To call Macon Blair’s new reboot of the 1980s cult-schlock classic The Toxic Avenger “bad” is not the blanket disqualifier that it might be for most films; we must instead specify which kinds of bad, and to what degree. Is it “bad” in the way that the original film, from Lloyd Kaufman and Michael Herz’s neo-grindhouse Troma Entertainment, is “bad”— willfully, joyfully, anarchically bad? Is it the more earnest strain of bad which characterized the independent, third-party titles Troma distributed in the ‘80s and ‘90s, which played toward the house brand of outrageousness but were largely so incompetently made that you ended up wishing ill on the friend who rented it? Or is it bad in the way of so many 21st-century reboots of 1980s horror favorites, slickly produced and powerblasted of whatever eccentricities which made the originals so beloved in the first place? In my estimation, the results here are: a refreshing amount of Column A, far more of Column B than I would like, but blessedly little of Column C. It’s bad, and not even really good-bad, but it’s not evil.
That said, this new Toxic Avenger does have a higher-wattage cast than Troma ever could have afforded, and makes some at least nominal feints toward realism and pathos. Our new Toxie, Winston Gooze, is played by four-time Emmy-winner Peter Dinklage with all the wry melancholy which has become his stock in trade. Winston struggles to make ends meet as the janitor for a plainly evil pharmaceutical conglomerate in St. Roma’s Village (get it?). To provide for his moody, dance-loving stepson (Jacob Tremblay) and pay for a needed operation for a terminal brain condition, Winston attempts to rob the chemical plant late at night, and you probably don’t need me to tell you what happens when he falls into a vat of mysterious green slime. Beset with an urge to use his newfound monsterism to bring outlaws to (very gory) justice, our monster hero is pursued by his ruthless one-time employers (Kevin Bacon and Elijah Wood, both clearly having a blast) and aided by a dogged vigilante activist (Zola’s Taylour Paige, once again proving herself one of Hollywood’s great underused comic straightwomen).
Despite its big names and fresh coat of ersatz-Hollywood paint, The Toxic Avenger is a fundamentally ragged affair, which is both its greatest asset and its biggest weakness. Again, nobody wants an overly slick Toxic Avenger film, and at its best the reboot captures the manic what-the-hell weirdness of the original. The film’s heavies, a Slipknot-like masked punk band in which each member appears to have cooked up their own persona independently, are nonsensical in the best way possible, and could have come right out of a vintage Troma epic (I’m particularly fond of the one guy who is super into parkour and is also inexplicably dressed like the Zodiac Killer). That Blair has found a way to emulate Troma’s transgressive brand of humor in 2025 without getting himself cancelled is something of a magic trick*.
But all The Toxic Avenger’s bells and whistles can’t quite cover up the fact that it is simply not very well made, and not always in a funny, ironic way. The visuals are headachey and overly busy, its exaggerated mood lighting coagulating into visual mud (while no one will ever accuse Lloyd Kaufman of being a great visual stylist, he at least maintained a commitment to shooting on 35mm despite a minuscule budget). The direction and editing are strangely slack; jokes thud to the floor which might have been saved with by a fraction of a second’s trimming. And while he is present in a nominal executive producer role (and an obligatory Stan Lee-style cameo), there’s simply no accommodating for the absence of Lloyd Kaufman. Kaufman is one of exploitation cinema’s great eccentrics (I had a friend who interned for Troma out of college, and he could tell you stories), and much of what makes Troma so irresistible stems from his idiosyncratic yet consistent worldview. He’s a lunatic— and any Toxic Avenger film not made by a lunatic is going to come up short in comparison.
Ultimately, I can’t quite recommend the new Toxic Avenger, as it’s simply not quite successful at what it’s trying to do— but I do appreciate that it is trying to do it. It would have been easy to simply sell the name as a scrap of recognizable IP to slap on another bland Platinum Dunes-style reboot; the fact that this was clearly made by someone who grew up renting Troma tapes makes me forgive a lot of flaws (it also must be said that the film’s producers just announced that they are erasing $5 million of medical debt, putting The Toxic Avenger in the unlikely company of The Thin Blue Line as a film which has accomplished objective good, regardless of quality). Curiously, The Toxic Avenger is the third Troma-adjacent film of the summer, joining Alex Ross Perry’s Videoheaven (which affectionately highlights the ubiquitous Troma posters in on-screen video stores) and Superman, written and directed by Tromeo & Juliet scribe James Gunn, speaking to the studio’s legacy in the annals of schlock and awe. As an addition to the horror-comedy canon its deformed heart is in the right place, but when I get the urge to return to Tromaville, I’ll still be popping in my old DVD of the original.
* – There is one moment in particular I feel I must highlight. Blair restages the original film’s iconic fast food bloodbath, but reinvents the sadistic punks as Proud-Boyish right-wingers enraged that the restaurant has rebranded its mascot from Mr. to Ms. Meat. It’s all very funny in its own right (“Triggered?!” one assailant sneers while waving the white-power finger thingy in front of a clearly blind woman), but the fact that this scene, which sat on the shelf for two years, is being released in the middle of a real-life right-wing freakout over a fast food restaurant’s branding is something close to eerie.
The Toxic Avenger
2023
dir. Macon Blair
100 min.
Opens Friday, 8/29 @ Alamo Drafthouse Boston Seaport and AMCs Boston Common and South Bay
