Toxic Avenger Review: a classic cult that deserves to be watched Cinemax
Intensity: 🩸 🩸 on 🩸🩸🩸🩸🩸
Made by Macon Blair
This should not surprise, or for some of you, it will be a massive surprise, but the Toxic Avenger is a great film. Not just a fun game in the cinema, but a real piece of blue and shiny horror wrapped in some of the best satires views for years!
For the uninitiated drug addict is an original idea of Troma Studios and the legendary Lloyd Kaufman. From 1974, Troma proved to be B-Film Gore, satire, parodies and stupidity by cargo. While Troma has a rich story of occasional misogyny trafficking, questionable representations of the race and one dose or two of homophobia, it has always been a great supporter of the oppressed.
Frankly, there is no better outsider than the Toxic Avenger. Partly Hulk, partly Frankenstein and Elephant Man, The Toxic Avenger is a character assaulted with love by tragedy and confusion. Imagine if Homer’s Odyssey was filled with PET, breast and cat jokes. The Greek tragedy meets the stupidity of debauchery.
While many will indicate Schlock-Fest of Schlock on a low budget of 1984, the Toxic Avenger is an inmplexible and sharp satire of the razor on the greed of companies. Anyway, the production of Troma was an amateur outing filled with cheesy jokes and far too much of the aforementioned relaxed misogyny.
The release in 2025 of The Toxic Avenger Mark a significant gap of the original, the cartoon, the musical, and The Toxic Avenger of 1989: the last temptation of toxia, as well as Citizen toxia of the 2000s: The Toxic Avenger IV. Although it was the fifth episode of the franchise (depending on how you count), it is really a vague story of the 1984 film that started everything.
The big difference? Budget.
Macon Blair (the actor of Green Room, Murder Party and Blue Ruin) clearly had a few dollars with whom to work, and that shows. Not only had Blair have a large budget, but it was also offered an incredible casting which included Peter Dinklage, Elijah Wood and the exceptional Kevin Bacon.
The intrigue is somewhat similar to the original of 1984. This time, however, the concierge of Melvin Ferd Scrawny Health Club was replaced by Winston Gooze (Peter Dinklage), an employee of the corrupt pharmaceutical company and pollutant BTH (bi-toxiphetamine hydroxylate). Meanwhile, a rebellious activist JJ Doherty (Taylour page) strives to discover the horrible things that the BTH has done.
JJ manages to sneak secret information to an investigation journalist, but his contact with journalism is offered by the killer Nutz. They are a violent gang and a popular rap group on BTH’s pay. The nuts are represented by the strange and off -putting Garbinger Fritz (Elijah Wood). Toxic waste, corporate embezzlement and even the name of the city, Tromille, is still there. The city has been intelligently rebuilt as a village of St. Roma, alias Tromville.
Gooze discovers that his concierge work in BTH gave him brain tumors. Its lifespan was cut to another year, in mind. When he pleads for money for a medical treatment of the villain / Magnat Bob Garbiner, he is shown at the door. A discouraged cotton then accidentally collides with JJ on the plant. The Nutz arises to kill the accidental couple. They capture Winston and throw it into a Goo swimming pool, which creates the Toxic Avenger! (Get them toxia!)
The performance of the Toxic Avenger
Aside from the frantic editing and the constant dam of Easter eggs, the hysterical dialogue outside the camera and the pieces of brilliantly hidden satire, the film really lives and dies with the incredible performance of Kevin Bacon like Garbinger, BTH’s head. Bacon brings pathos to a horrible and corrupt self-assistance guru who is on his head with the crowd. Garbinger does not care about the city dwellers in the village of Saint-Roma. He spends his obsessed days to pay the crowd, maintaining his vigor young and his penis unfortunately small.
Dinklage, as a toxia, also manages to shoot an equally impressive role in leaning on the vulnerabilities of a single father stuck in a dead end of concierge. The love story of Frankenstein of Toxia is toxia. Instead, it was replaced by social justice, revenge and the need to correct the wrongs of goosebumps. Rest assured, the mop is still there.
Peter Dinklage gave life to the role of Winston Gooze with Pathos and Humanity. But the film had a secret weapon. Give a special credit to Luisa Guerreiro, the cascade actress who puts on the toxia costume (the body). Dinklage recorded a performance for the whole film, but Blair needed a cascade person to do the action sequences. Enter Guerreiro, an interpreter of veteran and Comedian movement capture. She watched and adapted Dinklage, then reconstructed performance in all heavy prostheses and costumes. Bloody Disgusting has a wonderful article featuring an interview with WarRiro, which describes the process of trying to embody Dinklage, which in turn embodied toxia. Oscars now have a category of better waterfalls. (It’s time!) We hope they will remember his performance in this film.
Should you see Toxic Avenger?
I am sure that there are some of you who will insist on sticking to the original of Troma in 1984. Or, perhaps, one of its offbeat suites, but I am here to tell you that the Toxic Avenger is one of the best films – if not the best – 2025.
The radiance of the film lies in the incredibly tight and concise edition. No scene is wasted, and no dialogue bit is late. It is a film that is so full of gags that, when your brain manages to treat a single gag, it has missed two or three other gags. More importantly, Toxic Avenger gives the hope that a Troma story can be told without the most questionable elements of the 1980s. Instead, they replaced problematic bits with a hysterical and modern satirical approach.
Hoping that Macon Blair and others with the same state of mind pick up the Troma coat and get to work on the restarts of the Hopper chicks to Zombietown, the Surf Nazis must die and poultry: Night of the Chicken Dead. Do not bother trying to redo Shakespeare’s shit storm. This film is pure perfection.
Toxic Avenger is classified R and available everywhere.
