The Toxic Avenger review – strong cast struggles to revive stale horror franchise

The Guardian

11 hours ago

The 1980s schlock-splatterfest franchise, originating from the famously low-budget, low-morale Z-list horror studio Troma, is now rebooted with an impressive cast and unimpressive script; it gets its somewhat delayed premiere at Edinburgh, two years after its completion. (It's billed as a world premiere, though a presumably different version screened at a couple of film festivals in 2023.)
The original film was about a cringing nerd, sexually humiliated by bikini-clad women and brutalised by jocks, who then falls into a bin of bubbling toxic waste and is transformed into a hideously disfigured bulbous monster wreaking a terrible vengeance on all the bullies. This new version is not more progressive exactly, but the scantily-clad-babe factor, so important in bargain-bin 80s movies, has been dialled down.
Now it is Peter Dinklage as our antihero, playing Winston, a humble janitor at a creepy corporation pumping out the poisonous waste – although Dinklage only has to act as himself in the film's initial scenes. After the big transformation it's another actor body-doubling his part in a green monster suit while Dinklage phones in his dialogue from the voice studio. Jacob Tremblay plays Winston's poignantly lonely and vulnerable teen son Wade (another factor that the 1980s original did not consider relevant or necessary) while Taylour Paige plays heroine JJ Doherty, who is out to take down the amoral corporation led by a slimy plutocrat, gamely played by Kevin Bacon with much panto villainy. He has a submissive brother-slash-helpmeet resembling the animated baddie Gru, played by Elijah Wood, and his uptight office assistant is played by Julia Davis.
However this solid roster of acting talent can't do much about how frankly uninteresting and unfunny The Toxic Avenger is most of the time. As satire or spoof of both superhero movies and scary movies it is abysmally obsolete, and on its own terms as horror-comedy it achieves neither scares nor laughs. But in fairness, there are some good gags in Sunil Patel's cameo as a sorrowing doctor who has to break the news to Winston about his condition.
The Toxic Avenger screened at the Edinburgh film festival, and is in Australian cinemas from 28 August and UK and Irish cinemas from 29 August.