Toxic Shock

The Toxic Avenger ambles his way into theatres some two years after the film was first shown at festivals. Strange that the movie had so much trouble finding a distributor given the presence of major names, relatively mainstream sensibilities (compared to the 80s original anyway) and the fact it's actually quite a bit of fun.

Events take place in a fictional city inside a cartoonish, ultra-capitalist, crime-ridden caricature of 80s America, with locations called things like "Depressing Outskirts" and "Ye Olde Shithead District". Peter Dinklage is down on his luck janitor Winston Gooze, a widower with a step son who attempts to break into the headquarters of the mega-pharmaceutical company he works for when he discovers his gold level insurance doesn't cover treatment for his brain condition. Things go south and he is transformed into The Toxic Avenger, a mutated super human who sets about righting some wrongs in his crime ridden city.

The film attempts to stick as close to the vibe of a Troma film as possible, while still being palatable to the extended audience people like Dinklage, Kevin Bacon and Elijah Wood can bring to the party. This means we get a tonne of ridiculous (and mostly amusing) jokes and references, married to a gory splatter fest that aims to stick to practical effects as much as possible. Despite the film's subtitle being "unrated" the nastier edges of the Troma's 80's output have been sanded off in accordance with modern sensibilities, there is no exploitative nudity or child murder on display here. The result of this update is a movie that plays kind of like a classic Universal monster flick by way of a garishly gory comic book.

In keeping with the practical effects tradition, the titular avenger is played by Luisa Guerreiro inside a fantastically gross bodysuit with Dinklage providing the voice. Together, they craft a likeable and sympathetic monster. Elijah Wood and Kevin Bacon have fun as a hunchbacked henchman and nefarious businessman, respectively, but the stand out antagonist is Julia Davis as Bacon's unhinged assistant. The prolific Jacob Tremblay notches up another lead kid role as Winston's stepson and is as dependably solid as ever.

Underneath all the humour and mayhem, there is a sense of real injustice about charlatan healthcare practices and the systems that deprive and riddle with debt those who have the temerity to get sick. Obviously, there are innumerable films that point to the evils of paid for healthcare, and it certainly isn't examined in any great detail here, but the sentiment is genuine. As evidenced by the fact the filmmakers spent $5 million paying off real life medical debt rather than marketing the film traditionally.

Writer/director Macon Blair has done a solid job of capturing the Troma spirit and while the humour may bemuse some, and the splatter put off others, The Toxic Avenger is a fun and spirited hundred odd minutes. It does take a while to get going though.

7 deadly mops out of 10

Comments

Wasted Men

From Scum to Starred Up, neither the big nor small screen are short of brutally frank depictions of life behind British bars. Wasteman adds a taut, modern take to the pile and shows that life isn't getting any easier inside. Philip Barantini (creator of Boiling Point and Adolescence) is on board as a producer so you know it's going to feel real and the Safdie brothers were at one point attached to direct, so you know it's going to be gut-clenchingly tense. It doesn't disappoint on either front. David Jonsson plays long term convict Taylor. A timid drug addict, he cuts the hair of the top-dog inmates in return for a regular fix and is existing rather than living as the years of his sentence tick by when he gets some unexpected news. Prison overcrowding means he is up for early release, provided he can keep his nose clean for a couple of weeks, something made increasingly tricky by the arrival of his new cellmate Dee (Tom Blyth). Dee encourages Taylor to make contact wit...

More Money More Killing

How to Make a Killing is loosely based on 1949 British crime comedy Kind Hearts and Cornets (which is in turn an adaptation of 1907 novel Israel Rank: The Autobiography of a Criminal). In a world of remakes, reboots and adaptations, that is pretty interesting source material and could almost qualify as an original idea. Unfortunately, the imagination mostly stops there and the film isn't funny or insightful enough to rise above "it's fine" territory. Glenn Powell is Becket Redfellow, a suit salesman who grew up largely in the foster care system as his mother died while he was young. He is heir to the fortune of his mother's estranged family and, in the unlikely event all the other senior Redfellows should perish, he would be a billionaire. A chance encounter with his status obsessed childhood crush Julia (Margaret Qualley) and an unjust demotion at work give him the notion to speed up his inheritance a little. As he arranges "accidents" for his fellow R...

Stars and Their Cars

Crime 101 is named for the California freeway one of the characters commits all his robberies along. It also doubles as describing his MO, he is successful because he makes sure he gets the fundamentals right every time. It can also describe the film itself, which nails the basics of making a slick crime thriller better than just about any other movie has in quite some time. The professional thief is Mike Davis (Chris Hemsworth), a meticulous planner whose jobs never lead to anyone being hurt and are so well executed that nobody even has any idea they are all the work of one man. Nobody that is, except for Mark Ruffalo's Detective Lou Lubesnick, who is determined to catch the "101 Robber" even though his obsession is starting to lead to him being ostracised in the precinct. Both characters come into contact with high value insurance broker Sharon (Halle Berry) as Mike plans a big score and Lou joins the dots in an attempt to track him down. A potential fly in the ointmen...

