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.
Let’s begin here: I’ve never seen the original “Toxic Avenger,” but I know the legend, Troma’s backyard whiplash, the anarchy of cheap latex and insouciant bad taste. Lloyd Kaufman never cared if you thought it was “good,” only that you felt something (nausea, probably). That glorious state of no-budget freedom is like the glue that holds American exploitation together; remove it, and what’s left is an expensive, empty homage: Hobo With a Shotgun’s cousin who went to private school and came back with a trust fund, eager to show you how much fun the poor kids used to have slumming it.
Peter Dinklage is our new Toxie, lurching from janitor to mutant hero with a mop and an air of world-weary condescension that feels more “Marvel’s honorary uncle” than tragic grotesque. He’s clearly enjoying himself, who wouldn’t, with the built-in camp license, but there’s a layer of distance to his performance, as if even he can’t quite convince himself this is the rebirth of a cult icon. At his side is Elijah Wood, transmogrified into something halfway between Uncle Fester and Danny DeVito’s Penguin, all bulbous prosthetics and black eyes, a Napoleonic henchman to Kevin Bacon’s drab, slick corporate villain. You can almost hear Wood’s agent rubbing his temples and muttering, “Sure, sure, Elijah hasn’t done ‘gonzo’ in a while.”
The plot? It’s a pastiche of corporate corruption, whistleblowers, slapstick satire, and that classically American transformation: nerd becomes monster becomes hero. BTH Pharmaceuticals is an unholy blend of EvilCorp and cartoonishly evil mobsters, no points for realism; this isn’t that kind of movie and never wanted to be. There’s toxic waste, accidental death and rebirth, hostages, super soldiers, evil bands, and the sort of mayhem that used to come bundled with Resident Evil cutscenes. It’s all artifice, half-masticated by a script so overstuffed it could patch potholes in New Jersey, but what it lacks in inspiration it tries to make up in blood sprays and detached limbs.
Which brings me to the gore: there’s a certain way that goop and viscera can feel aplomb in the hands of an amateur, like bad magic, or a child’s birthday cake left in the rain. Here, though, the prosthetics and bodily destruction are fussed over, deliberate connoisseur violence à la Terrifier and so it’s oddly joyless. The film wants you to admire the makeup, to feel the pulse of arterial ambition, but forgets to ask if you care. If Troma wore its guts on its sleeve, this reboot holds them behind glass with a visitor’s pamphlet: look, but don’t touch.
Is it funny? Occasionally the demonic Nu Metal ensemble “The Killer Nutz” is the epitome of “try-hard,” but Elijah Wood’s penguin-faced gofer gets a few groans-to-grins. Kevin Bacon, so often delicious when allowed to unspool, here delivers his best “I am reading the cue cards from a swivel chair” villainy, the kind of performance that disappears as soon as you close your eyes. The only real sparks come from the prosthetic team: say what you like about faint echoes, but their work on Wood’s face could score him the next round of auditions for the DC Universe. Call that progress.
Did I enjoy the 80s schlock aesthetic? For a minute. Credit to the production team: if you’re going to rip pages from the Troma playbook, at least they remembered to soak them in neon. There’s personality here if only the movie had the courage to clash with itself, to let its seams and glue show through instead of sanding everything for mass acceptance.
The trouble, finally, is that Macon Blair’s “Toxic Avenger” is caught in a trap. It wants to be reverent and roguish, to appeal to those who watched midnight sleaze with sticky floors and to the new audience who want their cult icons shrink-wrapped for streaming. It wants, in short, to recapture the spirit of a gonzo era without enduring any of the risk. But without risk, trash cinema is just trash, and outrageousness without danger is merely an affectation. When the final explosion detonates and a mutated villainess is splattered for our amusement, you feel less joy than relief it’s over.
This is what gets lost when self-consciously “retro” films attempt to resurrect genuine anarchy: they confuse excess for energy, and pastiche for purpose. The Toxic Avenger Unrated wants so badly to take you back to the movies you think you remember, but it has the sickly odor of a sealed exhibit. You watch, you nod, you appreciate the prosthetics…and nothing sticks. The cleanup, as ever, is left for the janitor.
If you need me, I’ll be rewatching something with Lloyd Kaufman’s fingerprints still wet on the celluloid. This, for all its blood and wink, is just a sanitized aftertaste of the mess it wishes it could be.
