The Toxic Avenger Unrated

The Slime and the Fury

I genuinely didn’t expect to care about a guy in a pink tutu murdering people with a radioactive mop. You probably wouldn’t either. We’re stuck in a moment where superhero movies feel like a slick, bloodless assembly line of corporate synergy—everything polished, everything sanded down by committees. So when Macon Blair’s *The Toxic Avenger* finally clawed its way out of distribution purgatory—after sitting for two years post-its 2023 festival premiere because executives reportedly called it “unreleasable”—it doesn’t play like a reboot. It plays like a threat. It’s loud, it’s revolting on purpose, and I’m still a little stunned a major studio paid for it.



If you’ve seen Blair’s earlier directing (*I Don't Feel at Home in This World Anymore*) or his work with Jeremy Saulnier (*Blue Ruin*), you know his thing: regular people getting dragged into cartoon violence that keeps escalating until it becomes a nightmare. He drops that same indie-thriller wiring into the Troma world. The original 1984 *Toxic Avenger* was a glorious, zero-budget blob of sleaze. Blair keeps the sleaze, but he bolts it to something uglier and more grounded: the American healthcare system.

The most upsetting scene isn’t a head explosion or some mutant appendage. It’s a small, deadening conversation in a corporate office. Winston Gooze (Peter Dinklage), a widowed janitor with a terminal diagnosis, sits across from his boss, the oily health-and-wellness CEO Bob Garbinger (Kevin Bacon). Winston is asking for his treatment to be covered. Bacon doesn’t play Garbinger like a cackling comic-book villain; he plays him like a familiar modern sociopath—soft smile, empty wellness jargon, slouched posture, and the casual ease of someone sentencing an employee to death between meetings. Dinklage folds in on himself, voice down to a rasp. You can watch the exact moment the social contract snaps in his eyes. It’s an almost painfully real launchpad for a movie that, not long after, has a man dissolve into neon-green goop.



Once Winston takes the plunge into toxic waste, the movie splits open into a neon-drenched practical-effects carnival. And this is where it pulls off its best trick. Dinklage voices the mutated Toxie, but the body in that bulky, boiling-flesh suit belongs to stunt performer Luisa Guerreiro. She gives the creature weight and sadness. He doesn’t move like a superhero; he moves like an exhausted dad coming off a double shift who just wants to lie down. It’s smart, specific physical acting—and it keeps the character tied to working-class fatigue even while he’s ripping limbs off corporate hitmen.

And the hitmen are… something. I still don’t fully know what Elijah Wood is doing as Fritz, Garbinger’s brother and top henchman, but I couldn’t stop watching. Under prosthetic teeth and a horrific comb-over, Wood turns Fritz into a chain-smoking evil penguin powered entirely by goblin energy. (Post-*Lord of the Rings*, Wood has basically used his fortune to bankroll and star in the weirdest stuff he can, and honestly, we’ve benefited.)



It’s not flawless. The middle gets a little shaggy, and Jacob Tremblay—playing Winston’s estranged stepson—gets handed emotional turns that feel a bit too calibrated to squeeze tears out of the mayhem. You can sense the script wrestling: heartfelt father-son drama on one side, and the obligation to show a villain getting liquefied by a tractor on the other. As *Mashable* noted in their review, the movie sometimes fits “snugly into the framework of other superhero stories, even as *The Toxic Avenger* works hard not to fall into that box.”

But I’ll take some mess when the whole thing feels this handmade. In a movie landscape clogged with sterile digital sheen, St. Roma’s Village has a tacky, tangible presence. The blood looks like corn syrup and dye. The sludge looks truly rancid. The film knows the world is run by people who’ll steal your life to pad their pockets, and it offers one response: uncontrolled, ridiculous, slime-soaked rage. Whether you want that depends on your tolerance for scatological humor, but it’s hard not to admire a movie that commits to the mop swing this completely.