Pyschotronic Cinemavision: The Toxic Avenger

Founded in 1974, Troma Films has been an independent cinema house committed to crafting films of a disruptive nature. A ‘Troma’ film contains all the heart and craft of a mainstream Hollywood film but served up by directors with almost pornographic sensibilities. From that, you wind up getting pitch-perfect comedies with some real heart, and there’s no better example of that than 1984’s The Toxic Avenger.

The film, which was written and directed by Lloyd Kaufman alongside his collaborators Michael Herz and Joe Ritter, follows a young nerd named Melvin destined to save the town of Tromaville from its own rot after undergoing a monstrous transformation. From serial killers to corrupt mayors, no evildoer is safe from the Toxic Avenger’s violent justice.

Filled with crude humor and gore, it would be safe to assume that the film is trying to satirize or parody the ‘superhero concept’. Specifically the Marvel archetype, the character a total geek transformed by a toxic scientific substance while living in the shadow of New York City. However, The Toxic Avenger is more of a straight-up superhero comedy than a parody. It does tell an earnest story and doesn’t spend its time criticizing or purposefully bringing down the genre. Instead, it utilizes it with purity to set up a string of violence and hilarity that is incredibly engaging.

Troma is a film house known for this, and this film is no exception. Its practical effects are pristine, even by today’s standards, and help ground the ongoing absurdity in something tangible. Overall, it would a be little difficult to gage just how much this film cost, which was very little, as the production team used everything they could to their advantage to craft a film that feels so big and bold without having the tools to be. The film only ever suffers at a production level when it comes to the music, its overuse of singular tracks noticeable and immersion breaking.

A note on that absurdity is that the film utilizes stereotypes to crank up its surrealist nature, and in that way, it can offend, but there is a point to the film’s overt lack of character depth. Tromaville paints a picture of America that is as accurate as it is almost painfully blunt. Yes, the nerds are the nerdiest nerds and the LGBTQ characters are the most LGBTQ a character can be within the incredibly strict lens of an 80s shock comedy; however, by the same token, so are the antagonists of the film. The villains are white supremacists and murder-obsessed teen bullies, sexual assaulters, drug-lording grandmothers, and corrupt city officials who are willing to sacrifice health for greed as well as hire straight-up Nazis to run their police forces. The film is trying to be absurd but not offensive.

There’s a love for the underground and a hatred for the establishment that permeates every part of this film. While its attempts at showcasing that are less than safe by today’s standards, frankly, you can’t truly create art that is attempting to blatantly attack the worst parts of American culture by playing it safe. That being said, it isn’t perfect and does have a level of immaturity that does hurt its overall message, but at the end of the day, this film is about loving what society deems to be monsters and rejecting the true evils that do so.

Kaufman’s honesty as a filmmaker is what makes the violence earnest and what makes the cartoonish representations of American life more than just eye-rolling and groan-worthy caricatures. Outside of this, of course, the film is just damn entertaining and more well-written than I’d have expected for a film of its nature. The comedy is genuinely side-splitting, and every actor here commits to the bit hard and never falters in their performances. While there isn’t a performance that steals the show here, there also isn’t one that stands out against the crowd as particularly bad either. Everyone here is indistinguishable from their other roles, all transforming perfectly into the citizens of Tromaville.