Review: The Toxic Avenger - Toxie 2025 does Troma proud

Luisa Guerreiro as The Toxic Avenger

Two years ago, glowing reviews for this new update of Troma’s superhero The Toxic Avenger came flooding out of Fantastic Fest in Austin, Texas.

And then……silence.

No teasers, posters or news of a release date. What made this even stranger was the fact that Legendary Pictures produced it, the company behind Christopher Nolan’s Batman trilogy, the new Godzilla films and A Minecraft Story. In other words, big-ass blockbusters that screen in multiplexes and IMAXs around the globe.

But there was a glimmer of radioactive green light earlier this year, when Cineverse (the distributor behind the Terrifier films) helped rescue the film from languishing on the shelf (or hard drive) and gave it a hefty and well-hyped worldwide release just last week.

When a movie gets put on the shelf indefinitely, the general public assumes that it must be a piece of shit and not worth releasing. But thankfully, that was not the case here, as writer/director Macon Blair’s reincarnation is bloody good! It does the legacy proud, tapping into the gonzo gross-out humour that made the original films so beloved (and even spawned a kids' cartoon series in the '90s). Having finally seen the film, the only reason I can think of as to why it took so long to come out is that prospective studios had no idea who the audience was for this film.

The very idea of a Toxic Avenger film with stars (Peter Dinklage, Kevin Bacon), a budget and a wide release seems somewhat anathema to the franchise’s origins. Troma Films, the exploitation film company that built its brand on the back of Toxie’s malformed shoulders, found its success without access to any of those things. Like Roger Corman before him, Lloyd Kaufman’s company churned out gloriously trashy films, and gave some of today’s renowned filmmakers their start, most notably James Gunn, who cut his teeth on Tromeo & Juliet and co-wrote Kaufman’s book All I Need to Know About Filmmaking I Learned from The Toxic Avenger, before graduating to the big leagues with his Guardians of the Galaxy trilogy and this years Superman.

Mopping up crime

Troma Films aimed low: low budget and proudly lowbrow. They produced trash-tastic cult cinema that knew what it was and proudly wallowed in their own end of the (cess)pool, serving up four Toxie films as well as other bad-taste flicks like Class of Nuke ‘Em High, Surf Nazis Must Die and Rabid Grannies.

Despite having more money and actors who can actually act this time around, Macon Blair’s new film proudly honours the Troma tradition. Firstly, it’s gleefully gory, with many a bad guy getting their jaw or limbs ripped off in Toxie’s rampaging quest for justice. Some unneeded digital assistance aside, the gore is, for the most part, practical and doffs a blood-spattered cap to Troma’s time-honoured predilection for bodily dismemberment.

Equally important, the new film is full of heart. The original Toxie’s relationship with his blind girlfriend, Sarah, is genuinely sweet, which goes a long way to grounding the film in some semblance of humanity (much needed amidst the outlandish parade of inhumanity throughout the rest of the film).

Here, we have Winston Gooze (Dinklage), a down-on-his-luck janitor, taking care of his sensitive stepson Wade (Jacob Tremblay), and dealing with the news that he has an incurable brain tumour (delivered by a doctor who must have trained under Arrested Development's Dr. Fishman).

Once Winston takes his destined dip in a vat of toxic waste, his mission to clean up the streets of St. Roma (formerly Tromaville) is initially to show Wade he stands for something, and later to rescue him from the clutches of evil CEO Bob Garbinger (Kevin Bacon).

Peter Dinklage as Winston Gooze, pre-Toxic bath

Peter Dinklage is an inspired choice to play the new Toxie, bringing that heart and the bitter anger of the truly downtrodden that the role requires. The film spends a decent amount of time setting up Winston as a loveable loser who wants to do the right thing but feels trapped and helpless by the hand he has been dealt. The tragic irony here is that he has to be shot and dropped into a vat of toxic sludge, and mutated into an unrecognisable green monster to become who he wishes he could be fully.

I’ve seen some bitching online about how Dinklage doesn’t perform in the Toxie makeup, instead just providing the voice-over once the transformation has taken place. But that proves the naysayers haven’t seen (or have indeed forgotten) the original films, where Winston and Toxie were played by multiple actors, with the voice work changing constantly as well. Toxie 2025 embraces that goofy tradition but, miraculously, makes it work! British actress Luisa Guerreiro does a brilliant job under the makeup, and even though you can tell it's not Dinklage, she is clearly going off his guidance and voice work to create a fully realised Toxie that effortlessly carries the film. Guerrero and Dinklage work in tandem spectacularly — it's a genuinely great double-act that they and Blair deserve praise for.

Among the other joys of the film is Jesus Lizard frontman David Yow as a homeless ‘maybe’ doctor who takes in the wounded Toxie, Elijah Wood as the Penguin-esque Fritz, Bob’s younger brother and his cohorts, the Killer Nutz, a rap-metal outfit who have a sideline as killers for hire. Fritz's line 'Summon the Nutz' deserves to join the lexicon of oft-quoted movie lines.

The bigger budget also means we get a fully realised and tactile setting in the run-down, crime-ridden St. Roma, with such memorable locales as (returning) fast food restaurant Miss Meat (formerly Mr Meat, laments an old white male newsreader) and the requisite toxic waste dump site.

Kevin Bacon as the big bad Bob Garbinger

Bacon is clearly having fun in this villain phase of his career (which includes similar turns in Maxxxine and Beverly Hills Cop Axel F), but Blair may have missed a trick by not making him even more diabolical. Don’t get me wrong, he’s a sleazy big business scumbag of the highest order, but when you look at who’s running the USA today and the shit he gets away with, Bacon’s character can't help but seem tame in comparison.

One of The Toxic Avenger’s promotional taglines has been ‘Show the Fuck Up’, urging fans to get off their asses and into theatres, a worthy sentiment for sure, especially since Cineverse has already pledged $5 million from its promotional budget to help erase medical debt for families least able to pay. And they will provide another $1 million for each million it makes at the box office. Bloody legends!

Well, I’m proud to have shown the fuck up and been able to see the film in my local small town New Zealand cinema (shout-out to the Regent 3 in Masterton and Umbrella Entertainment for getting it there). I salute Winston, the glorious green mutant and his Cineverse overlords for helping real people in need. And in an era of spandexed superhero over-saturation, this scrappy green outsider in the pink tutu truly is the hero we need right now.

4 radioactive mops out of 5.