‘The Toxic Avenger’ Movie Review: Re-imagining Has More Goopy-Gory-Goofy Splatter Than You Can Shake A Mop At
Photo from Cineverse
From Jeremy Kibler
Troma Entertainment’s 1984 VHS-schlock classic The Toxic Avenger couldn’t be made today. Any remake that even attempted to be half as gonzo as the singular original would probably come across as safe and inoffensive by comparison. Lloyd Kaufman’s indie oddity was clearly rough around the homemade edges and not instantly easy to embrace but somehow managed to be charming and outrageously clever in its own ridiculously regressive and un-PC way (with a not-so-subtle anti-pollution message).
Fortunately, writer-director Macon Blair’s The Toxic Avenger is its own beast for a new generation with most of that same rebellious spirit. Initially deemed unreleasable without a distributor and now finally seeing the light of day since its 2023 premiere at Fantastic Fest, this re-imagining is profane but far less mean-spirited and not always as go-for-broke as one might expect. Still, it’s affectionately made and a ton of goopy-gory-goofy fun if this is your bag.
Gone is Melvin Ferd, the grinning Bobby Boucher Jr. mopping up sweat at a health club full of psychotic hard bodies before becoming the titular tutu-wearing monstrosity who destroyed the scum of Tromaville. Instead, the inspiredly cast Peter Dinklage plays Winston Gooze, a down-on-his-luck janitor at a chemical factory for corrupt health corporation BTS in St. Roma’s Village (knock out some letters and you’ll get it). Making an effort to be a good stepdad to his late girlfriend’s anxious teenage son Wade (Jacob Tremblay), he then gets diagnosed with brain cancer with a year to live and his insurance plan won’t cover the treatment. After an plea goes nowhere with cold-hearted employer, CEO Robert Garbinger (a smarmy-and-loving-it Kevin Bacon), Winston robs BTS, only to get dumped into a vat of radioactive toxic waste. From there, he transforms into a green-skinned mutant, a vigilante antihero with an equally radioactive mop head for the town scum.
The Toxic Avenger is very much the movie it wants to be and very much a change of pace for writer-director Macon Blair (whose 2017 debut I Don’t Feel at Home in This World Anymore was a great, genre-fluid indie). More beholden to the big superhero boom and graphic novel adaptations, particularly The Punisher, Blair’s script is definitely plottier than the straightforward original, but the stakes feel bigger. Imaginatively designed and vibrantly colored, Blair’s vision is still a B-movie at heart but looks like a real motion picture with a healthy budget and slicker production values (and the very funny ADR lines from off-screen extras are on purpose). While there is a lot of CG blood, the prosthetics for Toxie look awesomely grotesque and tactile with a peskily exposed bug eye that keeps popping out of its socket.
This 2025 take on The Toxic Avenger isn’t exactly sanitized, but it’s far more palatable. The irreverent, anything-goes tone is still intact but more self-aware reflective of today’s standards. By holding back on the weirder, sleazier sensibilities of the source (which, on one hand, is welcome), it starts to feel a little more conventional without the demented personality this kind of movie calls for in the first place. For instance, a traumatized blind woman’s dog isn’t shot dead before she is nearly raped, and a 12-year-old girl isn’t sold off for $12. It’s for the best, but the lunacy here is sometimes noticeably tamped down. The carnage can be splatterific fun, however, like Toxie delivering the pain to a group of criminals holding fast-food workers and patrons hostage and then, most cathartically, Garbinger’s henchmen, an evil rock band called Killer Nutz. There’s no death by milkshake machine, but there is one by car engine.
As overqualified as he may be, Dinklage is great as our new Toxie, bringing legitimacy and sympathy to the role of the wonderfully named Winston Gooze. He and Tremblay have just enough sweet moments as father figure and kind-of stepson, and as Toxie’s platonic sidekick, Taylour Paige (Zola) brings a sardonic delivery to whistleblower J.J., particularly in a conversation about a Zamboni. Whereas Bacon is playing it bad to the bone as human garbage Bob Garbinger, Elijah Wood is physically memorable, looking like the long-lost brother to Danny DeVito’s The Penguin, and provides some surprising pathos as Bob’s stringy-haired, hunchbacked brother/henchman Fritz.
The Toxic Avenger doesn’t always strike that sweet spot between earnestness and over-the-top spectacle with jaw-ripping and guts-torn-out-of-buttholes, but for the niche genre freaks, it still has plenty of infectious, gnarly charm coming out of its ass.
Rating: 3/5
The Toxic Avenger hits theaters on August 29, 2025.
