Horror remakes: The Toxic Avenger

It was only 20 months ago that I saw Lloyd Kaufman's The Toxic Avenger (1984) for the first time. I'd been on a little bit of a Troma jaunt, in which I also saw Frankenhooker and Tromeo & Juliet. I'm going to leave that sentence as is, even though I just checked and Troma actually had nothing to do with Frankenhooker. In any case, I had only recently seen both those films and was feeling very receptive to the sort of thing Troma had to offer.

It's a bit of a shame, then, that Kaufman's film spoke to me little enough that I can't even really tell if Macon Blair's new Toxic Avenger -- which actually first saw the light of day in 2023, before finally getting a proper release in August -- is a remake of that film or not.

Certainly, it doesn't exist in a world in which the Toxic Avenger, and by that I mean the person not the movie, exists and is part of the characters' lore, which distinguishes it from other not-quite-remakes I've seen this month like I Know What You Did Last Summer and Friday the 13th. However, it's not quite a remake in the sense that the title character is an adult looking after his stepson after the stepson's mother died, whereas I'm pretty sure the original Toxic Avenger was a high school kid. 

Actually, I just looked it up, and Mitch Cohen, who played that character, was 32 at the time the film was released -- he just looked like a gawky teenager. That's pretty different, though, from the guy who plays the character here, our treasured Peter Dinklage, who is 56. 

Hey, did I expect every movie I watched this month to be a shot-by-shot remake like Psycho?

There's another thing I should tell you about Toxic Avenger -- or Toxic Avenger Unrated, as it is sometimes billed -- or actually two things:

1) I paid $14.99 AUD to rent it. That's about $9.77 USD. 

2) I watched it as the second movie of a horror double feature, and I was really, really tired.

The first is pertinent because I had said, earlier on this month, that I didn't want to pay the full $19.99 rental price just so I could watch it in this month of horror remakes. And that was a $19.99 USD rental price, which would have been closer to $30 AUD. And so indeed, I did not. I paid half that, which is not really what I wanted to do either, but as I mentioned a few days ago, this theme is starting to run dry for me and I still have another four days until it's Halloween.

The second is pertinent because it explains why, two days later, I can barely remember Blair's new movie. 

I know I generally liked it, and I do have some general thoughts on it.

One is that I was really glad they cast Dinklage in this role, where it does not seem his size is a relevant part of the story. Or rather, it's not relevant at all when he's just a janitor looking after his stepson, one with an aggressive brain cancer who is likely to die in a year's time. (Humorously, every time the doctor gives him bad news, he engages in an excessive amount of small talk before getting to the news, which drives Dinklage's understandably nervous character crazy.) No one comments on his size and we are not meant to question why the boy's full-height mother went for him. Dinklage has done a good job making his height an unimportant aspect of the movies in which he's cast, and this was another example of that. (I do find it a little disappointing that Dinklage did not actually get made up in the Toxic Avenger practical effects suit. Wikipedia says it was actress Luisa Guerrero, so I guess not even a man, who did that work.)

However, I do think that Blair found there to be something that was right about Dinklage that made him worth casting in this movie, perhaps some sort of match with the toxic sludge superhero we see in the second half. And indeed, some characters do refer to him as a "little guy" in that form -- though at that point, they don't recognize him as the janitor, thought to be dead, who is revived by the rejuvenative effects of the sludge on his person. I'm not sure if this was the intention, but it has the impact of suggesting people are polite enough not to talk about height with a human little person, but it's still something they'd mention if they thought they were dealing with an actual monster.

The other thing is that I was surprised how little this film deserved what I would consider the very prominently listed notion that it is unrated. The first film in the evening's double feature, which I watched with my wife and my older son, was Osgood Perkins' The Monkey, a second viewing for me. The Monkey's gore seemed more worthy of being unrated than the gore in this movie. Maybe sometime I'll try to figure out what gore offends the censors too much and what gore does not.

Another interesting tie-in with The Monkey that I would never have anticipated? Both movies feature Elijah Wood. So I'm sure if I weren't already writing a post about a horror remake, I'd be writing about a post about an Elijah Wood double feature. 

This does have the spirit of Troma all over it. Blair is a big Troma fan, and Troma is the actual production company here. So we get a lot of big, intentionally absurd moments, and you get geographical locations described thus: "Depressing Outskirts," rather than an actual name. There's good glee in this movie, always a hallmark of Troma.

Lastly I'll just mention that Kevin Bacon is the antagonist in this movie, and he has a lot of fun. 

I wish this piece about The Toxic Avenger were more substantive, but they can't all be masterpieces -- the movies, or my essays about them.