For a series that literally stinks of radioactive ooze, the Toxic Avenger sure has had a long half-life.
The Toxic Avenger movies are often objectively terrible films, working hard to be as nasty and dumb as they can be, and yet the franchise has somehow lasted more than 40 years and now is reborn in a moderately big-budget Hollywood movie.
I first came across 1984’s The Toxic Avenger at a high-school late-night party devoted to cheesy movies like Attack Of The Killer Tomatoes and Night of the Lepus. It’s an airhorn blast of crude comedy and gore, the story of a screeching nerd who’s bullied relentlessly and falls into a vat of toxic waste, transforming him into the Toxic Avenger, “New Jersey’s first superhero.” Armed with a janitor’s mop, he dispatches crowds of bad guys in nastily inventive ways, with splattery violence and slapstick lowbrow humour all crashing together into a swampy mess.
Within the first 10 minutes of The Toxic Avenger a bunch of thugs run down an innocent teenager on a bike in sick, lingering detail, played for comedy, and you know what kind of trash-flick you’re in for. It feels like the only proper way to watch these movies is on a battered VHS tape in your Mom’s basement, hopped up on Nerds candy and Jolt cola.
Troma, the studio behind Toxie, made its calling card its splattery punk-rock ethos B-movie horror comedies, calculated to outrage and offend.
And yet, there’s a bit of ugly charm to some of the Toxic Avenger series if you’re in the right twisted frame of mind. It’s got this “let’s put on a show” amateur enthusiasm that evokes the days I’d spend as a pre-teenager hacking together terrible comedy cassette tapes with pals, or scribbling my early comic books. It’s the appeal of doing something, anything, even if it isn’t very good.
The first movie is so in-your-face with its offensiveness and broad comedy that it’s curiously watchable, but the three sequels spewed out from 1989 to 2000 are generally a case of diminishing returns (and they’re also all way too long – 87 minutes is the scientifically correct length for this kind of movie, not nearly two hours).
Toxic Avenger Part II takes our hero to Japan for some amusingly silly equal opportunity offensiveness, while in the proudly inept Toxic Avenger Part III: The Last Temptation of Toxie, our hero battles Satan himself. Both of these movies – shot at the same time and even oddly duplicating a few scenes – are choppily directed, terribly acted and gleefully stupid, although the sleazy sheer malice of the first movie fades away for a bumbling sloppiness. I gather Troma was trying to “mainstream” Toxie a bit – heck, there was even a short-lived Saturday morning cartoon and a Marvel comic book of this most un-mainstream saga.
Ultimately, the twistedness all comes roaring back with 2000’s Citizen Toxie: The Toxic Avenger IV which is easily the grossest, most offensive movie of the franchise, ramping everything up to 11. A mad story that claims to be the only “real sequel,” it’s about Toxie and his evil alternate universe doppelgänger, and overflows with bodily fluids, gratuitous nudity, rape, rancid racial stereotypes and gore, to the point where the satire gets pretty lost in the sheer ugliness. Maybe I’m a snowflake, but lingeringly gross scenes showing a school shooting in a classroom of mentally disabled students or riffing on racist hate crimes just go too damned far. I get what they’re going for, but not sure I want to go there. Citizen Toxie is definitely an experience, but also an endurance test for most people.
After the nihilistic stench of Citizen Toxie it’s strange indeed to see the character “redeemed” in a way with the new moderately gentler, family-focused reboot.
It’s strange to contrast director Mason Blair’s The Toxic Avenger 2025 with its predecessors. It’s far more of an actual movie, for one thing, with decent special effects and recognisable stars like Peter Dinklage, Kevin Bacon and Elijah Wood. It’s got gore and a few raunchy bits but held up against the sleazy originals, it feels positively tame. While it follows a similar arc – bullied Winston Gooze (Dinklage) is transformed into a working-class deformed hero taking on corrupt businessmen – it’s all slicker and less eccentric.
There’s a core sense of sadism to much of the Troma Avenger years that simply doesn’t fly for many viewers in 2025. It’s funny to me that apparently the new Toxic Avenger, which was first released in 2023 but only now hitting cinemas, couldn’t find a distributor because it was “unreleasable” due to violence. Honestly, it’s about 1/10th as offensive and gross as Citizen Toxie. Times change.
Toxic 2025 is still a pretty good time, although ultimately it’s far more conventional and lacks the outsider-art reek of the original movies. In the first four Toxic Avenger movies, everyone is pretty loathsome, even our hero (the incredibly unappealing performance by Mitch Cohen as the nerdy pre-Toxie in the first movie honestly makes you want to root for the bullies). It’s a world that feels tangibly rotten, with cackling moronic extras, gibbering villains and bumbling anti-heroes.
Dinklage’s excellent performance here fills you with actual sympathy for his Toxie, and his relationship with his bullied son (a great Jacob Tremblay) gives the movie some serious heart, while Bacon and Wood have a lot of fun playing the sneering bad guys. There’s righteous vengeance and over-the-top villains (my favourite was the endlessly parkouring thug), but also a bit of a moral about acceptance.
I can’t say I would ever feel the urge to rewatch anything but the first and most recent Toxic Avenger movies, to be honest, but I am oddly captivated by the strange longevity of Toxie’s warped world, where everything is shit, even the superheroes. The original Toxic Avenger series doesn’t have a serious bone in its body, mocking everything from the blind and disabled to the very concept of heroism. The new movie ends with a father bonding with his defiantly different son, on a kind of elegant note of optimism despite all the chaos that came before.
As nice as all that feels – and it doesn’t leave you feeling like you want to wash your hands afterwards like the Troma movies do – it’s also not very Toxic, I guess. Then again, the world is a toxic enough place these days as it is, isn’t it? Perhaps a gentler Toxic Avenger is the hero we need.
Nik Dirga 