Photo: Yana Blajeva/Legendary Pictures
I don’t think I was supposed to feel emotional during The Toxic Avenger, a movie in which the title character pulls someone’s intestines out through their asshole. But the truth is that I genuinely did get a little teary the first time Toxie triumphantly enters the scene of a hostage situation wielding his radioactive mop and preparing to dole out justice in generous gouts of red-dyed Karo syrup and fake viscera. The 1984 Toxic Avenger, the brainchild of famed schlock slinger Lloyd Kaufman and the start of the flagship franchise for his indie studio, Troma Entertainment, was a revenge-of-the-nerds fantasy. Its scrawny protagonist, Melvin, may have been turned into a hideous mutant after an encounter with a drum of chemical waste, but the incredible strength he gained allows him not only to become the town protector but to wreak havoc on the bullies who made his life hell. In this reboot from I Don’t Feel at Home in This World Anymore writer-director Macon Blair, new hero Winston Gooze is still a janitor and a sad sack, but he’s downtrodden in a way that offers more universal pathos.
Winston (Peter Dinklage) works hard at his job at a factory owned by the sketchy BTH corporation and tries to do right by his skeptical stepson, Wade (Jacob Tremblay), whom he’s been raising alone since the death of his partner. Despite his efforts, Winston is broke and lonely, and that’s before he gets diagnosed with a brain ailment that’s fatal unless he can access some wildly expensive drugs his health-insurance plan won’t cover. Winston’s in danger of being crushed by the system, not just a few popular-kid sociopaths, and the unassuming nature of Dinklage’s performance gives the character a stubborn dignity amid all the silliness and prosthetics. “Why fight if you can’t win?” he asks J.J., a BTH whistleblower played by Taylour Paige. She isn’t really sure how to answer. BTH, headed by the slimy Bob Garbinger (Kevin Bacon), has already ruined the environment with illegal practices and caused widespread cancers with the supposed health supplements he’s been putting out. Exposing the company won’t set things right, but that doesn’t mean everyone should just give up.
So the Toxic Avenger sets out to do something, and that something involves outrageously over-the-top violence. The splatter comes more easily to this new movie than a grasp of overall tone does. The original Toxic Avenger was made for chump change and wore its low-budget nature proudly, while this version, which was shot in Bulgaria in 2021 and involves both practical and digital effects, tries to evoke that ragged aesthetic while working with more resources. It’s not always successful. The organic laxness of a DIY production tends to be a lot less charming when it’s deliberate, like the pre-aged wood paneling on a fake dive bar that opened just last year. But while the new movie dawdles on its way to Toxie’s origins, then rushes toward a finale with a lurching rhythm that verges on calculated ineptitude, its spirit never feels inauthentic. Blair, who sets his Toxic Avenger in the town of St. Roma, is obviously a true Troma geek (and enlists the support of fellow genre devotee Elijah Wood, who plays Bob’s Oswald Cobblepot-esque brother, Fritz). He doesn’t remake Toxie for 2025 (or, more accurately, 2023, when the film had its festival premiere) so much as he updates the context around him.
Winston goes to war with some Proud Boy surrogates called the Nasty Lads who take control of a fast-food joint to protest its mascot’s gender change and “western alpha scapegoating.” He battles a Slipknot-by-way-of–Linkin Park band who moonlight as corporate assassins, with a member whose job seems to consist entirely of leaping and bouncing off things (at one point, Fritz is forced to decree “No parkour!”). And his ultimate war is with Bob, a tech CEO who rants about his haters and has gotten rich off rebranded snake oil and whose obvious corruption has been obscured by his self-mythologizing. But these touches aren’t what make Toxie feel so primed to meet the moment — it’s the way the possibility of fighting the system never occurs to him until he has to do it. Dinklage, with his heavy head and weary eyes, plays Winston as someone who has been too busy trying to get by to see the trap that he and everyone around him have been caught in.
The game is rigged, and it’s not possible to get ahead. Yet when told he’s dying from what is almost certainly a side effect from his workplace, he just lets out an anguished moan and smooshes his head onto his doctor’s desk in a dramatic gesture of despair. When it’s this hard to simply get by, who has time to consider the bigger picture and those profiting from it? It takes dying, getting dumped in toxins, and coming back as an irradiated freak for Winston to rethink his own sense of powerlessness. Who wouldn’t find that a little moving, scattered body parts and all?
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