The Toxic Avenger
Writer/Director: Macon Blair
Cast: Peter Dinklage, Luisa Guerreiro, Jacob Tremblay, Kevin Bacon, Elijah Wood
If you love bonkers, light-on-its-feet, goo-covered horror movies full of monsters and fake blood and jokes both good and bad, there's a good chance you have Lloyd Kaufman and Troma Entertainment to thank, at least in terms of the modern landscape. Kaufman and Troma weren't the first filmmakers to treat horror with irreverence and seat-of-your-pants enthusiasm, of course. But in the 1980s, through films like The Toxic Avenger, Troma's influence exploded. They are — whether you know it or not — titans in the genre world, and you can see their influence now in everything from Cocaine Bear to The Monkey.
That means that anyone attempting to remake The Toxic Avenger, a cult classic tale of a nobody who becomes a hero through unlikely exposure to the excesses of the 1980s, had quite the tall order in front of them. How do you make a film that's quintessentially '80s in its style and yet timeless in its impact into something that works in the 2020s? It's not an easy question to answer, but writer/director Macon Blair (I Don't Feel At Home in This World Anymore) found a way, delivering a film that honors the irreverent spirit of the original while pushing Toxie and his friends into new frontiers.
Peter Dinklage stars as Winston, a widower and struggling stepdad who works a blue collar job at BTH, a health supplement mega-corporation run by the shady Bob Garbinger (Kevin Bacon). Winston's just trying to be a good dad to his troubled stepson Wade (Jacob Tremblay), but when an unexpected diagnosis leaves him with crushing medical expenses just to stay alive, he's forced to take extreme measures. One toxic waste accident later, and Winston is transformed into a green, muscled monster with one bulging eye and a mop so soaked with radioactive goo that it resembles a magical wizard's staff ... if a wizard's staff could cleave men in two.
Stronger, tougher, and driven by a desire to make things right, Winston embraces his destiny as the urban hero known to his fans as "Toxie" (still voiced by Dinklage but played in Toxie costume by Luisa Guerreiro), and takes the fight straight to corrupt CEOs and ruthless mobsters.
Like the original film, Blair's version of The Toxic Avenger takes us to a heightened world where businessmen are cartoonishly corrupt, newsreaders are cartoonishly sycophantic, and violence is cartoonishly over-the-top. But Blair goes a step further, taking the social commentary of the original film, awash in corruption and pollution, and dialing it up to 11. By introducing Winston as a guy saddled with medical debt and strapped by corrupt business practices, Blair grounds the film in a world we can't help but believe because, even in its most heightened moments, it's shockingly similar to our own. It's a movie that takes on the seemingly endless Unprecedented Times of the last decade (hell, the last quarter century) and, through Toxie, flips them a middle finger.
The other half of the Toxie puzzle is, of course, that raucous Troma energy. Blair has clearly done his homework there. This version of The Toxic Avenger is gloriously violent, packed with raunchy humor, and full of actors living their best lives going as broad and wild as they want. Bacon in toxic billionaire manbaby mode is a sight to see, Elijah Wood is terrific as Bacon's put-upon little brother, and Taylour Paige brings welcome heart as Toxie's ally, an activist out to expose the BTH corporation for all of its sins. The best part of the cast, though, is the double-act of Dinklage and Guerreiro, who imbue Toxie with a wonderful combination of humanity and vigilante rage. It's one of those movies where you can feel the fun of it coming through the screen, and it's infectious.
What's perhaps most remarkable about all of this is that The Toxic Avenger is not a new movie. The remake had its world premiere on the festival circuit two years ago, and it's only now making its way into theaters. And yet, that delay has done nothing to dampen this impact. There is literally a bit in this movie about people getting unreasonably angry when a restaurant changes their logo (I'm not kidding), and its repeated jabs at grumpiness over pronouns, billionaire tantrums, and rock stars as brutal foot soldiers in ideological battles make the whole thing feel like it could have been made yesterday. It's smart, it's hilarious, it's violent, and it's everything we could have possibly wanted from a modern Toxic Avenger movie. See it with a crowd while you still can, because I need at least three more of these movies.
The Toxic Avenger is in theaters August 29.
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