It felt wrong seeing 2025's The Toxic Avenger in my favorite hometown Cinemark. A dingy midnight movie like this one should be viewed in a rundown auditorium permeated with the slight twinge of cigarette smoke. The squelch of some random couple's lips (did they even but a ticket to THIS movie?) should constantly be faintly heard. Seats must be decaying and full of tears. Every step on the floor should result in one's shoes producing a sickening sticky noise. In other words, Macon Blair's Toxic Avenger is best viewed in a rundown domicile where Travis Bickle or Midnight Cowboy's Ratso could be seated next to you.
Instead, I witnessed the film in a ritzy, well-kept Cinemark auditorium in a cozy leather recliner seat. How surreal to see a Troma film projected in these suburban confines. The dissonance between the film and where it was being shown was tantamount to the Cinerama Dome reopening solely to house a 70mm Grandma's Boy revival screening or watching Come and See on your Game Boy Advance.
Even if it was surreal to watch The Toxic Avenger in the same movie theater that kept Kirk Cameron's Saving Christmas playing for three consecutive weekends, that didn't stop this title from being a fine time at the movies over Labor Day weekend.
This new vision of the Toxic Avenger lore (first established in a 1980s B-movie from trash cinema empire Troma) follows janitor Winston (Peter Dinklage). He's already struggling to make it every day as a single dad to his estranged step-son Wade (Jacob Tremblay). However, his boss, Bob Garbinger (Kevin Bacon), is also killing Winston's town with radioactive sludge and dangerous consumer products. Winston's life goes from bad to worse when he discovers he has only one year to live. His job's insurance won't pay for a surgery that could save his life, and asking Bob directly for help only gets this janitor even more mockery.
Trying to secure money for that operation gets Winston on the wrong side of Bob's younger brother Fritz (Elijah Wood) and his maniacal oons, the Killer Nutz. These baddies kill Winston and dump his corpse into a vat of toxic ooze. Here, Winston transforms into a new green-skinned, hideous being called Toxie (voiced by Dinklage, played in a suit by Luisa Guerreiro). This unkillable creation might just be the key to helping save Winston's neighbors and taking down Bob once and for all.
The Toxic Avenger channels Borat Subsequent Moviefilm as a cinematic follow-up altering what material is considered "shocking". The first Borat was about making the jaws of moviegoers drop over how quickly ordinary people could become racist or xenophobic. The second Borat, though, made it surprising to discover compassion between people, such as the budding bond between Borat and his daughter or the kindness exhibited by Holocaust survivor Judith Dim Evans.
Similarly, Macon Blair's Toxic Avenger shrewdly tweaks its ideas around what's transgressive. As Blair himself said in a recent interview, nudity was a major gasp-worthy element in the original Toxic Avenger. Its story, meanwhile, focused on a wish-fulfillment fantasy of a nerdy guy getting the hot babe of his dream, while threats of sexual violence were also common in the script. In the new Toxic Avenger, what's presented as "shocking" (beyond the graphic violence, of course) is someone overcoming apathy to do something in a world rocked by pollution, gentrification, and corporate greed. Committing to a sincere ode to helping ordinary souls is unexpectedly subversive in 2025, when the new Captain America primarily focuses on reassuring audiences that corrupt old white men Presidents are actually very nice.
As the star of this summer's best big-budget blockbuster noted this summer, "maybe [kindness] is the real punk rock." It's a total surprise that a Toxic Avenger reboot would make that its ethos, but it's executed quite nicely. Blair's script also translates edgy anarchy into delightful bursts of graphic violence. Have you felt this year's cinema has lacked scenes where heroes reach into the asses of villains and pull out their intestines? Have I got a movie for you! It's all wild and silly (albeit way too heavy on CG blood) in a fittingly Troma fashion. There's enough scalp chewing and gruesomely dark demises here to make the genre movie freaks pleased as Dolphins watching Darius Rucker cry.
The one big issue Toxic Avenger can't avoid, though, is that being innately a remake with several famous faces in its cast means it can never quite capture the wild, unexpected glories of classic B-movies like The Miami Connection. Even a crafty evolution of the past is still tethered to yesteryear. Excellent low-budget 2020s films like Cannibal Mukbang, The People's Joker, or Annapurna Sriram's Fucktoys are the true modern heirs to the chaotic and creative world of trash cinema. This Toxic Avenger remake from the production outfit behind the Dune movies, meanwhile, can't escape a polished and calculated veneer robbing it of some of its impact.
That inevitable shortcoming creeps up with some other screenwriting defects, including having Taylour Paige's J.J. Doherty frustratingly often only reacting to outsized male characters rather than also being a fun unhinged figure. Also disappointing in the script is a third act that needed an extra dose of unpredictability. Even with these foibles, this new Toxic Avenger remains an enjoyable exercise, especially with its welcome doses of sinceirty. That quality is effectively communicated through a soulful Peter Dinklage performance. This esteemed performer refuses to phone in his Winston work, which gives the character engaging Jack Lemmon-esque energy before he transforms into Toxie.
There's such an endearing underdog humanity in Dinklage's on-screen presence, including in Winston's very genuine attempts to bond with Wade. It's a welcome surprise to witness that dramatic conviction in a film like this. Props too to Luisa Guerreiro, the in-suit performer of Toxie. Her consistency with Dinklage's pre-established physical acting is remarkable. The two actors share this part seamlessly, maintaining a consistently superb level of acting.
It's also a welcome relief that the script lets most jokes or silly details, like Garbinger owning an underground laboratory straight out of Scooby-Doo, just exist without self-conscious quips. The Toxic Avenger operates in an outlandish world with street signs indicating that your destination is 69 miles away, dicks getting whipped out on-screen with an accompanying "BOING!" sound effect, and Elijah Wood randomly playing the pan flute. Macon Blair happily revels in absurdity rather than craft mocking meta-jokes about the silliness. That confidence, plus welcome doses of puppetry and excellent practical makeupo effects, results in enjoyable blood-soaked mayhem, even though it's disappointing that this new Toxic Avenger movie made no room for the "My Big French Boyfriend" song from the Toxic Avenger stage musical...
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