There is a certain irony to seeing a movie like The Toxic Avenger show up in regular theaters with magazine ads and a proper campaign. The character made his bones in the wild world of Troma, that notorious outfit that happily wore the badge of bad taste and no money. Those movies were dirty and scrappy and proudly handmade. Fans loved them for exactly that. So when a new version arrives with real stars and a real budget, the very people who have been waiting for it the longest might be the ones who hesitate. Expectations can be a curse. The long pause between its festival splash back in 2023 and the eventual rollout in 2025 only thickens the fog around it. Time lets folks imagine a different movie than the one that actually exists.
So what is this one. It is less a do over and more a salute. Macon Blair is not copying Troma’s marching orders beat for beat. He is playing in their sandbox but he brings his own toys. That choice matters. His sensibility leans toward a dry and sometimes grumpy sense of humor with sudden bursts of lunacy. If you saw his earlier feature I Do not Feel at Home in This World Anymore you know how he likes to wrap melancholy in mischief. He also writes comics and you can feel the pulp splash of that too. The result is a movie that winks at the old one while also stepping off to the side. That may thrill some folks and annoy others. It did not feel like a betrayal to me. It felt frankly honest.
It helps to remember what Troma meant in the first place. Those films were made with lunch money and stubbornness. They embraced cheap latex and big messes. The jokes were filthy and sometimes dumb and sometimes surprising. But they had a pulse. The original Toxic Avenger was not a sleek superhero picture. It was a half broken carnival ride that rattled and shook and made you laugh because it did not care if it derailed on the next turn. That energy is hard to fake and harder to scale. When a filmmaker finally gets a decent check and a cast full of familiar faces, the question becomes what do you keep and what do you let go.
Blair’s answer is to keep the spirit and reshape the body. He does not try to mirror the old movie scene by scene. He is too smart to chase a copy. He aims for the same sense of nasty glee, but his version has a straight face more often. He leans into character and mood a bit more than the Troma factory ever did, then he splashes the screen with goo and limbs when it is time to get loud. The tension between those two modes is part of the movie’s charm and occasionally its stumble. When it clicks, you can feel that mischievous spark that made you love this material in the first place. When it does not, you will wish the effects were more rubber and less digital and the punchline hit a beat sooner.
The setup tracks closely at first. We are in a small American town that has seen better days. The sign reads St. Roma, which feels like a grin toward Tromaville for anyone who has been here before. The civic life of this place has rotted under a smug corporate creep named Bob Garbinger. He is the kind of executive who treats pollution as a business model and ethics as a liability. Kevin Bacon relishes that kind of role and you can see the fun in his eyes. Bob runs the town like a looter and even has his own house band of goons. They call themselves The Killer Nutz, which tells you plenty about their sense of grace. His brother Fritz is their ghoulish ringleader. Elijah Wood disappears into that moldy grin like only he can.
Then we meet Winston. He cleans floors in Bob’s company and gets stepped on by life from every direction. He has a head injury and a stack of medical headaches. There is a child in the house with storm clouds hidden under a hoodie. There is no wife anymore. That detail is not used to turn him into a saint. It is just another bruise. The movie lets that background sit without wallowing in it. Peter Dinklage finds the tender parts of Winston without asking for sympathy. You see the frustration and the stubborn love for his kid at the same time. The whole character could have collapsed into a cliché. Dinklage does not let it. He grounds it without weight.
Of course, you know what is coming if you know this story at all. The man gets pushed too far. The boss pushes harder. There is a messy industrial accident. Chemicals do their nasty miracle. Winston is gone and something else stands up in his place. He is green and heavy and strangely elegant. Dinklage keeps the voice and the soul of the creature. The physical performance comes from Luisa Gurreiro, who gives the monster a lumbering grace that is oddly touching. That split between voice and body works here. It makes the hero feel like a character who is being pulled in two directions. One part is still dad and worker. The other is a rage filled protector who tears bad men in half.
