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yendiThe Toxic Avenger. 1985. Directed by Lloyd Kaufman and Michael Herz. Written by Kaufman, Joe Ritter, Stuart Strutin, and Gay Terry. Released by Troma.
Okay, I know how bad most folks consider this movie. And I know it has almost no redeeming qualities. But I adore it. Bad acting, bad effects, and horribly over-the-top dialogue combine to form one of the great guilty pleasures (and cultural icons) of the '80s.
We start in the town of Tromaville, the Toxic Waste Dumping Capital of the World (or so we're informed by a helpful voice-over). While really bad dance music blares, we see the town's hardbodies working out at a gym, complete with all the usual cliches (two gay guys working out in thongs; a fat chick eating snacks during an aerobics class; the camera zooming in on cleavage and crotches).
The mop boy at the health club, Melvin, is retarded, and is tortured by almost everyone at the club, especially a group of four jocks named Wanda, Julie, Slug, and Bozo. Yes, there are actually characters named Slug and Bozo here. In the opening scene, we see Bozo nearly have a meltdown, as he yells that the mop boy is "screwing up my karma" before primal screaming his way offscreen. You can almost picture Bozo bitching about having been thrown off his groove.
As Slug and Wanda make love after hours in the locker room*, we learn that Slug and Bozo have a hobby. They're hit-and-run drivers (and their girls know about it, and want to ride along). After a brief interlude in which Melvin interrupts the couple (thus antagonizing Slug as much as Bozo), we see the drivers in action. Julie explains the scoring -- which favors killing minorities and children -- and after a while, they finally find a kid on a bike, who they run over twice (splattering his head in full gore). They have to call off hunting for someone else because Slug has to get up early in the morning to go to church.
Yeah, it's that sort of movie.
After Melvin annoys the villains again, Julie hatches a plan. She convinced Melvin to meet her in the locker room after hours. At the same time, a flatbed truck full of chemical waste (in lidless containers, of course) pulls up outside the gym so the drivers can smoke some weed and snort some coke.
Julie gets Melvin alone, and tells him how horrible Bozo is, attempting to seduce him (not exactly tough). She convinces him that she's really turned on by men wearing tights and tutus, and has him put those on and meet her at the pool. Still carrying his mop, he heads out for what he assumes will be his first sexual experience. He leans down to kiss her in the dark, only to find (when the lights go up) that he's kissing a sheep! The entire membership of the gym is there laughing at him, and Melvin, in a fit of embarrassment, attempts to kill himself by self-defenestration. He lands in one of those containers, however, and crawls out, presumably to die.
The entire membership of the gym is still laughing at Melvin, and even as some of them realize that he's burning up, Bozo accuses him of faking it**. Eventually, a cop steps in, and gets lit on fire when he touches Melvin. Melvin, now burning like the guy in that Wax video, runs home to take a bath. Alas, although the fire's out, he continues to mutate. He's become . . . The Toxic Avenger!
(And yes, that entire origin, other than the sex, pretty much reads like something that Stan Lee might have written. Except for the sex.)
Melvin's mother, incidentally, hears her son's groans, and assumes that he's finally reached puberty. As I said, it's that sort of movie.
As Toxie runs screaming into the night, we see the city's criminals in action. A pusher named Cigarface (along with his sidekicks, a guy with a hard head and the world's worst transvestite) threatens O'Clancy, an honest cop, on behalf of his unnamed boss. Just as they're about to kill the cop, Toxie comes to the rescue, beating on the villains for about five minutes and killing the two sidekicks*** (bashing their heads together and then sticking mops in their faces). Cigarface gets away, but the city has a new hero!
Poor Toxie, meanwhile, horrifies even his own mother with his appearance, so he builds a home in the junkyard. He's now twice as tall as he was before, and a lot more intelligent and articulate.
We now find out the truth about the town. The Mayor is the head of all the crime! It's just like Buffy Season 3! His police chief -- a man with a German accent who has a habit of raising one hand in a salute -- is also corrupt. They're both concerned about who's cleaning up the town and interfering with business, especially since the Mayor is trying to cut a corrupt land deal that would place a chemical dump near the town reservoir.
