The Toxic Avenger ★★★½
The Toxic Avenger Part II ★★
The Toxic Avenger Part III: The Last Temptation of Toxie ★★★
Citizen Toxie: The Toxic Avenger IV ★★½
WITH a new version on the horizon, it’s time to look at the 1984 original The Toxic Avenger.
In fact, let’s have a look at all four films in the original series.
The series is definitely not for everyone – far from it – but the first film at least is a classic within the horror sub-genre of splatter comedy.
And the king of this type of film will always be prolific writer/director Lloyd Kaufman, the driving force behind specialist studio Troma Entertainment.
The Toxic Avenger, produced and directed by Kaufman and Michael Herz from a story by Kaufman, focuses on Melvin Ferd Junko III, a skinny, nerdish at a gym in the fictional town of Tromaville, New Jersey.
Melvin is constantly bullied by a group of customers, Bozo, Slug, Wanda and Julie, whom Melvin has a secret crush on. Things go too far when they trick Melvin into wearing a pink tutu and throw him into a dark room where he unknowingly hugs a sheep that he thinks is Julie.
Melvin is laughed at, ridiculed and chased around the gym and ends up trying to escape his tormentors by jumping through a second-storey window. He falls into a drum on a truck parked outside which is full of toxic, radioactive waste.
The concoction burns his skin and sets him on fire, but Melvin doesn’t die. Instead, he is transformed into a horribly deformed mutant with superhuman size and strength – The Toxic Avenger.
There are two strengths to this film.
Firstly, it has just the right approach to the gore-laden material, with tongue firmly in cheek, to transcend its low budget. The effects and make-up look cheap, but they are meant to.
Secondly, Kaufman weaves just the right amount of social commentary through the script to elevate the proceedings above just being a splatter comedy.
THE first sequel, The Toxic Avenger Part II (1989), on the other hand, has none of the same inventiveness or charm.
It tries, by taking the story in a bizarre new direction with Toxie, as he is now known, tricked into windsurfing to Japan in search of his estranged father.
Toxie became the hero of Tromaville at the end of the first film, but his absence now leaves Tromaville, and his blind girlfriend Claire, at the mercy of Apocalypse Inc, the evil corporation that wants to turn the entire town into a toxic waste dump.
There is more splatter and much more nudity, but the script is nowhere near as clever. The proceedings seem to be mostly filled with never-ending and three badly-directed fight scenes.
THE Toxic Avenger Part III: The Last Temptation of Toxie, also released in 1989, provides somewhat of a return to form.
After being saved again by Toxie at the end of Part II, Tromaville has become a safe, family town. But it’s also become a boring life for our toxic superhero who spends his time doing mundane tasks like rescuing cats and helping old ladies cross the street.
Because he also needs money for surgery to reverse Claire’s blindness, he agrees to work for Apocalypse Inc, the corrupt chemical company that, unbeknown to Toxie, still has designs on his hometown.
Toxie becomes an unfeeling yuppie for a time but eventually redeems himself, in one of the film’s highlight sequences, by murdering a bunch of thugs terrorising customers in a video store.
The final act sees Toxie pitted against Satan himself in a bizarre, video game-inspired duel.
In some ways this second sequel is more humorous than the original, but lacks the harder edge of social commentary.
In Citizen Toxie: The Toxic Avenger IV (2000) we are back to Part II’s level of gore and sex but, again, without much of the original’s magical balance to the material
There is more science fiction to this entry as well with Toxie being transported to Amortville, a mirror version of Tromaville, where his opposite number, The Noxious Offender, is an evil law enforcer.
Noxie also trades places with Toxie, leaving both super beings confused by their new surroundings. Being a nice guy, Toxie reacts with some care and trepidation, but Noxie just starts murdering innocent citizens.
This entry is also over-burdened with new characters – there’s Noxie of course, plus Toxie’s new sidekick Lardass, Evil Kabukiman, a bunch of new, inept super heroes and an evil Mayor, played by former porn star Ron Jeremy.
The cameos don’t stop there with directors James Gunn and Eli Roth, Corey Feldman as a gynaecologist, Hugh Hefner as the US President and Spiderman creator Stan Lee as The Narrator.
It’s fun, but all a little too over-blown.