Here is where the film swerves between tones. Sometimes it plays like a straight vigilante picture, with a righteous monster cleaning up a poisoned town. Other times it slams on a banana peel and slides into gross slapstick. A head pops like a melon. A limb flies across the room and the movie pauses for a laugh. That zigzag is deliberate and not always smooth. You can sense Blair searching for the edge Troma used to live on. The difference is clear. In the Troma era, the blood looked like paint and the gags looked like cardboard. There was a tactile joy in that. This new version uses a fair bit of digital polish, and while the images are sharper, some of the tactile fun leaks out. The moments that use practical effects land harder. You can almost hear the squish. The digital bits are fine, but they do not feel like something you could trip over on your way out of the screening.
Even with that caveat, the movie does not apologize for its humor. It leans into jokes about bodies and fluids and the less graceful parts of being alive. There is a dryness to the way it delivers those jokes. The movie is not constantly elbowing you in the ribs. It often plays things straight and trusts you to find the smirk. That choice forces the cast to hit a precise tone. Overplay it and the whole thing turns into a bad skit. Underplay it and the laugh never arrives. The actors seem to get what is being asked of them. They know when to hang back and when to go big. Even a groaner works when an actor looks like they believe in it. This cast believes in the bit.
The film’s sense of mischief also shows up in the way it toys with your memory of the original. There are nods and winks for fans but Blair refuses to stop the movie so the audience can applaud a reference. He skips the cheap version of nostalgia in favor of a general feeling of chaos and defiance. At its best, the movie overwhelms you with so many gags and bits of business that even the ones that miss feel like part of a lively rhythm. It is like a band that throws the kitchen sink into a solo. You do not need all of it to connect for the show to work.
If you are not used to this sense of humor, it may take a little while to get on its wavelength. The jokes are broad but delivered with a poker face. The movie wriggles between sincerity and mockery. One minute it wants you to care about a dad and his kid. The next minute it wants you to giggle at a splatter. That combination will be too much for some. It might not be raucous enough for hardcore Troma diehards either, the ones who want every scene to be a dare. That is the risk of trying to please two tribes at once. Yet the craft here is a little cleaner than you might expect. The editing knows when to cut for a laugh. The sound cues set up a gag and snap it shut. You can feel a professional hand guiding the chaos.
What about the question that hovers over all remakes. Why do this at all if you are not going to replay the greatest hits in the key that fans already love. The movie seems to answer that by refusing to slow down and justify itself. It is more like a cover band that speeds up the song and changes the groove because that is how they hear it. You are invited to dance along or go find the original record. There is a confidence in that stance that I admire. It does not hate the old song. It just trusts its own ears.
One of the sharpest moves Blair makes is to lean into the domestic angle. Turning the avenger into a single father with a nervous kid is a bold adjustment. It gives the character a pressure point that hurts in a different way than the old story. The bad bosses are still disgusting. The town is still being poisoned. But the stakes are intimate. Can this dad even show his face to his child anymore. How do you explain a new skin and a new hunger without ruining what little safety you have left. The movie lets that discomfort breathe long enough to matter, then it tosses you another wild gag so you do not sink too deep into gloom. The very name of the lost wife, Shelly Gooze, is a joke that also stings. It is ridiculous and sad at once, which is a tone the movie enjoys.
It has to be said that the villain gallery pops. Bacon gives Bob a cheap smile and a rotted soul. Elijah Wood looks like a sewer ghoul who found a thrift store suit and wears it with pride. The band of thugs is all swagger and bad decision making. They function like a cartoon chorus that keeps walking into a punch. When the monster finally stops holding back, the film does not either. The violence is vivid. Some of it is knowingly juvenile. Some of it is oddly beautiful. When red sprays across a spotless white lobby, you might find yourself laughing and wincing at the same time.
