Crew
Director/Screenplay – Macon Blair, Based on the Film The Toxic Avenger (1984) Written by Joe Ritter, From a Story by Lloyd Kaufman, Producers – Alex Garcia, Michael Herz, Lloyd Kaufman & Mary Parent, Photography – Dana Gonzales, Music – Brooke Blair & Will Blair, Visual Effects Supervisor – Chris Ritvo, Visual Effects – Moving Picture Company, Special Effects Supervisor – Yovko Dogandjiiski, Creature Effects – Millennium FX (Supervisor – Kate Walshe), Production Design – Alexander Cameron. Production Company – Legendary Pictures/Troma Entertainment.
Cast
Peter Dinklage (Winston Gooze), Luisa Guerreiro (Toxie), Kevin Bacon (Bob Garbinger), Elijah Wood (Fritz Garbinger), Jacob Tremblay (Wade Gooze), Taylour Paige (J.J. Doherty), Julia Davis (Kissy Sturnevan), Jonny Coyne (Thad Barkabus), Shaun Dooley (Mel Ferd), David Yow (Guthrie Stockins), Sunil Patel (Dr. Walla), Kitodar Todorov (Kupp), Sophia Vassili (Sawser), Spencer Wilding (Monster Garbinger)
Plot
Winston Gooze works as a janitor at the BTH pharmaceutical company in St Roma’s Village (nicknamed Tromaville), while trying to raise a teenage son Wade on his own. Winston is then informed by his doctor that he has a terminal brain condition. There is a drug that will treat this but it is not covered by his medical insurance. Winston sneaks into a gala event in honour of BTH’s CEO Bob Garbinger to plead his case but is thrown out. An angry Winston tries to steal money from the plant but is found by Garbinger’s hoodlums and dumped in a pool of toxic waste. Winston emerges as a mutated creature. He is able to use the strength this now gives him to intervene with wrongdoing around the town, which gains him the name The Toxic Avenger or Toxie, and makes him a folk hero as he sets out to bring Garbinger down.
The Toxic Avenger (1984) was a parody of a superhero film, which came with an emphasis on splattery gore effects and meltdowns, bare boobs and a willingness to step way over the lines into Bad Taste. The Toxic Avenger and Class of Nuke ‘Em High (1986) were the start of the reputation that Troma Films has gained as a production and releasing house specialising in some of the cheapest, nastiest, frequently offensive and badly made horror films out there, which are usually released with deliberately outrageous titles. This has gained them a cult following.
The Toxic Avenger was followed by three sequels:- The Toxic Avenger Part II (1988), The Toxic Avenger Part III: The Last Temptation of Toxie (1989) and Citizen Toxie: The Toxic Avenger Part 4 (2000). The Toxic Avenger also became a character in Troma’s children’s cartoon series Toxic Crusaders (1991-2). There was even a Toxic Avenger videogame and The Toxic Avenger (2008), a rock musical.
From the 2000s onwards, we saw a host of Remakes of popular 1970s/80s films from The Texas Chainsaw Massacre (2003) through Dawn of the Dead (2004), The Amityville Horror (2005), The Hills Have Eyes (2006), The Wicker Man (2006), Halloween (2007), Piranha (2010), Evil Dead (2013), Poltergeist (2015) and Hellraiser (2022), and a host of others. Almost all of the major films of the era were covered. So it is no particular surprise that The Toxic Avenger gets the inevitable remake treatment here.
What is a surprise is seeing Lloyd Kaufman’s gungy, next-to-no budget original, a work that pushed the extremes of bad taste, being given the respectability treatment with a decent budget. This means some okay effects and that the film has been shot internationally in Bulgaria with a cast that includes well-known name actors like Peter Dinklage, Kevin Bacon and Elijah Wood. It is something that would surely have been bowled over Lloyd Kaufman, who always champions how cheap and unwatchable the films he churns out are, back in the 1980s.
Looking back at the original The Toxic Avenger, it is nasty little film that makes a virtue of pushing an envelope of as much in the way of Splatter effects and bad taste humour as possible. The only thing that really changed with any of the sequels was that they were made on better budgets with somewhat better effects. (Although it should be noted that things were cleaned up in order to be marketed as a children’s cartoon with Toxic Crusaders).
In order for it to be the mainstream, theatrically released film it has, The Toxic Avenger has been considerably cleaned up over the original. Gone are all the scenes beating up old ladies, people masturbating over pictures of roadkill victims and the gratuitous nudity. There is still a reasonable degree of splatter with assorted ripped limbs, severed heads and slit throats, but this is fairly tame as a Toxic Avenger or Troma film goes. Even so, the remake did have difficulty getting a theatrical release in the US such that it originally appeared in 2023 but did not obtain a wider release until 2025 where it went out unrated.
Beyond that, The Toxic Avenger has been modernised somewhat. Gone is the whole health club setting, which is now transformed into a more 2020s boogeyman of a pharmaceutical company, while Melvin Ferd (renamed Winston Gooze here, although we still get a journalist character named Mel Ferd played by Shaun Dooley in the prologue) is shown struggling with the US health insurance nightmare. The one other oddity is that with the casting of Peter Dinklage as the before version of Toxie (with the transformed version being played by British actress Luisa Guerreiro) we end up with a Toxic Avenger who is less than five feet high – Dinklage is 4’4” and Guerreiro 4’9” – and looks like a cuddly kid more than he ever does a threat.
The script of the original was fairly shapeless and was mostly driven by Toxie getting revenge on the four lowlifes who humiliated him and led to his mutation. The remake goes far more in the direction of standard scripting. The four lowlifes are still there but are rewritten as a band. The film now gains a standard villain in the form of Kevin Bacon’s evil CEO, who also takes the Toxie formula and mutates towards the end. In addition, Peter Dinklage’s Winston is rewritten to have a teenage son and is shown attempting to awkwardly be a good father. The scene we get in the mid-credits with Toxie proudly sitting in a backrow watching his son’s performance seems a whole level of warm-heated sentiment that would have been welcomely trashed back in Troma’s heyday.
Director Macon Blair had previously directed the comedy I Don’t Feel At Home in This World Anymore (2017). He had previously written the scripts for the horror film The Monkey’s Paw (2013) and the crime films Small Crime (2017) and Hold the Dark (2018). He has had a number of supporting parts as an actor since the early 2000s including in Green Room (2015), tv’s Swamp Thing (2019), The Hunt (2020) and Oppenheimer (2023).
Trailer here