Franchise Fixations is a recurring column by Will Ashton that digs beneath the surface of today’s latest franchise films—unpacking what they add, subtract, or accidentally reveal about the ever-growing universes they inhabit. Sometimes it’s praise, sometimes it’s therapy. Always, it’s personal.
Toxie is a dear friend of mine. Oh sure. It’s a bit of a one-sided affair. What is often referred to as a parasocial relationship. He pretends that he doesn’t know me whenever we see each other at the bar. He’ll feign ignorance when I reminisce about our history together. But the truth is, Toxie and I go back — way back.
To me, Troma and camp were always synonymous; I learned about each around the same time. My uncle, something of a film connoisseur himself, albeit of the schlocky variety, once used the word “camp” to describe the type of movie and media he likes. This was well before the days of my appreciation of John Waters, so-bad-they’re-good horror movies, or whatever else is thrown into that semi-unique distinction (and, admittedly, more things get wrongly categorized than not).
Honestly, I thought at the time that he was referring to summer camp. You know, films like, oh, let’s say, Heavyweights or Meatballs. But it’s perhaps best that I didn’t get a clear idea of what camp was then. Because camp — more than not — is felt more than it’s known; everyone must take their own camp journey (camping, if you will) to discover whatever it ultimately means to them.
So for me, I gained a proper understanding of camp when I finally took one of my uncle’s quite strange recommendations and watched 1984’s The Toxic Avenger. This would have been in my college years when, in the grand tradition of liberal education, I was expanding my horizons. I threw it on in the hopes of getting a few dirty laughs and exploring some grungy ‘80s genre filmmaking. The viewing experience, it seems, proved to be more substantial in terms of taste.
Or, rather, it would be more apt to say, lack thereof.
Troma itself, spearheaded by Lloyd Kaufman, is akin to the oddball rise of “The Toxic Avenger.” They came from shambles, became a grotesque approximation of what genre movies should be, and found love and adoration from their own small group of Tromavillians. They were always niche, but that’s okay. They were also always very small-budget affairs, often to an unabashed degree. On-screen errors and continuity goofs weren’t necessarily faults of the film; they were all part of its warped charm. The less these movies adhered to proper taste or proper film methods, the more they gained a cult-like following with viewers who liked films on the weirder/wackier side.
Nevertheless, as Troma became its own offbeat brand, something was lost in the toxic sauce when it came to the latter Toxic Avenger films. These flicks became too saturated in their gross, depraved sense of humor; the sequels, even the more enjoyable ones like The Toxic Avenger Part III: The Last Temptation of Toxie, don’t have the same plucky, gung-ho charm. The original Toxic Avenger works almost completely despite itself. It’s a lightning-in-a-bottle success that’s nearly impossible to recreate, which makes the sequels and last year’s remake/reboot, directed by Macon Blair, a bit of a lost cause.
Obviously, there’s room to make a more robust movie than the 1984 no-budget effort. But will it really be better than what Kaufman concocted in the early ‘80s, when he had everything to gain and nothing to lose?
The answer, expectedly, is no. However, it’s an admirable no. The sort of no that says: You gave it a good shot, and you had your heart in the right place. And hey, what do you know? This is a pretty good Toxie movie. Props where they are due: you put together an admirably odd remake.
Perhaps what makes this revamped Toxic Avenger appealing, at least to film festival attendees who finally got to watch it in 2025, is that it had its own uphill battle. Following a warm reception at SXSW, Blair’s directorial follow-up to his outstanding, award-winning debut, Netflix’s I Don’t Feel At Home in This World Anymore, was in limbo. While the film was in the spirit of previous Troma efforts, there just wasn’t a traditional market for those movies in theaters anymore. Not even in the smaller ones. At least, not in a reliable sense. While horror movies are prone to sell, and often well, Blair’s Toxic Avenger was ultimately too cheeky, too outlandish, and just too plain nutso for any serious buyer to scoop it up, despite the praise that it garnered at the Texas-based film festival. As a result, Blair’s Toxic Avenger retelling lingered on the shelf, idly, for too long.
