The Toxic Avenger Movie Review

The Toxic Avenger (1984)

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Written by: Lloyd Kaufman (story),  Joe Ritter (screenplay),  Lloyd Kaufman & Gay Partington Terry, Stuart Strutin
Directed by: Michael Herz, Lloyd Kaufman (as Samuel Weil)
Starring: Mitch Cohen, Mark Torgl, Andree Maranda, Pat Ryan Jr., Jennifer Babtist
Rated: R
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Plot
Tromaville has a monstrous new hero. The Toxic Avenger is born when meek mop boy Melvin falls into a vat of toxic waste. Now evildoers will have a lot to lose.

Verdict
It's easy to see why this is a cult classic with the insane over the top acting and violence. It's a ridiculous concept, and while that can make it fun there isn't much of a story. It's a budget movie, but my complaint is that there is no story, just a string of monster attacks. It's a movie that seems to be conceived by a twelve year old from the humor to the content.
Skip it.

Review
This is a low budget horror movie and I won't hold that against it. It was a defining movie for production company Troma.

This feels very '80s with a warning about the violence and a pollution service announcement via voice over. You have to wonder how everything came together for this movie to exist. Kaufman had the idea while working on Rocky.

The gym rat, serial killing, antagonists.

The entire movie is over the top. The acting is on a level of over acting I've never seen. People scream lines, straining with every word. It's beyond parody. The antagonists aren't just bullies, they are racist serial killers. That information is mentioned casually despite its appalling nature.

The Toxic Avenger

The level of gore is unsettling. It's just gross as heads explode and limbs are ripped off. This wouldn't be as bad, but it's amplified when the antagonists run over a child and we see his head explode.

The violence has a level of amateur to it. You can watch this movie and speculate accurately which scenes got less money so they could save up for other scenes. It's easy to see scenes where they skipped prosthetics presumably to save money and time.

Melvin

The plot hinges on just how stupid Melvin is. He believes a woman that has tormented him wants to make out with him. He then confuses a sheep for a woman. He jumps out of a window to escape from everyone laughing at him into open containers of toxic waste sitting unsecured on a flatbed truck.

It's silly, but it's secondary. The main point of this movie is to loosely link scenes of the Toxic Avenger murdering people. The Toxic Avenger seems to have a sixth sense about evil people. I'm not sure why and it's only my guess. In later movies this is revealed as a fact.

This is a cult classic because it's so campy, but campy and silly doesn't make it good. I get why someone would like this, but I don't think this movie was a joke. While it definitely has some comedic parts, this is a movie made by a  twelve year old in content and humor. Nearly the entire movie is gratuitous with no bearing on the plot. I want a movie with a solid foundation. This movie has a lot of ideas and none of them are developed, other than the mutant that mutilates people.