My father first showed me the 1984 film The Toxic Avenger when I was nine years old. Or, should I say, attempted to show it to me. After fast forwarding through every scene with bare breasts or sexual innuendo, we ended up on the infamous head-crushing scene, in which a young boy on his bike gets his head run over by the film’s villains.
The effect was achieved using a watermelon stuffed with hamburger meat—gotta love low budget horror—but to little nine-year-old me, seeing a kid my age getting massacred in such a way was traumatic. So my dad turned it off and put on a much more child friendly film: Army of Darkness. My father and I didn’t always have the best relationship, but we routinely bonded over horror movies throughout my life, beginning with these two films and continuing with 4am viewings of The Twilight Zone Movie on HBO, repeated watches of Silent Hill, and the rest of the Evil Dead films.
The fascination with Troma remained, something I vaguely knew about as I developed an early taste for horror. I would pore over editions of Rue Morgue (a magazine I now write for) cover to cover, giving myself a horror movie education. I would rent weird forgotten horror films from the only video rental store in town. Eventually, at 13, I had watched a handful of the video nasties, the films banned by Margaret Thatcher in the 80’s for their depictions of violence, and I figured it was time to give Toxie another chance.
One day during spring break, the spring break where I would walk the mile downhill to Blockbuster every day to rent whatever horror movies they’d give a young teenager, I sneakily stole my dad’s DVD copy of The Toxic Avenger (the “21st anniversary edition”), deciding now was the time to formally let Toxie into my life. I watched it alone in my room, on my hanging TV with the built-in VCR, giving it my undivided attention and allowing it to give me a low-budget horror education. If I could handle Evil Dead, surely I could handle a Troma movie.
Reader, I was hooked instantly. I loved The Toxic Avenger in all of its glory, uncensored and grimy as it was. The gore was unrelenting, the punches were not pulled, and I’m pretty sure my third eye opened. Toxie was an instant hyperfixation, one of many I kept largely to myself at that age, like a dirty little secret, something I could now revel in again and again. I remember as the movie ended feeling mentally violated by what I saw, awakened to a new genre of gore movie that was equal parts disgusting and hilarious. I didn’t know cinema could be made with such a microscopic budget, or with so much love. From that point on, I was a Troma fan, and The Toxic Avenger DVD now lived in my room.
No budget cinema is, in my opinion, the pinnacle of filmmaking. Lloyd Kaufman’s nonfiction book, Make Your Own Damn Movie was a turning point for me as a creative person. You really don’t need a million dollars to make a movie, just a camcorder and a few of your weirdest friends.
Of course, any cult classic is subject to a less-inspired, higher budget remake. The Rocky Horror Picture Show got one. Robocop got one. Soon enough, The Toxic Avenger would get one too, but it was a long journey to get there. Years ago, there were rumors of a Toxie reboot, but one that would be along the lines of a more traditional superhero movie, with a PG-13 rating. That wouldn’t do, I thought. The Toxic Avenger is a movie about how far you can go, pushed to the limits of weird and wonderful low budget filmmaking, not unlike the gross-out exercise in bad taste that is my other cult classic favorite, Pink Flamingos. If a studio was going to remake The Toxic Avenger, they had to do it right.
Finally, it seemed that a new Toxie was underway, with on-set photos coming out around 2021. The film was to be directed by Macon Blair, an auteur with a clear reverence for Troma and Lloyd Kaufman, and was to feature heavy-hitters such as Elijah Wood, Kevin Bacon, and Peter Dinklage as the titular Toxie. The plot was a departure from the original film, with the hero not being a wimpy, frequently bullied teenager named Melvin Ferd, but instead a single dad named Winston Gooze who is hit with the reality of impending death after a cancer diagnosis. Toxie became not just a gooey action flick, but also a horror story about the realities of American health care.
For a piece of art to be revived, whether it’s in theatre, literature, or film, it has to be revamped, brought into the modern zeitgeist through culturally relevant themes. They’ve been doing it with Shakespeare adaptations for years—rather than spitting out the same art over and over again exactly how it’s always been, instead new artists are allowed to adapt the material in new and exciting ways. The Toxic Avenger is another one of those things—the story needed an update to work in the modern era of politics, and boy did it work. Kaufman himself even went on record saying that Blair’s adaptation was better than the original. Once I heard that, I was sold on the reboot, and ready to see what it offered.
Unfortunately, I would have to wait to see this new film. After premiering at Fantastic Fest in September 2023, the new and improved Toxic Avenger was shelved, unable to find a distributor willing to take on the gore fest that the film promised. I was disappointed, as it had been years since fans had any kind of Toxie content, and I was itching to see what strangeness Macon Blair had dreamt up. I resigned myself to the idea that I probably wouldn’t see the Toxic Avenger reboot for a while, but maybe one day I’d get lucky and they’d put it on a streaming service or something.