But after two years, a smaller studio finally came to Toxie’s grumbling and long-suffering rescue. Cineverse, best known as the distributor behind the grisly-but-highly-profitable Terrifier sequels, figured they had a good shot at bringing Blair’s remake to the masses. It’s a known IP, after all. And with its strong reviews, star-filled cast, and the studio’s ability to appeal to real gorehounds, it was a match made in trash-filled heaven. They released the movie, unrated, in any theaters willing to host it, and they emphasized its theatricality to boot. The result, alas, was much more limited than what Terrifier 2 and 3 accomplished, but at least Toxie had his day in theaters again.
Now that Blair’s third feature, the frustrating and underwhelming dark bromantic comedy, Idiots, formerly known as The Shitheads, is now in theaters, I was curious to revisit my thoughts on this off-kilter remake. People are often quick to write off any ‘80s remake as a cheap attempt to redo the magic of beloved ‘80s charmers, with more bucks but much less bang. But this one certainly was different. There was no denying Blair’s love for Troma and that his desire to revamp Toxic Avenger came from being a fanboy of the property. And Kaufman and Michael Herz’s 1984 movie was almost proudly far from flawless in its shoddy telling. It was a risk, but writer-director Blair approached it with an endearing stride. He desired to make something that lived up to his long-held wacko enthusiasm for what Kaufman and crew made in their early days. That was most certainly the right mindset.
Toxie was in the right hands. I knew he would make me proud, even with his gross new facelift.
To the 2023/2025 film’s credit, it is the second-best Toxie movie. However, that is not much of a competition. It’s more of a race to the bottom than to the top after the roughly endearing original. But with its self-aware writing, scattering of fun supporting players, impassioned new emotional story about a deadbeat, terminally ill father trying to connect with his stepson, and impressively redesigned imagining of Tromaville, a place far more appropriately deranged than any past take on this multi-film-spanning town, Blair’s remake succeeded in bringing new life and some brand new ideas to the forefront. This was definitely a well-modernized take on this decades-old film — complete with a surprisingly scathing critique of the failures of America’s healthcare system.
And for the first time in a long time — most likely, for the very first time — there were real actors in this Troma movie, not merely the community theater-level performers — said with affection — who populated the Kaufman features. At the forefront is Peter Dinklage, who takes on the part of the paternal Winston Gooze, the widowed janitor who has some serious problems well before he transforms into a mutated superhero-of-sorts. The award-winning thespian brings tormented heart to the role and, more importantly, plays it straight, thus allowing the rest of Blair’s off-kilter cinematic world to lean more head-on into the expected zaniness. This film is certainly filled with a variety of foul, off-beat, hyper-violent elements, but Blair opts for something here that could be considered a foreign concept in Troma movies: restraint. He lets talented stars like Dinklage and Jacob Tremblay, as his son Wade, carry the unexpected sincerity of emotionally-charged beats.
Which possibly begs the question: is there a way to tackle poignant subject matters in a Troma remake? Blair doesn’t seem to mind one way or another. While he knows the assignment, he is also trying to make a real movie here, and maybe that’s part of the problem. Troma is — and will always be — schlock. In essence, Nü-Toxic Avenger is elevated Troma, complete with a bigger budget, bigger star power, more dramatic heft, and a general desire to make a feature that, well, looks and feels like a movie, albeit one that isn’t shy about throwing around foul words and gore.
Can an effort to make an honest-to-goodness movie, even a largely self-aware one, bridge the gap between camp and total earnestness? Blair, bless him, does what he can to make it work. 2023’s Toxic Avenger is, at its best, a slimy, silly, splatter-friendly B-movie with some A-level talent, both in front and behind the camera. The makeup effects are genuinely outstanding; it is ludicrous to suggest such a thing about a Troma-adjacent film, but it should have gotten honest Oscar consideration. The stunt work is bold and punchy. The world-building is always inspired, and it shows that building worlds that are off-beat but also lived in is one of his finest talents as a filmmaker. And the movie’s desire to stick it to the systems that hurt the honest, hard-working people of the world is an interesting, appealing way to appeal to the original’s anarchistic spirit.
