AVENGER PART II (1989) picks up where THE TOXIC AVENGER left off, sort of, with the city of Tromaville now peaceful and happy thanks to the Toxic Avenger’s crime fighting. Melvin now has the last name Junko instead of Ferd (no explanation), is nicknamed “Toxie,” and is both played and voiced by Ron Fazio (BASKET CASE 2), except in some scenes where he’s played by John Altamura (“Muscle Man,” YOUNG NURSES IN LOVE) before he was fired for allegedly being a pain in the ass. Toxie’s blind girlfriend Sara is now named Claire (also no explanation) and is played by another musician, Phoebe Legere (MONDO NEW YORK, KING OF NEW YORK). In narration, Toxie explains how he became a “hideously deformed monster hero of super human size and strength” and that the people of Tromaville now enjoy “dancing in the streets, tattooing, manufacturing orange juice, exterminating vermin (this is literally referring to cockroaches and stuff, not Toxie stuffing mops in people’s faces), and watching excellent movies,” which of course is illustrated by a marquee saying “TROMA FILM FESTIVAL,” even though they presumably live in a world where Troma’s best movie does not exist. (read the rest of this shit…)

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Posted in Comedy/Laffs, Monster, Reviews | 22 Comments »

The Toxic Avenger

Wednesday, February 23rd, 2022

THE TOXIC AVENGER (1984) is a classic of ‘80s smartass b-movies – the ones that carried the drive-in exploitation model of boobs and blood into the VHS era, but did it with a wink. It was directed by Michael Herz & Lloyd Kaufman, founders of Troma Entertainment. Kaufman had been peripherally involved with respected ‘70s classics including ROCKY, SATURDAY NIGHT FEVER and MY DINNER WITH ANDRE, but as a filmmaker and distributor he specialized in sex comedies (SQUEEZE PLAY, STUCK ON YOU!, THE FIRST TURN-ON!!) with the occasional horror movie (SILENT NIGHT BLOODY NIGHT, MOTHER’S DAY). But when he combined a little bit of those genres with super hero action he came up with a cult classic, a video hit, a figurehead for the studio, and a house style that he and other low budget smartasses would try to duplicate for decades with – according to my calculations – mostly poor results.

It’s a movie that’s crude in every meaning of the word, it’s in very poor taste, it also makes me laugh quite a bit, and it’s so dorky it feels kind of sweet and well-meaning, despite all kinds of ignorant jokes and requiring a “WARNING: THE TOXIC AVENGER CONTAINS SCENES OF EXTREME VIOLENCE” disclaimer at the beginning. Or maybe that’s all nostalgia because I loved this movie so much growing up, after me and my friends somehow managed to rent a copy while we were in middle school. (I seem to remember it being in an adults only section.) We’d never seen DEATH RACE 2000 and didn’t have driver’s licenses, so we thought the bad guys purposely running over people for “points” was one of the funniest things we’d ever seen. (read the rest of this shit…)

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Posted in Reviews, Comedy/Laffs, Comic strips/Super heroes, Monster | 16 Comments »

Def By Temptation

Wednesday, October 10th, 2018

I remember DEF BY TEMPTATION (1990) seeming like an important indie movie at the time. Robert Townsend and then Spike Lee had created this excitement around the new black cinema in the late ’80s. This one predates Matty Rich’s STRAIGHT OUT OF BROOKLYN by a month and John Singleton’s BOYZ N THE HOOD by a year, and represents the movement extending into the horror genre half a decade before Rusty Cundieff’s TALES FROM THE HOOD.

Writer-director-producer-actor James Bond III made his low budget story of a vampire in the dating scene in New York, with Troma coming in to give him finishing funds. So Lloyd Kaufman provides an introduction with some fun trivia on the crappily transferred 20th Anniversary Edition DVD, including that he had to take over as cinematographer for one of the climactic scenes. That’s notable because the rest of the movie is, as the credits say, “shot by Ernest Dickerson,” who was definitely hot shit because he’d already done THE BROTHER FROM ANOTHER PLANET, KRUSH GROOVE, SHE’S GOTTA HAVE IT, SCHOOL DAZE and DO THE RIGHT THING. (read the rest of this shit…)

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Posted in Horror, Reviews | 15 Comments »

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