The Toxic Avenger: Movie Review

Cast: Peter Dinklage, Jacob Tremblay, Kevin Bacon, Julia Davis, Elijah Wood
Director: Macon Blair

Perhaps the greatest recommendation The Toxic Avenger can receive is that of it feeling like it's a film that's been assembled in someone's basement, a film that's controlled in its shabbiness, yet happy to embrace the lo-fi end for the love of its genre audience.

A fully committed Dinklage plays Winston, the janitor at the local chemical megacorp run by Kevin Bacon's sleazy CEO Bob Garbinger.

With his wife recently dead and his stepson distant to say the least, Winston is not having the best times. Something that's further compounded by a terminal diagnosis that can't be helped by a lack of healthcare from the company he's spent decades with. 

Inadvertently crossing paths with a whistle-blower, Winston's killed and dumped in a toxic pool, before transforming into an avenging monstrosity.

With a film like this, it's important to not take it too seriously or to delve too deeply into most of what happens, given how slight a lot of it feels. 

That's not to say there's not coherence here, but given it opens with someone being shot several times before being blasted through a window, it's clearly not aiming for high art - and nor would the Troma genre claim otherwise.

Embracing its Troma edges and innate blood and guts works - as does an all-in Dinklage - but yet there are parts here which feel muted and occasionally drawn out from what somehow manages to be a long  90 minute film.

Yet when it fires and the humour is both deadpan and overt, The Toxic Avenger feels like the trashy time it's aiming for. Director Macon Blair keeps things on the right side of lo-fi, but there's never any aspiration to make this generate a wider appeal for audiences outside of the genre it's dipped its toxic toes into. 

Ultimately, The Toxic Avenger embraces the blood and guts of the genre, but the film itself never really rises beyond a mixed bag - even with the likes of Wood, who plays a kind of cross between Oswald Cobblepot and Peter Lorre and Dinklage, who gives a sadness to his Winston - the film can't do anything other than what it sets out to.

Which in this case feels like a missed opportunity.