The Toxic Avenger

Dir: Lloyd Kaufman, Michael Herz

1984

***

The Toxic Avenger represents the birth of Troma Entertainment, the influx of independent film and the rise of the sex/horror genre. Lloyd Kaufman and Michael Herz had made only sex comedies until this point but after working long hours on the set of Rocky as a pre-production supervisor, which meant spending an awful long time in a boxing gym, Kaufman decided he wanted to make an 'anti-health club' movie. Around the same time he also read that the horror genre was officially dead and decided he wanted to prove the idea wrong. The combination of both ideas, somehow, became The Toxic Avenger. The story takes place in Tromaville, as do all future Troma films. Boza, Slug and their girlfriends Wanda and Julie spend most of their days either working out at the local Tromaville Healthclub or running over young cyclists in their car and taking photos of their exploded heads. Melvin Ferd, the mop-wielding janitor at Tromaville Healthclub, is the daily but of their jokes, each day bringing a new nasty trick to play on him. When a honey-trap is laid for Melvin (involving a sheep with lipstick and a padded bikini) this go a little bit too far and he ends up jumping out of a window and into a barrel of nuclear waste that just so happens to be on the back of a truck below. Melvin then goes through a peculiar transformation that turns him into a giant green blob of muscle and 'Tromatoms' and he develops an unquenchable thirst for justice. He then goes about ridding Tromaville of its bad guys, generally by killing them in various inventive and gory ways. I'm not against a bit of creative violence but the rather tired sex comedy element of the film became pretty puerile quite quickly. It's a film for 12 year old boys who wouldn't be allowed to see for another six years. If you managed to get hold of a copy before you were 18 you were a king at school but only until people watched it and realized is wasn't that great. It has a lot of charm though, why there are so many blind jokes and men in drag only Kaufman and Herz know, but the overall idea is original and quite funny. It isn't so much a film but rather a collection of interesting scenes, some of which will offend (Patrick Kilpatrick who plays a young thug in the film actually walked off set when asked to point a shotgun at a baby), many will shock (I found the scene whereby a young boy is run over by a car and head bursts to be the most shocking but the most complaints came from the shooting of a guide dog) but most will leave you puzzled (why were there samurai swords on the wall of the Mexican restaurant). I can't quite believe it was turned into a kids cartoon!