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If New Line Cinema was the house that Freddy built, then Troma is the house that Toxie built, and well to be honest, the house Toxie inhabits in the movie does have a very Troma-feel to it. Of all the Troma releases this one might have been the one closest to being main stream and could easily be picked up by a major studio to be remade into a straight faced movie, rated PG-13 of course. If that would happen than this movie would become a parody of that one because it’s hard to take it seriously and of course it never was meant to be taken seriously in the first place.
In The Toxic Avenger uber nerdy Melvin is being bullied by basically every one. No wonder as he walks around spastic, mopping the floor, drooling over the physiques of the girls around him and not being able to form a complete sentence. When some young adults decide to play a trick on him Melvin runs away and falls through the window in a barrel full of toxic waste turning Melvin in a muscular monster with a tendency of doing good. He is The Toxic Avenger and Tromaville will from now on be safe!
The Toxic Avenger is hard to take serious from the minute the movie starts. The general location is a health club where two gays are working out together, people smoke while pumping iron and the steam room is used for sex. In this health club Bozo and Slug together with their sleazy girlfriends hang out because they have nothing better to do I guess. Another hobby of them is running over random pedestrians and kids on bikes at night time, just for fun. Hey, this was a time before the internet! People were bored back then.
So they run over a young boy who flips over the car, when it’s clear that he’s still living they throw the car around and drive over his head resulting in a pile of goo. And of course they stop to make pictures, always nice for the family album. If you didn’t have an idea about this movie yet, the tasteless gore doesn’t stop there. When disposing of his enemies Toxie rips off arms and beats their former owner with them.
The Toxic Avenger looks cheap of course but never as cheap as a, let’s say, Troll 2. Then again, filming my dog taking a dump on the neighbors lawn looks more expensive than Troll 2. The movie is filled with numerous people we never heard of after the movie, except for Patrick Kilpatrick who pops up here as a bad guy and has managed to have a career made out of playing them.
The Toxic Avenger jumps between gore and humor with ease an has quite a brisk pacing, which makes sure the movie is never dull. Troma ingredients are all included: outrageous subject matter, gore, chicks, T&A, strange dubbing, bad acting and a cheap video look. The video-look does give it that extra nostalgic feeling, never a bad thing.
The Toxic Avenger is one of the more accessible Troma movies. It’s superhero theme will appeal to a wider audience than surfing Nazis or killer condoms. It’s a funny movie even though the low budget shows and nothing epic aside from some car chases happen.
