Del and Mladen review ‘The Toxic Avenger’

Image courtesy of Troma Studios, Legendary Studios and Cineverse

“The Toxic Avenger” Starring Peter Dinklage as Winston Gooze, Jacob Tremblay as Wade, Taylor Paige as J.J. Doherty, Kevin Bacon as Bob Garbinger, Elijah Wood as Fritz Garbinger and others. Directed by Macon Blair. 1 hour, 40 minutes. Unrated. Theatrical release.

Plot summary: Winston Gooze is a janitor at a company called BTH, a terrible polluter that has destroyed vast swaths of the countryside with toxic chemicals. After he’s drawn into an attempt to expose BTH for its crimes and dumped into a pool of toxic waste, Winston becomes the mutated Toxic Avenger who sets out to destroy BTH and its gang of bad guys.

Spoilers: This movie was in limited release in September 2023 so the plot is already known.

Del’s take

“The Toxic Avenger” is many things at once: a grisly and outrageous yet empathetic condemnation of all things poisonous, from industrial waste to the contaminated thinking of 21^st century America. But one thing it is not:

Boring.

The minutes fly by as you cover your eyes, hold your gorge or laugh your ass off, and in the end you’ll either be onboard with this loveable band of quixotic characters or you’ll be counting the dead brain cells, as one member of our meager matinee audience announced, because there’s no middle ground with “The Toxic Avenger.”

Despite the gore, I loved it.

“The Toxic Avenger” is a Legendary Pictures remake of a 1984 Troma Entertainment production that was shown to film festival and convention audiences starting in September 2023 and thereafter. It didn’t see theatrical release because distributors considered it “unreleasable” due to the extreme gore and violence. In January of this year Cineverse acquired distribution rights and scheduled an Aug. 29 release. In its first weekend “The Toxic Avenger” has earned $1.75 million according to Weekend Box Office.

The 1984 version was written by Lloyd Kaufman, Joe Ritter and Gay Partington Terry. It was directed by Kaufman and Michael Herz for Troma. Both Kaufman and Herz were retained for the 2023 production, although Macon Blair helmed.

The movie is about greed. There. I’ve said it. The word “greed” – in all its uniquely American, dare I say Trumpian manifestations. At first glance “The Toxic Avenger” is a blunt, no-holds barred condemnation of a rapacious system that values profit above life itself. But at its heart “The Toxic Avenger” is about much more – the poverty of intellect and soul such systems inflict on their victims. In a day when the president of the United States ignores the confirmed peril of climate change, opens the nation’s treasure of natural wonders to resource exploitation, delivers America’s health resources into the hands of a lunatic, removes the guardrails that protect us from environmental contamination, dismantles the education system and replaces it with dogma and propaganda  – all in the name of profit and the wad of cash finding its way into his pocket – movies like “The Toxic Avenger” gain a timely relevance. They’re not just darkly comedic splatter films. They’re documentaries.

Peter Dinklage is a warm and sympathetic Winston Gooze, while Kevin Bacon excels in his role as the face of evil in Tromaville, N.J., where the sky is always blackened by smokestacks, the landscaped pocked with festering sores of industrial waste pools and mutated bird-like creatures struggle gamely to exist while their eggs are eaten by RFK-like nutcases living in junkyards of illegally dumped refrigerators. Also good is Elijah Wood as the Igor-like brotherly sidekick, and Julia Davis as Kissy Sturnevan, Bob Garbinger’s suck-up personal assistant. She reminded me of a buxom Kar Kar Leavitt – just a devious and dumb as her real-world counterpart.

Despite the blood, the guts, the bleak setting and the bonkers violence, there’s a beating heart to “The Toxic Avenger” that reclaims it from mere exploitation. Its thesis is that despite everything, love and family prevail, a message many of us want and need to hear as we muck about in the cesspool that has become 2025 America.

My grade for “The Toxic Avenger” is a B+. I think it’s too gory and violent for mainstream audiences, but it’s so clever and well-written that I can’t score it any lower. And, of course, I agree with its message.

 May we all grab our mops and take up the cause of The Toxic Avenger!

Mladen’s take

Not sure what Del is doing to me. We saw “The Toxic Avenger” a couple of days ago. The week before, we watched another crazy violent movie, “Nobody 2.” Is Del attempting to desensitize me to blood and guts in preparation for the collapse of the global economy and environment, so that I’m in full survival mode for the upcoming fascist‑induced Rapture?

If so, it’s working. I pretty much guffawed, chuckled, chortled, or moaned through “The Toxic Avenger” as each scene tried to exceed the one that came before with its body horror. Limbs ripped from shoulders, brain matter splatter across walls, toxic urine melting titanium. Toss in electrocution and the main bad guy’s head-first encounter with a running car engine and, well, you get the picture. Actually, no, you probably don’t. The ghastly action in this film can’t be described. It must be seen. “The Toxic Avenger” ain’t rated “unrated” for nothing.

Name the grotesqueness, this movie has it. The Toxic Avenger’s principal weapon, a green‑glow mop radiating convection currents like distant asphalt in the blazing sun, is used to commit one of the goriest bits of head splash I’ve ever seen. It’s glorious. Most terrible of all, it’s funny. The victim is a member of the sub‑clade of humanity that promotes toxic masculinity.

Even as I waited for the next bit of ultra violence or “UV,” as Alex in “A Clockwork Orange” would say, I appreciated the sardonic big-picture message flowing through “The Toxic Avenger.” Like the skin-eating alkaline slime burbling to the surface of the river in the movie, it’s clear that our whole society, culture, civilization, call it what you wish, and not just industry and government, is toxic, too. The violence people throw at each other is not a whole lot different than the violence they fling at the Outdoors.

Dinklage as The Toxic Avenger and Bacon as the desperate CEO of a failing vitamin supplements and nutrition company are very good. Some of the supporting cast do a good job but I was unimpressed with Tremblay as step‑son Wade. However, I suspect that’s because the script failed him, rather than his acting. Wade should’ve been a significant character. Instead, he seems to have been inserted as means to end, to set up the showdown between The Toxic Avenger and the CEO. How do I know? Tremblay is terrific as the autistic mathematics savant in “The Predator.” He has acting chops, no question.

A note to y’all tempted to see the movie. Don’t let the movie’s violence, despite its intense beauty, distract you from paying attention to the dialogue among characters. Also, watch for the captions that introduce sections of the dystopian town that spilled the Toxic Avenger into avenging.

“The Toxic Avenger” has merit but it’s unevenly distributed. Scenes like a penis getting whipped around or, and I can’t believe I’m writing this, breasts being flashed, are unneeded. There’s also a character, or two, that the film could’ve omitted without losing its, ah, flair. Del gave “The Toxic Avenger” a B+. For my rating, I’m deleting the “+.”

Mladen Rudman is a former journalist and technical writer. Del Stone Jr. is a former journalist and writer.