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!

Adam Chaplin

Dir: Emanuele De Santi

2011

***

Adam Chaplin is probably one of the most goriest films I've ever seen. In fact, it's got to be one of the most goriest films all time. Honestly, if you don't like blood then don't watch. Adam Chaplin, as the title suggests, is the story of Adam Chaplin (Emanuele De Santi), who desperately loved his wife Emily (Valeria Sannino). They had a happy and complacent family life when his wife fell short of a local loan shark, the demented and sadistic city mobster Denny (Christian Riva) and his equally animalistic sons Derek (Giulio De Santi) and Ben (Paolo Luciani). Emily had borrowed a sum of money from Denny but due to her inability to pay her debt on time, she is brutally burned alive by Denny and his sons. Adam is living a secluded and sad life and is all set to exact revenge on the gangsters. For this Adam conjures a demon and promises to give his soul to it once his revenge is exacted. The demon weirdly decides to live in Adam's right shoulder and gives Adam supernatural strength to bring down his enemies. Armed with supernatural strength, Adam is now on the trail of his enemies and will not stop unless he has killed them all. They say revenge is a dish best served cold but not for Adam, he just wants to turn his enemies into tiny little bits. I have to say I loved the characters; the demon on Adams shoulder, Denny and his sons and even Adam to some extent. I liked the way everyone kind of looked like a zombie too, I don't know why they made everyone look so odd but it added to the surreal vibe of the film. I've never seen anything like it to be honest, so all credit for originality but watch at your own peril. It is the ultimate splatter movie, indeed, it is the splatter movie to end all splatters. It was, in all honesty, a little bit too hard-core for my tastes. There are revenge films and then there are autopsies. To call the gory violence extreme would be an understatement. To say all lovers of gore will enjoy it isn’t quite true. I love Peter Jackson’s Braindead of example – someone is chopped up with a lawnmower in that film and it is bloody brilliant – the difference is though is that Braindead is essentially a comedy. I’m not saying that laughing at amputation is better than keeping it serious but for me Braindead is an extreme version of Tom & Jerry. There is always humour in what shocks us, but not in Adam Chaplin’s case. This is a deadly serious film and that makes it fairly dark. There is a bit of humour in some of the characters and none of them resemble real people but the level of violence is so high, that I wonder whether this will really only appeal to psychopaths and film makers who want to get into special effects and make-up. Credit due for originality and there is something uniquely original and striking about the film’s cinematography but my goodness, it took me a while to eat anything after watching it.