The Toxic Avenger: Your Next Toxic Relationship is Here
By Thom Ernst
Rating: B+
The Toxic Avenger (Toxie to his friends) returns, not as a cheap shock-off of the cult sludge from which it emerged, but as a formidable companion piece to Lloyd Kaufman’s gloriously grungy original.
But where Kaufman’s 1984 film gave us ooze, director Macon Blair gives us something oozier and with a budget. Things are still sleazy, still slimy, still nasty; a refinement of the unrefined rather than a mockery of the parody.
For fans of grindhouse revivals like Hobo with a Shotgun, Planet Terror or Machete, Blair’s Toxic Avenger feels right at home. It’s gleefully grotesque, proudly tasteless, and unashamedly loyal to its roots — even gifting audiences with a Lloyd Kaufman cameo, a Stan Lee–style nod from the man who birthed the TROMA legacy.
Blair’s reboot embraces the anarchic spirit of the original Toxic Avenger, along with all the decrepit excesses that made Troma Entertainment thrive precisely because it was unapologetically low budget.
He isn’t recycling a franchise so much as resurrecting its sensibility — folding in the washed-out aesthetic, the gleefully unsubtle gross-out violence, and the sense that bad taste is a virtue, not a flaw.
And in that same spirit, Blair plants us in St. Roma, a crumbling dystopia where the “S” fades from the town sign, leaving a winkingly obvious nod to TROMA itself. Here, crime, corruption, and chemical ooze congeal into a landscape of pure mayhem.
Violence isn’t just part of the spectacle — it is the spectacle. Heads pop from bodies, jaws detach, and limbs are yanked apart like pork ribs at a BBQ. But amid the carnage and melting flesh, the film expounds in an unexpected emotional thread that’s damn near wholesome.
Winston (Peter Dinklage), widowed and struggling to bond with his girlfriend’s son (Jacob Tremblay), grounds the madness in something resembling heartfelt. Dinklage, unsurprisingly, makes even the most absurd moments relatable, his grim determination to connect cutting through the chaos like a tragicomic anchor.
Read our interview with Jacob Tremblay
But if Dinklage and Tremblay give the film battered soul, Kevin Bacon supplies the toxic bloodstream. Bacon is the villainous Bob Garbinger, a self-absorbed corporate CEO and architect of St. Roma’s decay.
Bacon relishes every opportunity to flash an oily grin, spew every callous dismissal and fawn over his ageless body. This is not Bacon’s first turn as a villain, but it may be one of his most enjoyably vile.
Bacon’s Garbinger, like all the villains in the film, don’t ascribe to the adage that villains are the heroes of their own story. These are villains who despise heroics and revel in being evil, constantly inventing new ways to outdo their own cruelty.
But even more than Bacon, an unrecognizable Elijah Wood disappears into the role of Fitz Garbinger, Bob’s grovelling, toady brother — a loser in the family gene pool who looks like a half-transformed Penguin and carries the sycophantic eagerness of Frankenstein’s Igor. Wood’s transformation goes beyond the physical, delivering a gleefully sinister and surprisingly layered performance.
This is not a movie for everyone, but if the film’s title didn’t warn you of that, the poster should have. And then there is the issue that the film almost slipped through distribution cracks — thanks to “extreme violence” warnings and the bizarre classification of “creature nudity” (yes, we see Toxie’s anatomy).
But for those who thrill at extreme violence, rubbery creature effects, and a screen that seems permanently soaked in toxic sludge: for them, The Toxic Avenger is a wild ride.
Yes, the film is unquestionably toxic, but by no means a waste.
The Toxic Avenger. Directed by Macon Blair. Starring Peter Dinklage, Kevin Bacon, Elijah Wood, and Jacob Tremblay. In select theatres August 29.