One of the many great things about Kanopy, the streaming video service, is that it's 100% free, the other is that it offers a real range of viewing options from the decidedly worthy and high brow to, well, the more tasteless rather than tasteful.
Gurning it up at the B-movie end of the spectrum are the films made by Troma Entertainment*. Kanopy has on offer such modern-day classics as Surf Nazis Must Die, Class of Nuke 'em High, and probably Troma's most well known cinematic effort, The Toxic Avenger (and its 3 sequels).
When I happened upon a trailer for a Toxic Avenger reboot starring Peter Dinklage in the title role (in cinemas from 27 August! Absolutely do NOT watch the trailer if you find large amounts of spurting blood upsetting) I knew I was going to have to check out the original.
Folks, I was NOT prepared.
The Toxic Avenger was released in 1984 and it is the most aggressively eighties thing I have ever seen, and I was alive in the 1980s. I wore acidwash denim the first time it was in fashion. And yet, somehow, The Toxic Avenger manages to encapsulate the decade in a way I can't fully account for.
The story is a simple one: Melvin Furd, mop boy at the Tromaville Health Club, is a lowly put-upon character. A snivelling weakling who is constantly bullied by muscle-bound jocks and their big-haired girlfriends, but when a prank goes awry and he falls into a drum of toxic waste he mutates into a basically indestructible buff-but-lumpy hero who can both sense evil AND dispense violent justice. And there's a lot of evil going on in Tromaville so plenty of excuses for disgusting special effects.
If you were looking for a film with nuanced performances and emotional realism then you have very much not come to the right place. The acting is spectacularly, intentionally bad. Villains deliver monologues like they've been up all night drinking Red Bull (which is impossible because Red Bull wasn't invented yet). Moreover the motivations for their dastardly schemes are never more deep than "we needed there to be baddies in this movie".
Below is a content warning list I made of things in The Toxic Avenger that might be considered offensive:
- The acting
- Sex scenes/nudity
- Massive amounts of violence
- Seeing-eye dog murder (but it's okay because you can totally see that he's still breathing under all the pretend gunshot wound gore)
- Really highcut leotards
- Really bad spray tans
- Blue eye shadow
- Multiple vehicular homicides
- Characters that you can tell are "gay" because they simper and wear neckerchiefs
- Really weirdly portrayed transvestite character
- Attempted rape
- Blind character that constantly flails around
- Fat-shaming
- Coked up truck drivers
- So many occupational health and safety violations
Actually, maybe I figured out why exactly this movie is so very eighties. It's all that stuff. It's like if you took "Revenge of the Nerds" and "Robocop"** and stuck them in a blender with a bunch of stereotypes and tropes and a raw egg and drank it as a breakfast smoothie.
Also there's a scene in a Mexican restaurant where someone takes a ninja sword down from off a wall and at the point I said to myself "why would there be a ninja sword hanging in a Mexican restaurant" I had to take myself aside and give myself a talking to for taking the whole thing a tad too seriously. This movie is not taking ANYTHING seriously, which is probably its saving grace. That, and that Toxie, as well as being SUPER violent, is a real sweetheart. He helps little old ladies cross the street, opens jars, and punishes evildoers. Real "folk hero" vibes. He also has a lovely speaking voice.
And while the film is notoriously bad in many ways it is also works really well in others. The Toxic Avenger fits a lot of story into a mere 1 hour and 22 minutes of running time. Like Toxie's toned abdomen - there is no fat. And it's just very eye-rollingly fun? When Toxie tears a man's arm off and hits him with it... well, you're either the kind of person who finds that hilarious or you're not. I'm firmly in the "bludgeoned with your own arm is peak comedy" camp.
There are many reboots that having me asking, why? Why are they bringing that back now? But The Toxic Avenger, with it's Nazi***-cops and corrupt politicians has me nodding my head and saying "yes, the time is now ripe".
One of the non-Nazi cops in the film says towards the end, when he's trying to explain to some children why they can't go and help their friend, Toxie, who is in trouble, "people can't go around doing things because they're right."
Can't they?
But can a hideously deformed monster hero of superhuman size and strength?
Watch
- The Toxic Avenger (1984)
- The Toxic Avenger Part II (1989)
- The Toxic Avenger Part III: The Last Temptation of Toxie (1990)
- Citizen Toxie: The Toxic Avenger IV (2000)
*At one point one of the independent movie theatres in Christchurch ran a Troma movie marathon that promised anyone who was willing to sit all the way through every film their ticket money refunded - such was the legendary "badness" of the films in question.
**Nothing can convince me that Peter Verhoeven wasn't taking notes in this movie before he made Robocop.
***Literally he speaks with a German accent and accidentally calls someone "fuhrer". It is NOT subtle.
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