But while the movie does know the appeal of midnight movie madness, and it can provide the goods in terms of goofy, grisly gore, it can fall under the same trappings of the previous Toxic Avenger follow-ups in trying to do a bit too much with such a deliberately light-weight concept.
The first half of this movie, while filled with endearing pathos, does make some genre-heads a bit restless, and understandably. It takes near the hour mark for Toxic Avenger (2023) to really lean into its Troma influences, and it can feel like the first half of the movie is biding its time a bit too much, perhaps. It’s understandable that the movie would want to keep Dinklage on-screen for as long as possible; he is undeniably the most notable star of the project, and he’s certainly an intriguing choice to take on Toxie, a role that has been interchangeably played by a variety of no-name actors of varying degrees. Again, in trying to be a real, dramatically earnest film, it can often get in its own way a little bit.
These moments, while not bad, don’t feel totally akin to what a Troma movie is and should be, and it does make one feel like it’s trying a bit too hard to make this whole thing something that it’s not, or maybe shouldn’t be. But it’s a testament to Blair’s dedication to the project, and the committed, tongue-in-cheek stars attached, that it can still appeal to genre-heads, even when it seems like it is fighting against what they really paid for.
Now, I love seeing my friend Toxie stretch himself as a performer and expand his range as a veteran of the silver screen. I would love to see him try his hand at more heavyweight material. But some of this sappy sentimentality can also sap some of the intended fun that’s meant to be had here. It’s a hard balance to achieve, admittedly, and while Blair doesn’t lose his balance, it does make for a movie that can be wobbly. But, in fairness, what Troma movie is ever perfect?
Blair’s I Don’t Feel At Home in this World Anymore is wonderful because it finds a rich, darkly hilarious balance between Coens-esque blundering suburban crime anarchy with the sharp, nihilistic, unapologetically blunt edge of Blair’s frequent collaborator, Jeremy Saulnier. Likewise, Blair’s most recent film, Idiots, doesn’t quite work because it’s trying to find a way to blend a sort of Last Detail/Midnight Run-esque buddy road-trip/on-the-run odd pair misadventure movie with some crass, semi-commercial raunchy humor/stoner comedy and it comes across as sadly thin and frequently contrived. Which might explain why Blair’s Toxic Avenger falls a bit in the middle.
It’s self-aware, filled with manic mayhem, always willing to go ultra-wacky at a moment’s notice, frequently absurd, and comes with a fine reverence for the schlocky material, while also trying to expand it in a way that justifies remaking it and finds its own individuality in the series. But it can also be outstretched, overlong, tiresome in spots, and sometimes annoyingly uneven. It’s better that it’s trying too hard than not trying at all; certainly, too many ‘80s remakes suffer from being too lazy and lackluster with their plotting and listless attempts to revamp the well-liked material. But it results in a feature that can seem like it is caught between Troma debauchery and bumpy pastiche, resulting in a film that does not firmly feel indebted to one particular time of film genre.
But ultimately, a Toxic Avenger needs to be one thing, and pretty much one thing only, in order to succeed: campy fun. And, in that respect, it generally succeeds. Making a Toxic Avenger film, even in the 2020s, isn’t rocket science, but it doesn’t come as naturally as it did when Kaufman and his cronies set out to make a film on their own free will, with barely a penny to their names, quality be damned. It’s the sort of thing that can’t really be replicated exactly, but props to Blair for giving it a good go and mostly succeeding in spite of the limitations that come with this effort.
Above all else, it was a warm thrill to see Toxie on the big screen. He might not remember me, but I remember him fondly, and I always wish him well. I don’t know when, or if, I will see him at the multiplexes again anytime soon, but that’s okay. As the tagline notes, he’s the hero we need, not the hero we want, and he’ll hopefully come back when he’s good and unwanted in the world.
