The Toxic Avenger, a semi-reboot of the 1984 superhero splatter-fest, made the rounds of the festival circuit back in 2023. But all the violence and gore scared off most distributors, so the film—starring Peter Dinklage (Game of Thrones) in the title role—has been languishing in the vault for much of the last two years.
Thanks to Cineverse, The Toxic Avenger is finally coming to select theaters this weekend. And thanks to the folks at Bloody Disgusting (a Cineverse subsidiary), we’ve got a trailer by producer/actor and horror movie fan Wilson Cleveland, rendered in a gloriously goofy-yet-gory grindhouse style that pays homage to the original trailer. (You can watch the red-band trailer below.)
(Minor spoilers for original 1984 film below.)
Created by Lloyd Kaufman, the 1984 Toxic Avenger featured a scrawny janitor, Melvin Ferd (Mitch Cohen), at a health club in the fictional town of Tromaville, New Jersey (“the toxic chemical capital of the world”). Melvin is tormented by a quartet of bullies and ends up falling out of a second-story window into a drum of toxic waste. He emerges as a hideously deformed mutant with superhuman strength and becomes a crime-fighting vigilante, taking on a gangster named Cigar Face, among others, as well as the corrupt mayor of Tromaville. And yes, he does take revenge on those bullies.
The film had a long run at New York City’s Bleeker Street Cinema throughout 1985 and opened a bit more broadly the following year as part of the midnight movie circuit. The critics didn’t exactly rave, largely dismissing the film as trash, while grudgingly acknowledging it was entertaining enough to appeal to fans of that particular genre. Kaufman was somehow able to spin that minor success into a franchise, with three sequels, a stage musical, a video game, an animated TV series, and a comic book series.
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