We now cut to the local Mexican fast food restaurant, where another trio of criminals sticks the place up, making anti-Mexican cracks and threatening all of the customers. They blow the manager away with a shotgun, and then shoot the seeing-eye dog of a blind woman and are about to rape her when Toxie comes to the rescue! He rips the arm off one guy and shoves him in an oven, fries another one to death, and (in a move that's simply genius in action) he pours milk into one guy's mouth and frappes him to death using a milkshake machine!
Toxie helps the poor (and hot) blind woman home, and naturally, she's ever so grateful, and not the least bit put off by his appearance. It's just like Mask! Only with 100% less Cher!
The next day, Toxie seeks his revenge on his original torturers at the gym, killing one drug dealer who hangs with the bad guys by dropping a set of weights on his head. He then moves to the sauna, where he kills Wanda by burning her on the sauna rocks.
We get more fights (a limo full of pimps), more heroism (saving two kids from getting run over, opening a popcorn jar for a housewife), and spinning newspaper headlines over a montage as Toxie becomes the town's greatest hero. More montage scenes follow:
The Mayor sets a trap for Toxie, siccing Cigarface and a group of five other villains on the hero, but Toxie jumps up just as the others fire, leading them to all shoot each other.
Toxie saves the blind girl (Sarah) yet again.
We finally get the scene we've always wanted: sex between a blind woman and a monster!
They cohabit, and we get more blind jokes as Sarah does things like cook eggs while putting the shells into the batter.
This is, I should note, a movie that is guaranteed to offend everyone.
After the montages, Toxie finally seeks his revenge on Julie, attacking her at the club and chasing her down to the basement before stabbing her to death with a pair of scissors (off-screen, for some reason -- why this was the only gore that got cut is beyond me).
He then gets his revenge on Slug and Bozo, strangling and throwing the former out of a car, and taking the latter on a wild drive that ends with a car exploding, killing Bozo.
After getting blamed for killing an innocent little old lady in a laundromat washer (she turns out to be the head of the local white slavery ring, but no one realizes it at the time) Toxie finally admits to his girlfriend that he's the monster hero of the town, and they decide to go away to escape from all the town's evil.
Before they can get away, the Mayor, the police, and the National Guard have tracked him down -- before they can fire, all the innocents Toxie has saved form a human shield to protect him. Toxie doesn't want them getting hurt, though, and sends them away. But the National Guard realizes that he's a hero, and they stand down.
The Mayor, now essentially alone aside from his bodyguards, shoots Toxie, but fails to kill him. He begs for his life, but Toxie, uttering the immortal line, "let's see if you have any guts," punches his fist into the mayor's belly and disembowels him. Everyone cheers, and Toxie and Sarah walk off together.
Look, The Toxic Avenger isn't good. It's not even trying to be good. It's poorly acted, poorly directed, and poorly edited (just look at the way scenes randomly cut to one another, or the way time seems to pass or not pass as needed). It's exploitative, offensive, and sick.
It's also the movie that essentially made Troma. The studio, of course, had been around for years, but almost nothing prior to The Toxic Avenger really matters (Blood Sucking Freaks was distributed by Troma, but the studio didn't have a hand in the actual film). And the sheer silliness of Toxie makes it hard to be half as offended as one should be; there really is a Stan Lee mentality at work here, with over-the-top caricatures in place of actual villains.
If you've got the stomach for it, and the ability to really check your brain at the door, Toxie is a film that's worth seeing, if only to watch a cult film that launched an entire empire (although I'd suggest avoiding the sequels, which are mediocre). The Toxic Avenger really is the epitome of the "so bad it's good" movie, and the influence of this film on the horror comedy movement in general (and Peter Jackson's early works in particular) makes it worth catching. As guilty pleasures go, you can't get much guiltier than this one.
*Troma waited a full six minutes before showing us a topless female, possibly their record.