But Toxie can’t be stopped, and he certainly can’t be contained. In January 2025, Cineverse announced that it had acquired distribution rights for the reboot, with plans to release it unrated. Previously, Cineverse had distributed Terrifier 3, which went down in history as the most successful unrated theatrical release of all time. Toxie was in good hands. In August 2025, after waiting four years, my husband and I dropped our baby off with my sister-in-law and went on our first date together since becoming parents, specifically to see the new Toxic Avenger.
Now, I’m not the type of parent who takes being away from my child lightly. I’m the stay-at-home parent and I spend a lot of time with my kid—handing him over to be babysat was huge for me. But it was opening night of the long awaited Toxic Avenger reboot! I wasn’t going to miss that, and I certainly wasn’t going to go without my horror-loving husband, who was also a Toxie fan.
My husband and I initially bonded over our love of horror and cult cinema. Having met him when we were playing Eddie and Columbia in a Rocky Horror shadowcast, seeing The Toxic Avenger together was on brand for us. We rolled up to that theatre, me in my “I Love the Monster Hero” shirt and him in his Silver Shamrock shirt, a tribute to our love of B-horror that brought us together. We took pictures in the theatre’s photo booth to commemorate the occasion, and I still have the photo strip in my scrapbook. It was the Night of Toxie, and it was a big deal.
We weren’t the only freaks at that theatre either. A father and son showed up wearing shirts identical to mine, a play on the original film’s in-universe Toxie merch. Ah yes, we thought. Fellow weirdos. More people started to filter in—it certainly wasn’t a packed house, but the people who were there could definitely be considered punks and Tromettes. The Tromatized, if you will.
It was a church-like experience seeing this film in theatres. It was the long awaited Second Coming of Toxie (I’m ignoring the questionable sequel trilogy), and I loved every second of it. In this new film, Toxie was now a widower and a stepdad to a kid who he was trying to understand. As a new parent, there was something poetic about Toxie being a dad, whereas in the original he was a nerdy teenager. It’s almost like I grew up alongside Toxie, his life as an outcast reflected in my own.
I’m happy to say that the remake worked. Gone were the questionable ‘80’s political incorrectness of the original, a film rife with casual misogyny and dated humor. What remained was a film with a lot of heart and really good politics, a woke horror movie if I’ve ever seen one. When I recommend it to people, I always say that it is the most surprisingly leftist horror movie I’ve ever seen, touching on issues like health care, climate change, police brutality, and the corruption of billionaires, all wrapped in a blood-soaked bow.
In a genre like horror that is known for being violent towards women and the less privileged, it is refreshing to see a horror-comedy where the joke is on the billionaires, the carnage aimed towards those in power, rather than punching down. I think this was a smart move, catering to the tastes of today’s cinema goers without hitting you over the head with politics. The oppressive cost of health care in America is a central plot point to the story, and is the catalyst for Winston’s transformation into Toxie. At its heart, it’s a story about a father who just wants to survive this world and show up for his stepson, giving it all the heart of a Troma movie with gore to match, but updated for 21st century, Gen-Z sensibilities.
Dinklage gives a committed performance as Winston, and it’s clear that everyone involved, cast and crew, really understood the assignment, what kind of film they were making. It may have had a bigger budget than the original film, but it was unmistakably and gloriously Troma in not only its gore, not only its sense of humor, but also in its very soul. My husband and I left the theatre satiated, our hunger for a well-rounded horror movie content. We debriefed on the movie on the way home, laughing at all of the ADR jokes that were added to the film, admiring the full picture Macon Blair painted. We went home to our kid, happy.
There are movies that have been my “friends” for many years, and The Toxic Avenger is one of them. But I am not opposed to a well-crafted new interpretation of a beloved film. It is truly how art stays alive, and how the messages it conveys lives on for generation after generation. I’m glad Gen-Z got to have their own Toxic Avenger. While it’s certainly not a film or a concept that will appeal to every person, to the right viewer, the films are revelations, both in the realm of horror as well as exercises in cinema as a whole. The reboot of The Toxic Avenger is not just a critique of what is wrong with the world, but also a celebration of what is right and good and just. That’s why I love it, and perhaps that’s also why Toxie continues to live in the hearts of his devoted followers.
The Toxic Avenger Unrated (2025) is now available on streaming. If you love watching a movie with a heart and soul and plenty of gross-out laughs, it’s exactly the one for you.
