Review: The Toxic Avenger (1984)

The Toxic Avenger (1984)

Rated R

Score: 3 out of 5

Much like its titular superhuman mutant, The Toxic Avenger is a messy, disjointed film that nonetheless rises above its ugly first impression, largely because it has a ton of heart beneath its campy exterior. Its story and its many subplots are all over the place, the cast is comprised of ridiculous caricatures, the acting is shaky at best, and some of the humor doesn't hold up and can best be summed up with "the '80s were a different time"; Troma typically treads a fine line when it comes to that sort of thing. That said, the effects themselves still look good decades later despite this film's low budget, the Toxic Avenger himself was an incredibly endearing character, and as somebody who grew up in New Jersey, this film's exaggerated parody of a lot of that state's working/middle-class communities rang incredibly true, especially with its notes of satire about what we think of as "acceptable targets" in the War on Crime. This movie's still worth a watch today, not just for gorehounds and B-movie aficionados but for anybody looking to have a genuinely good time.

Set in Tromaville, New Jersey just across the Hudson River from Manhattan, the film introduces us to Melvin Ferd, a scrawny, dweebish, dim-witted janitor at a supremely, spectacularly '80s gym whose rich asshole customers routinely harass and bully him, when they aren't partaking in their evening pastime of running people over and photographing their splattered corpses for their amusement. One day, four of those jerks decide to pull a prank on Melvin, one that ends with him accidentally falling into a drum of radioactive waste that mutates him into a hideous, grotesque abomination -- but one who's not only much stronger and more resilient than he used to be, but also seemingly smarter and better-spoken, too. Rejected by his own mother as a freak, Melvin goes to live in a junkyard, only to find his true calling in life when he brutally beats down three crooks attacking a cop who refused to take their bribe (killing two of them). With this, he becomes a local hero, especially as he starts fighting criminals and helping ordinary people across town -- a genuine Jersey superhero, much to the growing concern of the town's corrupt officials who fear that one day, he'll come for them.

This movie looks and feels rough, like they shot it on actual city streets that they only had a few minutes to close off, and not just because some of the police cars and ambulances say "Jersey City" and "Rutherford" instead of "Tromaville" on the side. While the action scenes are still better shot than some of the garbage I've seen with budgets more than a hundred times bigger than this film (which cost about half a million dollars), they were clearly relying on gore and explosions more than tight choreography. The characters are all written as broad caricatures and played in a very over-the-top fashion; Melvin is a walking dweeb stereotype before his transformation, the yuppie bullies, street criminals, and corrupt city officials are all cartoonishly, one-dimensionally evil, and the blind woman Sarah who falls for Melvin because she can't see what he looks like feels written and portrayed by people who'd never met a blind person. An interesting plot thread that Melvin's transformation might also be turning him violently insane is dropped when it's revealed that the seemingly innocent old lady he killed was actually a crime boss involved in human trafficking. This is a movie where it feels like the people involved were just glad they got the chance to make it at all, and so they focused purely on making sure that all the visceral thrills and yuks made it on the screen without really going back over the script.

That said, there are still interesting ideas here. As the story goes on and the Toxic Avenger starts aiming his sights higher than just mopping up street slime, his "protection" of Tromaville grows increasingly controversial once he starts attacking people like that old lady who were seen as pillars of the community, hiding their crimes behind a veneer of respectability. It's here where the film's real villains come out to play, the fat cats who have turned this town into an empire of kickbacks and graft and allowed it to turn into a dump (a literal one in the case of the toxic waste facility they built) with the residents none the wiser, to the point that it becomes easy for them to start turning the people against Toxie when he moves on to frying bigger fish. Again, it often felt clunky and disjointed how it played out, especially towards a climax that didn't really feel earned, and it didn't go into much depth on these themes. However, as somebody who grew up in New Jersey and was quite familiar with stories of small-town corruption, a lot of this movie's plot was instantly recognizable. For all the faults in the writing, I bought the villains as surprisingly realistic bad guys given the kind of movie they were in, and grew to hate them for all the right reasons.

I also grew to love Melvin/Toxie himself, a hideous lunk of a man but one with a big heart who, as it turns out, can actually express himself surprisingly well. Hearing him suddenly switch from grunts to speaking like a Hollywood leading man was humorous the first time, but by the end of the film, I'd come to embrace it as just another part of his character, a legitimate stand-up hero who just so happens to look and occasionally act like a horror movie monster. He's probably the most wholesome character I've ever seen crush another man's head with a set of weights. The violence and bloodshed here are plentiful, for that matter, and when paired with the manner in which Toxie is treated as a superhero by the town, I felt like I was watching a more lighthearted version of The Boys, one that dropped the cynical portrayal of superheroes but not the depictions of what might actually happen if a man with super-strength went HAM on a man who didn't. The romance between Toxie and Sarah felt like it was thrown in just to give him a love interest and have at least one actual female character who wasn't one of the bad guys, but it still felt pretty sweet how it was handled. The Shape of Water it wasn't, but I still came to care about her.

The Bottom Line

Overall, I left Popcorn Frights' screening last Friday night (a rather serendipitous one given I was heading up to Jersey that Sunday) feeling good. This is a quintessential midnight movie experience, with a mix of creative kills delivered to deserving scumbags and a hero I came to root for, even with the film's self-evident faults. It's a treat for fans of retro B-movie cheese.