Because this version is cleaner in execution than the Troma standard, the rough edges stand out in relief. A few jokes land with a thud. A few sequences feel like they are building to a bigger practical payoff that never quite shows up. You can feel the ghost of Jeremy Saulnier in the background sometimes, not as a person but as an influence. Blair and Saulnier made their bones together on movies that loved practical pain gags, homemade armor, and comic violence with texture. There are flashes of that here. You might find yourself wishing for more moments where you can tell someone built a weird contraption in a garage just to splatter a wall on cue. But you can only judge the movie that exists, and the movie that exists has its own timing and its own priorities.
The pacing keeps things lively even when the tone is doing its tightrope walk. You never stay in one mode long enough to get bored. The film also respects its audience enough not to explain every joke twice. If you get it, you get it. If you do not, there will be another one in a minute. That rhythm is closer to a comedy club than a polished superhero film, and it suits this property. It feels right for a story that was born as a shaggy dog and never meant to be a show pony.
I suspect reactions will map neatly onto what you bring into the theater. If you worship the old Troma grindhouse style and want every effect to look like it was built out of a mop and a gallon of diner ketchup, the slicker parts will rub you the wrong way. If you want a heartfelt antihero tale with a perfect arc and no crude detours, the toilet humor will wash you out. The sweet spot is for folks who can handle both. Who can giggle at a stupid gag and then settle into a silent scene where a dad stares at his warped reflection and wonders how to keep going. That combination may be a niche. It may also be exactly the kind of niche movie that becomes a cult object in its own right, just for a different generation.
The funniest thing about the whole enterprise might be its premise. Take the nastiest hero in the Troma catalog and hand him a lunchbox and a parent teacher conference. It sounds like a sketch. It becomes a running idea that gives the movie an emotional undercurrent and a crackling comic charge. I laughed more than I expected, and sometimes it was because the movie dared me to take a ridiculous moment at face value. That is hard to do. You have to play it straight and trust the audience not to flinch.
In the end, this is Macon Blair’s movie. It wears Troma’s leather jacket but it does not pretend to be the same kid who bought it. It is a tribute that takes liberties. It is both sincere and knowingly naughty. It lectures nobody. It mocks itself just enough to stay humble. It swings, it slips, it gets back up, it swings again. I admire that approach. I also admire the way it honors the one Troma lesson that matters more than any specific gag or effect. If you are going to mess around in this sandbox, you have to build your own castle. Lloyd Kaufman even put it right there in the title of his guide for scrappy filmmakers. Make your own damn movie.
Does this new Toxic Avenger succeed on every front. No. Is it a bad time. Not at all. It is an acquired taste. That has always been part of the brand. Some fans will clutch their pearls at the cleaner look and different vibe. Others will appreciate that a filmmaker with his own voice came to play and did not just do karaoke with the old lyrics. The very delay between premiere and release might have inflated every hope and every fear. Strip that away and you have a strange little genre picture made with skill and a crooked grin. It is messy. It is shaggy. It is sometimes suddenly sweet.
If that sounds like your thing, you probably already know it. If it does not, that is okay. The movie does not beg. It moves at its own pace and tone, like a cover band that takes a barroom classic and makes it march to a new drum. The melody is still there if you listen. The beat is different. The stomp is harder. And sometimes, in the middle of a stupid joke about a stupid mess, you will feel a jag of genuine feeling. That is the secret this movie holds tight. The monster is a joke and a man. The town is a cartoon and a place that hurts. The laughter is cheap and worth a lot.
So yes, he picks up the mop. He swings it. He makes a bigger mess before he makes it clean. That was always the point. And if the old school faithful and the new curious crowd can meet in the middle for ninety odd minutes, that feels like a win. Not a perfect win, but something scrappy and a little proud. The kind of win that would make a Troma veteran smile, shake their head, and then say the only blessing that really counts. You did not copy. You did not ask permission. You did the work. You made your own damn movie.
