The Test of Time: The Toxic Avenger (1984)

Last Updated on August 2, 2021

We all have certain movies we love. Movies we respect without question because of either tradition, childhood love, or because they’ve always been classics. However, as time keeps ticking, do those classics still hold up? Do they remain must see? So…the point of this column is to determine how a film holds up for a modern horror audience, to see if it stands the Test of Time.

DIRECTED BY LLOYD KAUFMAN & MICHAEL HERZ

STARRING MITCH COHEN, MARK TORGL, ANDREE MARANDA, GARY SCHNEIDER

As DC and MCU overtake the cineplex, we old-school horror fans still put our undying faith in THE TOXIC AVENGER. All hail the mother*cking Toxie!

It’s true y’all, April 11th marks the 35th anniversary of Troma Films’ CITIZEN KANE of ultra-B-movie-schlock, THE TOXIC AVENGER. A cult classic of cartoonish horror and mordant irony, we urge y’all to share below the first time you saw the flick, what you thought about it, and what turned you onto it in the first place. Me? Simple. Older sibling. My sister and her friends showed me this hilarious piece of lunacy when I was 14 or so. Here’s the thing though. I dug the flick so much that I once rented THE TOXIC AVENGER II from my local video house (Movie Magic yo!), switched the sequel with the original inside the box, and went home with the 1984 OG, which I still own to this day. Little f*cking hellion, right?

In any event, we’re placing the old toxic sludge under the microscope to see how well the highly offensive Lloyd Kaufman/Michael Herz exploitation classic has held up over the past three and half decades. Toxie…meet the Test of Time!

THE STORY: Conceived by Kaufman and scripted by Joe Ritter (a cameraman who went on to write the three TOXIE sequels as well), I always found an odd parallel between the story of THE TOXIC AVENGER and that of CARRIE. Of course the genders are reversed, and De Palma’s movie is, on every imaginable level, a superior film, the threadbare plot about a geeky, badly ridiculed teenager who assumes special powers and vows revenge on their bullies, is quite aligned. Here though, instead of the mousy Spacek, we get the rat-like Melvin Ferd III (Mark Torgl), a whiny and utterly pathetic clown who mops up the Tromaville Health Club. The cool hashers and gear-heads torment Melvin to no end. Dudes named Slug (Robert Prichard) and Bozo (Gary Schneider) ensure Melvin’s life is a living hell, even when they sip beers and pass joints between each other as they perform sit-ups. When hot blonde Julie plays a prank on Melvin by telling him she likes him and want to kiss him, only to replace herself with a lousy sheep (the sheep really had lice apparently, and nobody told Torgl until after filming the scene). Melvin becomes so distraught, he launches himself out of a three-storey window and lands headlong into a steaming barrel of toxic green goo.

And thus, everyone’s favorite horror hero was born. Running around in his mud-green tutu and trusty mop weapon, Toxie (played by Mitch Cohen) begins ridding the NYC streets of all the criminal filth he happens to come across. He’ll get even with Slug, Bozo Julie, and Wanda (Jennifer Babtist) eventually, but first he has to waylay a gauntlet of sinister scum. A pivotal scene comes in a Mexican eatery called The Mexican Place (a real joint at the time mind you, name as such), where, after quelling a stickup job and f*cking up Leroy (Patrick Kilpatrick), Rico (Michael Russo) and Frank (Larry Sulton), Toxie meets his mate, the blind Sara (Andree Maranda). Toxie shows his soft side as he courts Sara, picks her flowers, takes her on a picnic and long walks at dusk along the NYC skyline, and later, in the bedroom, things literally get steamy in a quick hurry.

