There comes a time in every young man’s life when his body starts to change in new and sometimes scary ways. For most boys this just involves a few unexpected patches of hair, a deeper voice and the realisation that boobs are totally awesome. For Melvin, the protagonist of The Toxic Avenger, puberty basically consisted of being exposed to toxic waste and mutating into a 6’6 pile of lumpy musculature. Soon this hulking monstrosity becomes a vigilante, hell-bent on cleaning up the crime ridden town of Tromaville. Only the corrupt forces of the mayor and his Dr Strangelove-esque police chief stand in Toxie’s way.
The Toxic Avenger is probably one of the most recognisable b-movies ever made, to the point where it pretty much defines the genre. Toxie himself became the mascot of the Troma studio itself and eventually the film became a franchise that spun off into a cartoon, comic book and stage musical. Stylistically its exactly the kind of indirect spoof of the horror genre that anyone familiar with Troma’s output would expect. Taken as such, the pantomime performances and ridiculous set pieces with their obvious stuntmen and lo-fi special effects are pretty entertaining.
Of course none of The Toxic Avenger’s strengths lie in its production values. By far the best aspect of The Toxic Avenger is its fantastic array of twisted characters. In particular the bloodthirsty teenagers that picked on Melvin before his mutation and spend their time re-enacting Death Race 2000 steal the show. The scenes where this group of teenagers are seen barelling down a quiet road towards an unsuspecting toddler have a genuine sense of menace. The bickering over how many points these young children are worth only adds to the impression that these individuals are utterly evil, making Toxie’s revenge all the sweeter.
Where these teenagers border on the satanic in their displays of willful malice, Toxie’s blind girlfriend stands in stark contrast as a paragon of virtue. Again the extremity of this character is played for laughs, with a hysterically funny ‘falling in love’ montage as this young blind woman frolics with the toxic monstrosity. In fact, despite the frequent violence, gore and sex; The Toxic Avenger is a strangely innocent film. The absolute clear cut morality of Toxie divides his world neatly into the abused and the abusers. For a film from the early 1980′s it’s surprising that Toxie isn’t the standard hard-bitten antihero one might expect from that era. He harkens back to an ironically ‘clean’ age of heroes with pure motives despite his hideous appearance.
The Toxic Avenger is a pioneering example of gorey action-comedy that popularised the modern concept of what it means to be a b-movie. To go off on something of a tangent, The Toxic Avenger’s attitude to what it means to be a horror film reminds me of the titular town at the centre of the TV show Deadwood. Where Deadwood depicts a community split between anarchy and civilisation, The Toxic Avenger represents a style of flim making split between horrific gore and comedy. It’s never actually scary, instead it employs scary characters to comedic effect. Their evil and their subsequent gorey demise being so cartoonish as to become hilarious.
