Hot Trash

‘The Toxic Avenger’ reboot, which debut-screened at Austin’s Fantastic Fest last night simultaneously in five packed theaters that probably housed 90 percent of its natural audience, is disgusting, exploitative low-rent genre trash. It also stars Peter Dinklage, one of our greatest actors, giving an Elephant Man-level performance while encased in layers of bulbous fake boils and Day-Glo rubber for most of the runtime. Elijah Wood, looking exactly like Danny DeVito’s Penguin from Batman Returns, is a sympathetic henchman, and Kevin Bacon chews up the screen as the main villain, a vain corporate CEO who enjoys walking around shirtless and receives regular infusions of ‘Gorilla Blood.’

THE TOXIC AVENGER ★★ (2/5 stars)
Directed by: Macon Blair
Written by: Macon Blair
Starring: Peter Dinklage, Kevin Bacon, Elijah Wood, Jacob Tremblay
Running time: 103 mins

So it’s hard to know what to make of this movie. On the one hand, it stays true to its grade-x Troma Film roots. On the other, it features actual movie stars and skirts around the edges of mainstream satire, at least until a scene where the protagonist rips out a criminal’s guts through his butthole.

Dinklage plays Winston Gooze, a widower and broke janitor who works at Kevin Bacon’s factory, which purports to make health supplements but is actually a toxic waste depository that has obliterated the surrounding landscape. Gooze develops a rare form of brain cancer, but his health insurance won’t pay for the treatments. So he concocts a pathetic plan that ends with some henchmen shooting him in the head and dumping him in a vat of toxic waste. He emerges as “Toxie,” a disgusting superhero with blue blood that heals. He wields a radioactive mop that obliterates everything it touches.

Obviously, this is not a movie that takes itself very seriously, and director Macon Blair clearly loves the source material. The problem is that the source material is a 1984 piece of middle-finger shlock that was clearly reacting to the bloat of 1980s film, and it’s now 40 years later. When the original Toxic Avenger came out, superheroes were still anti-culture, and The Toxic Avenger fit into the cultural pantheon alongside other fuck-off cultural phenomenon like Spawn and Howard the Duck.

But in our superhero-saturated age, we already have our gory, reactionary superhero property, The Boys, which has been doing the eviscerating and cutting off people’s dicks and head exploding quite effectively for several seasons. The satire in The Boys is sharper, the writing is better and tighter and vaster, and the action is bigger-budgeted and more exciting. By comparison, The Toxic Avenger feels like a hard-R episode of Power Rangers or Ninja Turtles.

That said, The Toxic Avenger has a sweet emotional core because of Toxie’s love for his teenage stepson, played by the not-annoying former child star Jacob Tremblay. He also has a nice relationship with an investigative reporter who’s out to expose Kevin Bacon’s evil mob days and corporate rapaciousness. And while the superhero satire doesn’t land, at all, the movie has an effective left-wing populist tone. Corporations are screwing us over and poisoning us. The health-care system is broken. And, in the movie’s most effective set piece, Toxie lays waste to some Proud Boys-style terrorists who are holding customers hostage at a fast-food place called Miss Meat. They’re angry because the restaurant changed its name from “Mr. Meat.”

The movie reserves a lot of its savagery for them, and for an Insane Clown Posse-style “monster rock” band called Killer Nuts, who seem more interested in doing parkour than making music, and more interested in killing people of the mob than any of the above. Toxie really rips them a new butthole, when he’s not busy melting trees with his radioactive piss.

The Toxic Avenger isn’t for everyone, or even for anyone. It’s not great. It isn’t even really very good. But it’s definitely something else.