The Toxic Avenger, 2025.
Written and directed by Macon Blair.
Starring Peter Dinklage, Jacob Tremblay, Kevin Bacon, Elijah Wood, Taylour Paige, Julia Davis, Sarah Niles, Macon Blair, Lloyd Kaufman, Spencer Wilding, Jonny Coyne, Atanas Srebrev, Lee Eddy, Rebecca O’Mara, David Yow, Chris Sharp, Brent Werzner, Randy E. Aguebor, Ev Lunning, Jane Levy, Luisa Guerreiro, Shaun Dooley, Annette Badland, and Sunil Patel.
SYNOPSIS:
A horrible toxic accident transforms downtrodden janitor, Winston Gooze into a new evolution of hero: The Toxic Avenger.
Realistically speaking, there was never a chance that a studio-friendly take of Troma/Lloyd Kaufman’s The Toxic Avenger would be as nasty with its humor or as depraved with its splatter violence. That also doesn’t mean that what writer/director Macon Blair (a self-professed superfan of all things Toxic Avenger) was set up for failure. There is a satisfying middle ground here that preserves practical gore effects and a decent amount of off-color humor, but now within a story that has a surprisingly tender core (albeit an almost unforgivably slow start, which prioritizes family dynamics a bit too much), with a dying father seeking acceptance from his stepson.
The blending of those aspects works since Macon Blair still knows what he is making and who the audience is, never allowing something like corny family strife to feel overly intrusive or deathly serious, but rather a natural extension of a type of story that could be told through this unorthodox superhero.
Much more reimagining than remake, Peter Dinklage stars as Winston Gooze, a widowed janitor for a corrupt pharmaceutical company and single stepfather to teenager Wade (Jacob Tremblay), a performative dancer who wants to be seen and understood. Lately, that has been difficult due to losing the boy’s mom, but also since Winston has been diagnosed with a neurological condition, leaving him six months to a year to live, and no money for treatment. A desperate plea to the company’s cartoonishly heartless CEO Bob Garbinger (Kevin Bacon) gets him nowhere.
Instead, Winston stumbles into joining forces with J.J. Doherty (Taylour Paige), infiltrating headquarters after hours, gathering evidence that the products are poisonous. Winston also finds himself at the bottom of a pit of toxic waste, transforming him into the eponymous freakishly strong superhero (still voiced by Peter Dinklage but physically played by Luisa Guerreiro in monstrous form). To Peter Dinklage’s credit, he is strangely endearing in the role and understands what he has signed up for, nailing the juvenile tone, especially during a high-stakes yet humorous moment involving his superpowered acidic urine.
From there, everything that happens comes across as a version of RoboCop, where the crimefighter isn’t a cyborg but rather the henchman who spontaneously combusts into chunks upon getting covered in toxic waste and wandering in front of a speeding car. With his stepson now terrified of him, Winston (inevitably nicknamed Toxie) ends up inside a humorously named diner protecting citizens from an angry mob aggrieved for silly reasons while also taunting blind patrons.
The kills are somehow even goofier, with Toxie brandishing a toxic mop that carries roughly the same amount of impact as Thor’s hammer if those movies had an R rating. Decapitations and dismemberment are one thing, but here, body parts are symmetrically sliced or creatively impaled, elevated by impressive makeup effects.
Considering that Wade earlier scorned human Winston for not even trying to protect citizens or cats in harm’s way from the crooked individuals in charge of this town, perhaps leaning into a superhero role is not only what he needs to do for himself right now, but also the way to his stepson’s heart. There is also an additional, unexplored layer here, in that Peter Dinklage has dwarfism, and some of Wade’s issues might stem from internalized ableism (it’s unclear what the boy actually expects Winston to do physically or how to defend others before becoming the monster hero). The logical reasoning for not digging into that further is that this is a modern-day Troma movie that doesn’t need to explore metaphors.
That’s ok: The Toxic Avenger contains everything from a punk rock group of henchmen dubbed The Killer Nutz hunting Toxie on behalf of Bob Garbinger, with one of them uncontrollably and hilariously doing flips in every frame. Unsurprisingly, one of those flips eventually leads to a hysterical death that’s worth the price of admission alone. Meanwhile, Bob’s creepy brother (played by Elijah Wood, looking like a riff on the Tim Burton version of Penguin) has been ordered to find and kidnap Wade for leverage, as there is massive money to be made if the company can extract samples of blood from Toxie and refine his mutations into a pharmaceutical for public consumption.
Jokes are also littered everywhere, whether it be background gags, on-screen text, cutaways to a pair of arguing news anchors, or sheer hilarity from the comically brutal bludgeonings that feature weapons going inside nearly every orifice of the human body. The fact that the film successfully circles back to tenderness with sincerity and gruesomeness is a zany balancing act worth applauding. Again, there is no denying that this is sanitized compared to other Troma films, but Macon Blair has kept some of that tackiness intact in a new, occasionally heartfelt approach to The Toxic Avenger.
Flickering Myth Rating – Film: ★ ★ ★ / Movie: ★ ★ ★ ★
Robert Kojder
