A man is chemically transformed into a repulsive creature that kills baddies and becomes a public antihero. This film tips its chemically altered hat to a redemptive relationship between a stepdad and his young son. But by and large, this is a awful collection of foul language, crude visuals and grotesque violence.
Winston Gooze is down on his luck.
Not only is he relegated to overnight mop-up duty at the scummy and chemically toxic headquarters of the BTH Corporation, but his home life is a real slog, too. He’s got past-due notices piling high on his kitchen table. And his stepson, Wade, kinda hates him.
Now, Winston doesn’t blame the boy. They’re both still reeling over the sudden death of Wade’s mom. It only makes sense that a young teen would lash out in his grief. So, Winston gives Wade as much encouragement, love and healing space as possible. But it’s still difficult.
Oh, but that’s not all. Winston also received some very bad news recently from his doctor: He has a terminal illness that his insurance company won’t cough up any money to help treat.
With all of that weighing on his very small back, Winston swallows his pride and begs his BTH boss for help. That unscrupulous bossman, the ever-preening Bob Garbinger, has money problems of his own. So he gives Winston a bit of public gladhanding assurance, and then he shuffles him out the back door.
Winston is distraught. So he dips his mop in a barrel of the company’s nuke-sludge and uses that flesh-obliterating stuff to steal cash from the on-campus BTH coffers.
That choice, however, only leads to Winston being targeted but the deadly rock-band goons who serve as Bob’s security killers, er, officers. They shoot poor Winston and toss him (and his chemically saturated mop) into the nearest waste water pool. And in so doing, they create … the Toxic Avenger!
Winston has been transformed into a tumor-covered, acid-oozing, monstrosity that’s nearly indestructible. He’s strong. He’s angry. He’s … repulsive. If only he could just go back to simply being down on his luck!
Winston is a loving, patient stepdad. And his slowly improving relationship with Wade is the sole positive of this film. That said, those father/son reparations are also winkingly smirked at in light of all the gushing mutilation that happens once the mutated “Toxie” is born.
Reporters strive to expose BTH for its corporate corruption.
A prominent local priest attends a party honoring Bob Garbinger. Bob also decides to market a diluted version of Toxie’s chemically altered blood, casually nicknaming it “God’s Soda.”
Women expose their breasts in a cheering rock crowd, and a guy in the audience follows suit by exposing his penis. Toxie’s chemically enlarged organ is exposed for a visual gag as well. Bob Garbinger has a tendency to stroll around shirtless, sometimes admiring his physique in the mirror. His female assistant lustfully gazes at his body as well. In a nod to the original film, guys wear tutus.
Over-the-top violence is The Toxic Avenger franchise’s calling card. But in this new version, those flesh-tearing actions are all the more CGI realistic.
We see Toxie and others using extremely visceral and realistically gory attacks. He tears a man’s arm off, for instance, and he hits another person’s A man’s arm is torn off, for instance, and another’s lower jaw is hit with a chemically covered mop that burns flesh, muscle and bone away, leaving his tongue dangling free.
We see that mop eviscerate a man, ripping open his torso. Another has his upper head and skull removed, leaving him to stumble about mindlessly with his bloody brain exposed. A man has his entrails pulled out through his backside. Toxie sometimes twists his enemies’ heads around like a jar lid. At other times, he simply rips the heads right off. One of those disembodied heads is crushed under a car’s tires. A man is ground up into splattering ground chuck by a car engine. The blood-spurting gore stretches on from there.
People are impaled by sharp objects and shot repeatedly with pistols and shotgun blasts. Thugs batter people around. Individuals are hacked at with blades. We see several locations where mutilated bodies and globs of flesh and entrails litter the floor. Explosions blow people into pieces. A man is kicked in the crotch and then beaten with his own cane. Someone’s throat is slashed by a sharp blade.
Winston is given 6-to-12 months to live because of an undescribed disease. A mob guy pressures an older woman to sell her store by threatening her cat. Winston is shot in the face before being thrown into a pool of waste water. He then goes through a painful physical transformation. Wade hits Winston/Toxie in the face with a book, sending him crashing down on to a car two stories down.
The dialogue contains in excess of 45 f-words and 15 s-words along with several uses each of the crudities “a–hole,” “a–,” “b–ch” and “b–tard.” God’s and Jesus’ names are misused a total of seven times (three of those combining God with “d–n”). The c-word is used once along with a couple other crude references to male and female genitalia.
A member of a rock group smokes a vape pen. We see a derelict man huffing some intoxicating gas. From a balloon. Winston drinks a beer. A number of people drink wine and alcohol at an awards dinner.
Wade calls a “pervert hotline” to report Toxie. Several visual gags feature Toxie’s corrosive urine. We see a group of innocent-looking middle school girls dancing to a raw-and-rancid rap tune. A large thug’s mask is ripped off, revealing a stunted baby’s head beneath.
If you’re remaking a Disney classic or a beloved superhero story, logic would tell you that you need to tread lightly. We’ve seen how often the wrong remake choices can offend fan sensibilities and send a pic plunging into a cinematic wasteland.
Of course, that maxim can’t possibly hold true for something as campy and bizarre as The Toxic Avenger franchise. Right? In that case, it’s swing for the fences. See what sticks as you spray bloody goop at the walls.
And that’s exactly what writer/director Macon Blair does.
In a JoBlo Horror interview, Blair describes his first exposure as an underage kid to the original 1984 Toxic Avenger pic. “The whole tone of it was just so sleazy and trashy in a very hilarious way,” Blair says. He then goes on to say he was inspired by the feeling by how it was made: that “regular dudes” who had their own camera had approached a strange movie concept with a “we can do this” attitude.
You can see that inspiration slathered all over this high-budget franchise reboot.
Everything but the “hilarious” part, that is.
Casting seasoned actor Peter Dinklage as the story protagonist is supposed to lean into the humorous side of things by turning a hulking, tumorous, acid-mop-swinging antihero into … a more diminutive one. But it doesn’t work in the slightest. The whole shebang just feels peculiar … along with being sleazy, trashy, profane and repulsively grotesque.
Yes, I know. The organ-splattering gore is supposed to be shocking and satirically guffaw-worthy. But it’s just wincingly gross here.
I might suggest you go watch a bad Disney remake instead. At least with that, you’d have a few things to laugh at.
After spending more than two decades touring, directing, writing and producing for Christian theater and radio (most recently for Adventures in Odyssey, which he still contributes to), Bob joined the Plugged In staff to help us focus more heavily on video games. He is also one of our primary movie reviewers.
