Toxic Avenger is the Best Schlock Movie Ever

Melvin Junko is a dweeby mop-boy at Tromaville's most popular health club, hated by the evil fitness freaks that go there. After a cruel prank, Melvin falls through a window and into a vat of toxic waste. He undergoes a painful transformation. He becomes taller, more muscular, and possessed with an unstoppable urge to punish evildoers. He starts with the small-time crooks who litter the back alleys of New York, but his do-gooding makes the absurdly corrupt authorities nervous, especially as they're looking at dumping even more toxic waste in the area. Can Toxie take them on while looking after his new girlfriend, and making sure his violent urges are restricted to the bad guys?

RUNNING TIME: 82 minutesRELEASE DATE: 1 April 1986DIRECTORS: Michael Herz, Lloyd KaufmanWRITERS: Joe Ritter, Lloyd Kaufman, Gay Terry, Stuart StrutinCAST: Mitch Coren, Mark Torg, Andree Maranda, Gary Schneider

For schlock fans, Troma Entertainment movies are the stuff of legends. The low-budget production company crew are an industry and a sub-genre unto themselves. Beloved by genre fans for their homemade aesthetic and cheery approach to gore, nudity and giddy laughs, their crowning achievement remains 1984's The Toxic Avenger. It not only created an icon in its disfigured, ultra-violent but sweet-hearted hero; it's the perfect showcase for their mad blend of cartoonish carnage, slapstick social commentary and exploitation.

Troma was still in its fledgling stages when Kaufman struck upon the idea for the character that would become the face of the company. At the time, he was freelancing for other New York-set films, while working on the pre-production of John G. Avildsen's Rocky. Having spent a lot of time in health clubs and gyms as the Stallone classic geared up for filming, the idea of setting a schlock movie in one of these locations took root. When he read an article proclaiming that horror movies were over, he decided that this was the genre he wanted to work in.

Superhero Comedy

Describing The Toxic Avenger as a horror movie isn't accurate; it's a superhero comedy. The character of Toxie is one driven by his desire to fight evil, whether it's in the form of a pimp trying to sell him a kidnapped 12-year-old girl ("You said you were going to take me to the David Bowie concert. He's not David Bowie!") or the town's bloated, corrupt mayor. He helps little old ladies cross the street, opens jars of popcorn for struggling housewives, and stops kids being mown down by lunatic hit-and-run drivers. The movie loves Toxie, and we do too.

But the film doesn't start with our radioactive waste-scarred superhero. Like all origin stories, it begins with his ordinary humdrum existence. This being a Troma movie, everything is pushed into ludicrous excess, including our hero's utterly pathetic state. Melvin Junko (Mark Torgl) is the dweeby mop-boy at the Tromaville health centre, and is reviled by its resident fitness freaks. The opening title sequence takes us through the various stereotypical aerobicisers, weight-lifers and body-image perfectionists that the film finds both hilarious and fascinating. This skewed take on the Eighties' obsession with lycra-clad fitness hunters is very much part of its charm, showing a John Waters-esque disdain for anyone so desperate to fit in.

Audible Reaction Cinema

While Melvin gawps, squeals and pratfalls, we get much more of an introduction to the four villainous hardbodies. The gang is led by the perpetually on-edge Bozo (Gory Schneider), his girlfriend Julie (Cindy Manion) and his friends Slug (Robert Prichard) and Wanda (Jennifer Babtist). Just in case we're in any doubt about how monstrous they are, we're shown how they like to go out driving, looking for people to run over. Just as they discuss the scoring system (riddled with hateful racial epithets, just to really drive that home), we see an older sister waving her little brother off on his bike. Things don't end well for that kid. Kaufman and co-director Michael Herz show him flying over the bonnet, crawling across the tarmac and finally getting his head burst under the tires of the reversing car (because you don't get any points if they're still breathing). The effect is absolutely grotesque, and it's so totally cartoonish that you're in no doubt about the filmmakers' intent. This is audible reaction cinema.

Gore and Gross

The full change takes place with some impressively bubbly skin effects in the bathtub, and that's the last we see of Melvin. He becomes Toxie, a giant muscle-bound but surprisingly articulate creature of vengeance. In one of the film's most unforgettable sequences he takes out the three violent crooks holding up a Mexican restaurant. It's also one of the most tasteless sequences in the whole film, mostly due to the introduction of the blind Sara (Andree Maranda). Interestingly, it was the shooting of her Seeing Eye dog that incensed viewers rather than the threat of imminent rape that she faces before Toxie shows up to dispose of these troublemakers, using all of the tools a restaurant kitchen allows.

However, for all the gore and gross-out-ness, the love story between Toxie and Sara is crucial, giving The Toxic Avenger its weird heart. The fact that Kaufman and Herz treat their budding romance with the same sense of gleeful silliness with which they show Bozo and Slug beating up an old woman and stealing her car really contributes to the sense that the filmmakers' intentions are in no way malicious. The two fall into a romantic idyll almost instantly, and suddenly Toxie's hideout is covered in bright yellow flowers as the two hold hands, go on rambling walks through the countryside together and share a post-coital cigarette.

Inevitably, such happiness can't last, and Toxie begins to worry that he won't be able to stop himself from inflicting violence on people who don't deserve it. In one of the film's few indefensible sequences, he throws a small woman into a drying machine at a launderette, weirdly quipping "No ticky, no washy" as he flicks the switch. It's a scattershot movie by its very nature, and this is one of the examples of something not working.

With the exception of the occasional taste misstep, there's very little about The Toxic Avenger that's not endearing; its scrappiness is all part of its charm, something that's hammered home by the various incredible stories from its micro-budget production. The fact that homeless man stole a prop gun and attempted to rob the crew with it while they were shooting the Shinbone Alley sequence is amazing, as is the fact that the sheep that Melvin makes out with was riddled with lice, and nobody told the actor this until after the scene was completed.

Trilogy

The movie is also endearing because hidden under all the fake blood and bikini-clad dancing girls is a certain amount of social commentary. In addition to skewering the characters’ ludicrous devotion to the gym, the toxic waste dumping in the New York area is presented as something that the Tromaville mayor and police captain are not only complicit in, but actually find hilarious. Pat Ryan is wonderful as the ludicrously corrupt mayor, seen at one point lying nearly naked on a table with a sandwich the length of his entire body.

Naturally, the Mayor gets his comeuppance an appropriately gory style, as Toxie tells him "Let's see if you've got any guts," and promptly punches into his stomach to pull out his intestines.

Kaufman and Herz would return to Toxie twice more to complete the trilogy, while Kaufman would direct a fourth movie solo in 2000. The Troma brand grew and grew, although it would take a big knock with the expensive flop Troma's War, and Toxie remains their most enduring property. It has stuck around to such an extent that Akiva Goldsman was linked to a family-friendly remake/reboot/reimagining directed by Hot Tub Time Machine's Steve Pink and potentially starring Arnold Schwarzenegger as a helpful stranger who trains Toxie. What's weird is how a family-friendly reboot could actually work. While we obviously love the violence and the schlocky elements, it's Toxie's heart inside his monstrous exterior that makes him special (and, to be honest, we'd want to keep the schlock).