WHAT HOLDS-UP: Revisiting THE TOXIC AVENGER again this week, the thing that stands out the most is how ridiculously over the top, and non-PC the humor is, and conversely, how unbelievably brutal the violence is. That is, the humor is just as funny as the horror is gnarly; the balance of which I’d argue is why the movie still registers as such a damn good time. It starts with the atrocious acting style across the board, with huge laughs immediately coming from Bozo’s slapstick persona (trivia: Vincent D’Onofrio was almost cast as Bozo). They tease the hell out of Melvin, which makes us sympathetic, but the humor is taken to the absolute extreme during the nighttime driving scene. The sick fuckos actually hit the streets, drunk and stoned, and award a point system for vehicular manslaughter…with more points awarded for children and the elderly. Shite’s absolutely insane, but also sets the tone of both pitch dark humor and wildly violent death scenes. A perfect melding of both horror and humor are right there in this scene. After lethally running down a series of bystanders, including popping a kid’s head like a water balloon beneath a tire (done by filling a melon with corn syrup and red food coloring), Slug admits he can’t hang out anymore because he has to go to church tomorrow!

Laugh after laugh comes with death after death. Who can forget the Mexican food scene, in which Toxie sullies a trio of stick-up artists. Check this. Word is Kilpatrick, who played the joker-faced Leroy, was so incenses by having to point a shotgun in a baby’s face that he instantly quit the movie as soon as the scene wrapped. That’s kind of offensive, un-politically correct vibe the movie revels in. Same scene, the one-armed Frank utters quite possibly the most outrageous line of the whole flick. He forces Sara to bend over a table before he cries out, “Hey Leroy, I always wanted to corn-hole a blind chick.” Rightly, Toxie is so repulsed he tears the sumbitch’s arm clean off the socket, dangling a gory drumstick over the restaurant floor. Insult to injury, Toxie then beats Frank with his own ripped off arm! Shite’s maddening. Equally offensive humorously as it is shocking violently; and the balance between the two has not lost a bit of its brilliance over the past 35 years.

Never mind the hilarious transformation scene that Toxie’s granny thinks is just a burst of puberty, let’s talk about the scene where Toxie fucks up Nipples, Knuckles and Cigar Face (the latter named so on the spot, when Kaufman spotted the actor huffing gars between takes). In a nighttime alleyway showdown, Toxie is snuck up on from behind. No matter, Toxie tosses an elbow in dude’s face until it resembles a cracked jar of raspberry Smuckers. Keeping with the cartoonish humor, Toxie Larry/Mo/Curly’s another dude’s eyeballs clean out of their sockets. The topper though? Toxie grabs the last victim by the nuts, tosses him into a trash canister and proceeds to speed-bag the man’s nards like he were Floyd training for 12-rounds with Pacquiao. Good god!

Sillier fatalities include death by ice-cream sundae (pretty f*cking sweet), as well as Toxie submerging a dude’s arms and torso in a boiling fry-vat of grease until he’s crispy tostada. Not done however, I always loved the scene in which Toxie stuffs a corrupt female midget in a dryer before turning the machine on at full blast. Shite’s right out of MY BLOODY VALENTINE but given an even more darkly humorous tinge. So too derivative is the gymnasium death scene (GRADUATION DAY or HAPPY BIRTHDAY TO ME), in which Toxie drops the dagger-like weight-bar down onto the trachea of some poor bastard, impaling his throat on impact. Shite’s just as barbarous violently as the humor is wickedly ironic. Another sterling example of such is when Toxie picks up Wanda and drops her butt on the hot-rocks inside a sauna. “Let this be a lesson to your hot ass!” Toxie barks in disgust as he boils Wanda’s derriere to a strip of jerky.

WHAT BLOWS NOW: It’s easy to lambaste some of the cheap ass FX in the film, but really, they were comedically inferior back in ’84, so not much has changed their status in 2019. The movie knows exactly how ludicrous it is, embraces it, and never takes itself too seriously as a result. The acting, which also stank back then, is still bad, but made charmingly so due to the sheer nostalgia factor. Of course, if you wanted to assess the film in today’s PC climate, there’s no way the film as a whole would play to such howling laughter and good-natured humor. There are things in the film that are absolutely revolting, which we know is deliberately part of the fun. But still, I can see some oversensitive millennials watching the film today for the first time and become apoplectic.

THE VERDICT: Bottom line is this. For a movie this genuinely funny and commensurately violent, there’s nothing about 27 kills in 82 minutes (one death per three minutes) to NOT like. Not now, not then. THE TOXIC AVENGER still deserves its rank as not only the best Troma Film to date, but still earns its place as beloved cult-classic as well. In Toxie we still Trust even 35 years later!