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Title: Toxic Avenger, The
By: Lloyd Kaufman, Michael Herz
Released by: Troma
Released on: 1985
Rating (out of 10): 9
Date: 08/29/2001

Mitchell Cohen, Andree Maranda, Mark Torgl

Better Living Through Chemistry

New York City: the world capital of culture and industry. Here, among the towering skyscrapers, civilization is guided by men of progress and the wonders of technology. But for all this industrial advancement, there is a price to pay: pollution, the unavoidable by-product of today's society. Every year, millions of gallons of poisonous wastes, garbage, and radioactive chemicals are disposed of in nearby towns such as Tromaville, the toxic-waste-dumping capital of the world.

Our story takes place at the Tromaville Health Club, where a young man named Melvin Furd works. Melvin's entire life-in fact, entire being-was changed by toxic chemical waste.

-Opening Narration, The Toxic Avenger


Upon its completion of The Toxic Avenger in 1984, the Troma Team found itself virtually unable to market it. Audiences at Cannes had no idea what to make of it, and the MPAA demanded most of the initial cut either be heavily edited or kiss a releasable R-rating goodbye.

The recent "director's cut" DVD release of the Lloyd Kaufman/Michael Herz film makes it easy to see why: The Toxic Avenger makes fun of practically everyone, from homosexuals to the blind. It has plenty of coke-snorting. It's got enough scenes of sex, masturbation, and female nudity to hold its own with any teen comedy of the period. And it's got tons of graphic head-crushings, decapitations, eye-gougings, and eviscerations.

I love it.

Since The Toxic Avenger's initial, turbulent release, the name Troma has become legendary to genre fans; the group has since turned out one cult classic after another, from Class of Nuke 'Em High to Chopper Chicks in Zombietown.

Its ultra-low-budget films have launched the careers of major stars such as Kevin Costner and Billy Bob Thornton. And it was this little story about a radioactive mutant's fight for justice-The Toxic Avenger-that launched the tiny New York studio once and for all toward that cult status.

Thanks to "Toxie," the first superhero from New Jersey (as far as we know), Troma's reputation was assured. These were the films that, even though they were relegated to the very back of the video store, were never in. These were the films that became mainstays of the old USA Up All Night, before the unfortunate mainstreaming of that cable series (Up All Night introduced me to most of these). These are, quite possibly, among the greatest bad movies ever made. And The Toxic Avenger must rank among the best of the them.


The First Superhero from New Jersey

At the Tromaville Health Club, amid the muscle-headed jocks and the air-headed bimbos, works a young, hopelessly-nerdish mopboy named Melvin Furd (Mark Torgl, The First Turn-On!!).

The ungainly, buck-toothed Melvin quite enjoys his work as a janitor, enough so that he can overlook being picked on and pushed around by the bullying jocks.

One day, though, a practical joke on Melvin is taken too far; the traumatized mopboy runs screaming from the laughing crowd, right out the second-story window-and into a waiting vat of radioactive waste.

The toxic chemicals mutate and horribly disfigure young Melvin; the boy grows huge, strong, develops a rich, resonant bass voice that hilariously offsets his unspeakable ugliness, and develops a singular passion for vengeance against the unjust. Melvin has become... The Toxic Avenger!

Melvin's mother, naturally, is horrified at the monstrosity her son has become and refuses to let him into the house; "Toxie" (Mitchell Cohen) thus makes a home out of the chemical waste dump at a nearby riverbank.

From this base, constructed out of the garbage that buries the area, he wages his campaign to rid Tromaville of any and all evil, wherever it may lurk: Whether he's ripping arms off of armed robbers at the local Mexican restaurant, or ripping stubborn jar lids off for startled housewives, you can bet that wherever there's a problem, Toxie will be solving it through pure, brute force. "It is-highly probable," reports a wacked-out Austrian psychologist during a press conference on this new, mysterious hero, "that this monster may have developed a very basic instinct which draws him-or should I say, commands him-to destroy evil!"

Indeed he has. But, as it later turns out, Toxie cannot stop himself from doing so. The toxic bath he took, in addition to mutating his physical form, seems to have crossed a few wires upstairs; now he slaughters criminals wherever they may lurk.

It's when he kills a little old lady at the laundromat that Toxie becomes concerned over his inability to control himself: He did not want to kill the old woman, but was compelled to do so nevertheless.

