Even as a schlock-obsessed kid I saw right through Troma's cynical attempts to manufacture prefabricated cult movies. Filmmakers don't make cult movies. Audiences make cult movies. Anyone who sets out to make a cult movie is on a hiding to nothing, but Troma thought they could game the system simply by giving their movies lurid titles and VHS artwork that the films inevitably failed to live up to, and in doing so they gave birth to the likes of The Asylum, with their endless Sharknado rehashes.
But in 1984's The Toxic Avenger Troma had a genuine cult movie on their hands, one that was discovered and lapped up by audiences hungry for something distasteful. It was the cinematic equivalent of the Heavy Metal and Rap albums that got so many conservatives' knickers in a twist in the '80s. It was the sort of movie that played by its own rules, where anything could happen on screen, and often did.
Remaking The Toxic Avenger in this era of bland, sanitised entertainment, where filmmakers are terrified at the thought of causing offence, seems like a folly. It's no surprise that writer/director Macon Blair's remake doesn't work. Sure, it has the gore (though, of course, it's CG rather than practical now) and even a few boobs, but it's all too tasteful. As though it doesn't believe a gory romp is enough, it injects surface level progressive politics so the audience can feel a little better about laughing at decapitations. In the original, children and animals were massacred to hilarious effect. Here it's only cartoonishly evil folk who suffer such a fate.
The original saw a bullied health club janitor transform into a hulking mutant superhero after falling into a vat of toxic acid. Here the janitor, Peter Dinklage's Winston Gooze, works for a pharmaceutical company run by the evil Bob Garbinger (Kevin Bacon). When Winston is given a year to live due to a brain condition, he pleads with Bob to fix his company insurance so he can afford the experimental meds that might reverse his condition. Laughed away by Bob, Winston decides to rob the company safe, which leads to him being caught by Bob's henchmen and tossed into a vat of acid.
Winston emerges as Toxie, though he's oddly no longer hulking, remaining at Dinklage's stature. This makes little sense as Dinklage isn't playing the role in Toxie form, simply adding his voice to another performer's (Luisa Guerreiro) work. Teaming up with JJ (Taylour Paige), a vigilante who wants to expose Bob's corrupt business practices, Toxie takes on big pharma, armed with his toxic mop.
In the original, Toxie's main power was his ability to sense "evil" in people. This has been dispensed with, this version now making it clear to everyone that Bob is a wrong 'un. If the film really wanted to make a political statement it could have presented Bob as a charming businessman who has fooled everyone but Toxie into believing he has their best interests at heart.
There's a subplot that sees Winston looking after his stepson (Jacob Tremblay), whose mother passed away a year before the events of the film, but this attempt to add sentimentality sticks out like a radioactive thumb.
The original movie was parodying the vigilante thrillers of its era more so than superhero movies, but this version is very much influenced by the latter. Ironically it has more in common with James Gunn's recent superhero movies than the low budget efforts he made for Troma at the start of his career. Rather than mocking the modern superhero movie, it commits the very same sins of over-complicating what should be a simple plot and forcing us to spend the last half hour watching an overblown wrestling match. The jokes are woefully thin on the ground, with only Sunil Patel providing a few laughs as the doctor who breaks Winston's health news in highly insensitive fashion.
Directed by: Macon Blair
Starring: Peter Dinklage, Kevin Bacon, Jacob Tremblay, Taylour Paige, Julia Davis, Jonny Coyne, Elijah Wood