**"This guy can't take a joke. He stinks!"
***Named "Knuckles" and "Nipples," incidentally.
Okay, I know how bad most folks consider this movie. And I know it has almost no redeeming qualities. But I adore it. Bad acting, bad effects, and horribly over-the-top dialogue combine to form one of the great guilty pleasures (and cultural icons) of the '80s.
We start in the town of Tromaville, the Toxic Waste Dumping Capital of the World (or so we're informed by a helpful voice-over). While really bad dance music blares, we see the town's hardbodies working out at a gym, complete with all the usual cliches (two gay guys working out in thongs; a fat chick eating snacks during an aerobics class; the camera zooming in on cleavage and crotches).
The mop boy at the health club, Melvin, is retarded, and is tortured by almost everyone at the club, especially a group of four jocks named Wanda, Julie, Slug, and Bozo. Yes, there are actually characters named Slug and Bozo here. In the opening scene, we see Bozo nearly have a meltdown, as he yells that the mop boy is "screwing up my karma" before primal screaming his way offscreen. You can almost picture Bozo bitching about having been thrown off his groove.
As Slug and Wanda make love after hours in the locker room*, we learn that Slug and Bozo have a hobby. They're hit-and-run drivers (and their girls know about it, and want to ride along). After a brief interlude in which Melvin interrupts the couple (thus antagonizing Slug as much as Bozo), we see the drivers in action. Julie explains the scoring -- which favors killing minorities and children -- and after a while, they finally find a kid on a bike, who they run over twice (splattering his head in full gore). They have to call off hunting for someone else because Slug has to get up early in the morning to go to church.
Yeah, it's that sort of movie.
After Melvin annoys the villains again, Julie hatches a plan. She convinced Melvin to meet her in the locker room after hours. At the same time, a flatbed truck full of chemical waste (in lidless containers, of course) pulls up outside the gym so the drivers can smoke some weed and snort some coke.
Julie gets Melvin alone, and tells him how horrible Bozo is, attempting to seduce him (not exactly tough). She convinces him that she's really turned on by men wearing tights and tutus, and has him put those on and meet her at the pool. Still carrying his mop, he heads out for what he assumes will be his first sexual experience. He leans down to kiss her in the dark, only to find (when the lights go up) that he's kissing a sheep! The entire membership of the gym is there laughing at him, and Melvin, in a fit of embarrassment, attempts to kill himself by self-defenestration. He lands in one of those containers, however, and crawls out, presumably to die.
The entire membership of the gym is still laughing at Melvin, and even as some of them realize that he's burning up, Bozo accuses him of faking it**. Eventually, a cop steps in, and gets lit on fire when he touches Melvin. Melvin, now burning like the guy in that Wax video, runs home to take a bath. Alas, although the fire's out, he continues to mutate. He's become . . . The Toxic Avenger!
(And yes, that entire origin, other than the sex, pretty much reads like something that Stan Lee might have written. Except for the sex.)
Melvin's mother, incidentally, hears her son's groans, and assumes that he's finally reached puberty. As I said, it's that sort of movie.
As Toxie runs screaming into the night, we see the city's criminals in action. A pusher named Cigarface (along with his sidekicks, a guy with a hard head and the world's worst transvestite) threatens O'Clancy, an honest cop, on behalf of his unnamed boss. Just as they're about to kill the cop, Toxie comes to the rescue, beating on the villains for about five minutes and killing the two sidekicks*** (bashing their heads together and then sticking mops in their faces). Cigarface gets away, but the city has a new hero!
Poor Toxie, meanwhile, horrifies even his own mother with his appearance, so he builds a home in the junkyard. He's now twice as tall as he was before, and a lot more intelligent and articulate.
We now find out the truth about the town. The Mayor is the head of all the crime! It's just like Buffy Season 3! His police chief -- a man with a German accent who has a habit of raising one hand in a salute -- is also corrupt. They're both concerned about who's cleaning up the town and interfering with business, especially since the Mayor is trying to cut a corrupt land deal that would place a chemical dump near the town reservoir.