It turns out she is actually the leader of an international white-slavery ring. Toxie nevertheless becomes discouraged, and complains: "Everyday I go out and I mash people! I tear them apart and I can't stop," and, with his new girlfriend, Sara (Andree Maranda), heads off into self-imposed exile to sort things out.

The beautiful, voluptuous, and blind Sara has been at Toxie's side since he killed the punks who blew away her guide dog; unable to see her boyfriend's facial deformities, she instead concentrates on what a "beautiful person" she believes him to be inside, and indeed he is: Toxie is guided by a rigid moral compass that makes him fiercely loyal to his girlfriend and good to his mother, in addition to demanding that he kill all of the bad guys.


Troma-tized

Troma films are among the last you'd expect to carry a message; but many of them deal (bluntly) with the theme of the oppression of the average citizen by the unfeeling "power elite."

In The Toxic Avenger (and later, in 1986's Class of Nuke 'Em High), the citizens of Tromaville are affected, directly or indirectly, by the proliferation of nuclear waste.

Toxie himself is the savior of Tromaville, aided by his incredible strength, and driven by his overpowering compulsion to DESTROY EVIL! He fights a one-mutant war against evil and corruption, right up to the mayor's office, making Tromaville a nice, crime-free place to live at last.

Meanwhile, the deformed hero deals with everyday life and relationships: He sets up his home in the nuclear waste dump and has Sara move in with him. The blind Sara relies on Toxie; her character is played up as a cheerful bumbler who's constantly stumbling about the place with a vacant, sightless smile, tripping over her own two feet and knocking over her rack of umpteen-zillion canes.

The Toxic Avenger's portrayal of the blind is not exactly what you'd call sensitive, and it's the sheer audacity of the blind jokes that makes them so funny. As in all of their other films, Kaufman and Herz send everything over the top.

Troma is notorious for pushing sex and violence to the absolute limit; take as an example 1978's Bloodsucking Freaks: The predominantly-female cast spends most of its time having bodily appendages sliced off in creative ways. It deals with white slavery and torture to such a graphic extent, and with such a startling absence of Troma's usual tongue-in-cheek approach, that I actually find it hard to watch.

To me, The Toxic Avenger is much more fun-it's the adventures of an ass-kicking superhuman nuclear mutant, too patently unreal to take seriously (some people may be able to personally relate to his situation, but I'm not talking about them).

But there is one scene that teeters very precariously on that fine line between the bad taste upon which Troma thrives and total inexcusability: the jocks' gleeful murder of a child on a bicycle.

It occurs early on. Two of the jocks and their bimbo girlfriends are on a joyride out in the suburbs; they target a kid and barrel right into him at high speed. The bloodied, badly-injured child tries to crawl across the street, but only gets so far before the laughing jocks back the car up right over his head, which explodes like an overripe melon.

Kaufman and Herz actually drew inspiration for this scene from local news stories about marauding punks who ran down pedestrians and used a "scoring" system to award themselves points according to whom they hit.

An argument could therefore be made that this scene merely reflects reality; however, this is Troma, and like everything else in that studio's movies, the boy's murder is played up for all it's worth (given recent national events, it might cause even more of an uproar if The Toxic Avenger were released today).

It's almost certainly The Toxic Avenger's most controversial scene, and is compounded later on, when one of the bimbos is seen masturbating to a Polaroid of the kid's smashed body.

But it's hardly the only one: In one scene, armed robbers shoot Sarah's guide dog, which flies across the room as its guts spill right out of its body. Later, two jocks savagely beat an old woman and steal her car.

Some critics have condemned The Toxic Avenger for scenes like these, but everything-from the disgusting special effects to the manic overacting of all involved-is so intentionally overdone and silly, that if you take it as the farce it was intended to be, you'll hardly stop laughing.

The Toxic Avenger must drive video stores nuts. Is it horror? Is it science fiction? What the hell is this thing? Some stores, refusing to take chances, simply shelve it under "Cult Classics". I think that it would be right at home under "Comedy."

Whatever genre it may fall under, though, The Toxic Avenger is almost always funny, whether it's dealing with Toxie's theatrical, over-the-top killings of the bad guys or nudging us in the ribs with subtler jokes-like our hero's wading through a pool of toxic waste in which rests a paperback copy of Richard Nixon's Six Crises (that is one of the subtler jokes). I highly recommend The Toxic Avenger for anyone with strong sensibilities.

And remember: pollution is everybody's problem.

© Copyright CultureDose.com 08/29/2001

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