Still trashy: ‘The Toxic Avenger’ remake fails by taking itself too seriously

By Bob Grimm

I was part of the generation who watched the legendary, purposely bad Troma Entertainment films like The Toxic Avenger upon their initial release.

I remember renting the original one on a Friday night back in 1984, pairing my viewing with an ill-advised pizza. The film had some disgusting gore effects in it, so that didn’t go well with red sauce and mozzarella cheese.

The original was as kooky of a movie as you are ever going to get; it didn’t take itself seriously in any respect. It featured a geeky janitor getting doused with toxic waste and turning into a vigilante, beating Batman to the big screen by five years.

If you are like me, and you saw it back in the day, you watched it once, and that was the end of that. Maybe you liked it; perhaps you didn’t, but it was certainly an experience to remember.

This remake, starring an all-in Peter Dinklage as Winston the janitor, makes the mistake of taking itself a little too seriously. It has the gore; it has the basic plot; but then it piles on a corporate-greed subplot starring Kevin Bacon, and an unneeded parental angle with Winston and a son (Jacob Tremblay); these extras make the movie longer than it needs to be. And if there is one place where I am not looking for emotional depth, it’s a Toxic Avenger movie.

I’m thinking you will have a much better chance of enjoying it if you haven’t seen the original. Despite the filmmakers’ efforts to be a little more serious, the movie is really going nowhere, and its frantic editing seems to be trying to cover up that fact. (Note: If you just saw Tremblay in this year’s very good The Life of Chuck and/or Sovereign, he’s about two feet taller in those than he is in this one. It’s a bit disorienting.)

Completed back in 2023 and sitting on a shelf until now, this is a decent remake of the original, and an improvement in many ways. But, alas, it is still trashy, and it has an odd, confusing vibe as it goes from being campy to serious drama.

Despite a few good laughs and some decent makeup, I can’t recommend it.