We now cut to the local Mexican fast food restaurant, where another trio of criminals sticks the place up, making anti-Mexican cracks and threatening all of the customers. They blow the manager away with a shotgun, and then shoot the seeing-eye dog of a blind woman and are about to rape her when Toxie comes to the rescue! He rips the arm off one guy and shoves him in an oven, fries another one to death, and (in a move that's simply genius in action) he pours milk into one guy's mouth and frappes him to death using a milkshake machine!
Toxie helps the poor (and hot) blind woman home, and naturally, she's ever so grateful, and not the least bit put off by his appearance. It's just like Mask! Only with 100% less Cher!
The next day, Toxie seeks his revenge on his original torturers at the gym, killing one drug dealer who hangs with the bad guys by dropping a set of weights on his head. He then moves to the sauna, where he kills Wanda by burning her on the sauna rocks.
We get more fights (a limo full of pimps), more heroism (saving two kids from getting run over, opening a popcorn jar for a housewife), and spinning newspaper headlines over a montage as Toxie becomes the town's greatest hero. More montage scenes follow:
The Mayor sets a trap for Toxie, siccing Cigarface and a group of five other villains on the hero, but Toxie jumps up just as the others fire, leading them to all shoot each other.
Toxie saves the blind girl (Sarah) yet again.
We finally get the scene we've always wanted: sex between a blind woman and a monster!
They cohabit, and we get more blind jokes as Sarah does things like cook eggs while putting the shells into the batter.
This is, I should note, a movie that is guaranteed to offend everyone.
After the montages, Toxie finally seeks his revenge on Julie, attacking her at the club and chasing her down to the basement before stabbing her to death with a pair of scissors (off-screen, for some reason -- why this was the only gore that got cut is beyond me).
He then gets his revenge on Slug and Bozo, strangling and throwing the former out of a car, and taking the latter on a wild drive that ends with a car exploding, killing Bozo.
After getting blamed for killing an innocent little old lady in a laundromat washer (she turns out to be the head of the local white slavery ring, but no one realizes it at the time) Toxie finally admits to his girlfriend that he's the monster hero of the town, and they decide to go away to escape from all the town's evil.
Before they can get away, the Mayor, the police, and the National Guard have tracked him down -- before they can fire, all the innocents Toxie has saved form a human shield to protect him. Toxie doesn't want them getting hurt, though, and sends them away. But the National Guard realizes that he's a hero, and they stand down.
The Mayor, now essentially alone aside from his bodyguards, shoots Toxie, but fails to kill him. He begs for his life, but Toxie, uttering the immortal line, "let's see if you have any guts," punches his fist into the mayor's belly and disembowels him. Everyone cheers, and Toxie and Sarah walk off together.
Look, The Toxic Avenger isn't good. It's not even trying to be good. It's poorly acted, poorly directed, and poorly edited (just look at the way scenes randomly cut to one another, or the way time seems to pass or not pass as needed). It's exploitative, offensive, and sick.
It's also the movie that essentially made Troma. The studio, of course, had been around for years, but almost nothing prior to The Toxic Avenger really matters (Blood Sucking Freaks was distributed by Troma, but the studio didn't have a hand in the actual film). And the sheer silliness of Toxie makes it hard to be half as offended as one should be; there really is a Stan Lee mentality at work here, with over-the-top caricatures in place of actual villains.
If you've got the stomach for it, and the ability to really check your brain at the door, Toxie is a film that's worth seeing, if only to watch a cult film that launched an entire empire (although I'd suggest avoiding the sequels, which are mediocre). The Toxic Avenger really is the epitome of the "so bad it's good" movie, and the influence of this film on the horror comedy movement in general (and Peter Jackson's early works in particular) makes it worth catching. As guilty pleasures go, you can't get much guiltier than this one.
*Troma waited a full six minutes before showing us a topless female, possibly their record.
**"This guy can't take a joke. He stinks!"
***Named "Knuckles" and "Nipples," incidentally.