Mehnificent

There’s a certain peculiar whiff that rises from this new “Toxic Avenger”, a reek of imitation, the sort of knockoff funk you get if you leave a Troma movie out in the sun and hope the radioactive stink will pass for flavor. Instead, it sours. Maybe that’s what you get when you take a perfectly naive cultural artifact, dip it in two decades of “ironic” reboot culture, and serve it up with a garnish of prosthetic gore and Peter Dinklage’s self-satisfied squint.

If the movies have taught us anything about time travel, it’s that the past might be a playground for regret—an endless loop of adolescent screwups getting a second (or third, or twentieth) shot at rewriting the fate of humanity, or at least saving their high school sweetheart. Tokyo Revengers, a turbo-charged punk vacuum pressed into gangland melodrama and science-fiction stripes, wants desperately to ride that carousel—sometimes dizzy, sometimes earnest, and blessedly, just self-serious enough to keep you from rolling your eyes straight out of your skull.

There is, let’s be honest, a certain adolescent joy in being bad for the sheer, unlaundered thrill of it—a kind of cackling, slippery impudence most modern horror movies outgrow in favor of handwringing, pious detours into “trauma,” and a double-locked justification for every sharp object. Watching Terrifier is like giving a chainsaw to the class clown and seeing how many teachers he can send packing: it doesn’t care about lessons, or roots, or the sob story behind the mask. It’s a daft, dangerous revel stripping horror down to the giggle you stifle when you know you shouldn’t laugh, but can’t help yourself.

Take Cover — the title suggests a mad dash and a hearty thud behind the nearest flaming oil drum, but what you get, with Scott Adkins at the prow, is something slyer and more self-aware. This is action cinema with a sly wink—half tactical ballet, half armchair philosophy, and more than a few swigs of that fizzy stuff called character charm.