Toxic Avenger, The |
  • USA • 1984 • 82m •    • Directed by: Michael Herz, Lloyd Kaufman. • Starring: Andree Maranda, Mitch Cohen, Jennifer Babtist, Cindy Manion, Robert Prichard, Gary Schneider, Pat Ryan, Mark Torgl, Dick Martinsen, Chris Liano, David Weiss, Dan Snow, Doug Isbecque..      This is the story of Melvin, the resident geek at the local health club. One day, Slug and Bozo (some resident jocks) chase Melvin around the club and Melin ends up plunging out of the window into a tub of toxic waste. Melvin is transformed into The Toxic Avenger and he is a geek no more! Toxie fights crime and gets revenge on his enemies like a true hero.
|
Trailers:
| Length: | Languages: | Subtitles: |
Review:
I was expecting gratuitous nudity and violence, and I was presented with it, but one thing I didn't expect was the pantomime acting. There's an array of absurd caricatures, including Bozo (Gary Schneider) a psychotic, gym frequenting idiot who enjoys running children over with his friends Slug (Robert Prichard) and Julie (Cindy Manion). Whilst at the gym, they antagonise the janitor Melvin (Mark Torgl), a ridiculously dorky moron who spends much of his screen presence squirming and baring his comedy-looking teeth. I thought there would be a good old fashioned revenge film to be found in The Toxic Avenger, and there is to a certain extent, however the relentlessly silly acting broke any modicum of investment I may have had in the characters to the point where it became almost unwatchable.
Other characters include Mayor Belgoody (Pat Ryan Jr), the corpulent, corrupt mayor of 'Tromaville'; the German police chief (David Weiss), who accidentally exposes his closeted Nazism by compulsively performing the Nazi salute and referring to the mayor as his Fuhrer and Sara (Andree Maranda), the Toxic Avenger's attractive, blind girlfriend whose condition is often the subject of juvenile jokes, the most frequent one being her stick inadvertently making contact with Toxie's crotch.
I'm sure most are familiar with the premise -' during a particularly humiliating session of bullying, Melvin the janitor falls out of a window and into a barrel of toxic waste, transforming him into a super strong and super righteous mutant -' The Toxic Avenger.
Performed by Mitchell Cohen, the Toxic Avenger's, or Toxie's, screen presence is the film's chief merit. The prosthetics and makeup applied to Cohen's body are very good considering the budget and Troma's reputation. The scene in which Melvin transforms into Toxie is also appropriately painful looking and gruesome, reminding me of the transformation scene in An American Werewolf in London released three years prior.
What I found particularly funny was the Toxic Avenger's voice. He initially only grunts and roars, I assumed he could no longer speak, however the toxic waste somehow provided him with a silky smooth mid-Atlantic accent (the voice acting provided by Kenneth Kessler). Kessler's diction is made for radio, it never gets old hearing it emanate from such a grotesque mouth. Amusingly, whenever Toxie speaks in this accent, his back is always facing the camera; this I thought was a reflection of the budget, so I was surprised when in the latter stages of the film you see Toxie speaking directly into the camera with no technical hitches at all -' a sudden influx of money, perhaps?
Like everything else in the film, the violence is amateurish. At times it reminded me of my friend and I's home movies. Using the 'DigitalBlue' camera, we created whole horror film franchises including the terrifying 'Oven Glove Man' series and homages to the infamous Jason Voorhees of Friday the 13th. Inevitably, the two characters eventually clashed in a Freddy vs. Jason fashion, my friend was the 'Oven Glove Man' and I, wearing a fancy dress hockey mask, was Jason Voorhees.
If my memory is correct, the majority of the films followed the same format of a murder scene followed by a still shot of the victim covered in terrible blood and gore effects that I applied with relish using the software's paintbrush function. Now and again the film felt like this, there would be lengthy fight scenes with little in the way of tangible choreography and nothing in the way of viscera. The viewers' bloodlust is only given slight satiation when Toxie deals a finishing blow and the incapacitated victim's wounds are shown in often motionless close-up shots, some of which being very gory, particularly the scene in which Bozo runs over a teenager's head.
With gore, scantily clad women and ridiculous campy humour, The Toxic Avenger has many earmarks of a Troma film, however, unlike most comparable films, there are enough laughs to make its 87 minutes bearable and at times somewhat entertaining.
Review by Jack Hawkins from the Internet Movie Database.
Movie Database