You Screen, I Scream

The worst thing about Scream 7 isn't actually the film itself. It's the at best cowardly, actions of production company Spyglass Media who fired the star of the previous two films, Melissa Barrera, for daring to have an opinion on genocide. In addition to leaving an icky taste in the mouth, this move cost them fellow star Jenna Ortega and the guy who was supposed to direct the seventh instalment Christopher Landon, resulting in a return to the drawing board to completely rework the film. The only actually good thing about Scream 7 is also nothing to do with the actual film. Series mainstay Neve Campbell missed the previous instalment after producers lowballed her, but the production chaos of their own making means they've had to go crawling back. So Neve returns with a reported $7 million payday, a producer credit and a story based solely around how legendary her character Sydney is. Go her. The actual film doesn't warrant much discussion at all, given it does little mo...

There Can Only be One

Trailers for Him had Jordan Peele's name slapped all over them, which is understandable from a marketing point of view. In reality it is simply produced by the"Get Out" directors company, Monkeypaw Productions. It is actually directed by Justin Tipping, from a script he co-wrote with Skip Bronkie and Zak Akers. The prevalence of Peele's name in the advertising means the film is bound to draw unflattering comparisons with his own work, which is a shame as the film has its own merits. Cameron "Cam" Cade (Tyriq Withers) grew up idolising Isaiah White (Marlon Wayans), star quarterback of the San Antonio Saviours. When White suffers a grisly injury during the Super Bowl, Cade's father tells the young fan that real men like his idol make sacrifices for greatness. Fast forward about a decade and a half and Cam is about to be drafted to the NFL, where he is tipped as a potential challenger to White's "Greatest Of All Time" status. When a mascot in ...

Fifty Shades of Chrononberg

If you've been missing pure David Chrononberg then Crimes of the Future has you covered. It has the lot; body mutilation, main character undergoing a metamorphosis, questions about what defines being human, integrity of the mind, the collision of different world views and pretty much every other recurring theme of his is present and correct. So needless to say, it isn't for everyone. The film takes place in the (possibly near) future, when most humans have evolved to no longer feel pain and in some cases grow mysterious new organs. Viggo Maortensen and Lea Seydoux play a pair of performance artists whose act revolves around removing Mortensen's excess organs in front of a live crowd. Fittingly, given its focus on artits, the film takes place in the orbit of the protagonists with little shown of the world at large. Everything is dingy and grimey, hinting things aren't going swimmingly, and there are vaugue hints at ecological disaster but the characters are all far mor...

Blow My Whistle

Whistle is Corin Hardy's third movie, after his 2015 breakout The Hallow and 2018's Conjuring spin-off The Nun. This new horror flick sits halfway between the indie energy of his maiden effort and the box ticking boredom of his big studio follow-up, with self seriousness butting up against dumb fun. The set-up is most reminiscent of Final Destination, with added high school slasher vibes. Chrys (Dafne Keen) moves in with her cousin Rel's (Sky Yang) family following the death of her father. Within about ten minutes of attending her high school she becomes besotted with Sophie Nellisse's Ellie, ends up in detention after a confrontation with loudmouth basketball player Dean (Jhaleil Swaby) and finds an Aztec death whistle in her new locker. Naturally, the teens end up blowing the death whistle which causes them all to be stalked by their future deaths. This manifests as a ghostly apparition of your dead future self who causes you to suffer said death as soon as they to...

Fast 10 Your Seat Belts

Despite suffering from some well established franchise problems Fast X puts it's pedal to the metal to become one of the saga's best entries. No mean feat for a series 10 films and over 20 years in. The set pieces are a tiny bit more grounded than F9 but still ridiculous and a lot more fun. Various members of the crew play live action Rocket League in Rome, drop out of a plane in a "canoe" and engage in a final chase that is much more satisfying than the turn magnet on and off showdown of the previous film. The film also benifits from an increase in star power and better use of its characters. John Cena returns but he plays the character of Jacob Toretto completely differently and is great fun as he embarks on a road trip with his nephew. Jason Statham is back as Decard Shaw, albeit only as a cameo with the promise of more to come. The film really belongs to franchise newcomer Jason Mamoa as Dante Reyes, son of Fast 5 villain Hernan. Leaving his imposing frame to por...

No Plane No Gain

In many ways Plane is the most generic action movie you could imagine. A former military man who is now a civilian pilot (played, of course, by Gerard Butler) crashes on a rebel malitia held island and must rescue his passangers from the local warlord. Some aspects are a somewhat different to the norm however, making the film a little different, if not necessarily better, than the premise suggests. Firstly, the focus really is on the plane and the ability of Captain Broddie Torrance (classic name for a Butler character) to fly it. This gives the proceedings a disaster movie feel for larges stretches. The titular plane is very much of the plot driving (or flying) variety, able to withstand hails of bullets while being the only airliner not capable of shrugging off a lightning strike. Butler's Captain Torrence is a little different than you might be expecting also. He isn't an ass kicking kill machine but rather just a very good pilot with a "no man left behind" atti...

Summer of Discontent

Unlike say, Final Destination, I Know What You Did Last Summer is not an idea ripe for remakes and sequels. Once you've told the story of a group of people leaving someone for dead, only to be hunted down a year later in grizzly revenge, there isn't really anywhere else to go while sticking close enough to the formulae to warrant being a successor. Its not a major surprise then that this sequel to the 1997 movie of the same name does little more than tread most of the same water as its precursor while trying to reference and acknowledge the original at every opportunity. This time round, the central cast are a little older than the high school graduates of 97 but still act like teenagers. Some of the clunkiest exposition dialogue of recent memory attempts to fill out their back stories but you're left with a group of characters you can't wait to watch die. This would be fine if it wasn't for the fact that, for most of the runtime, the inept hook wielding killer ...

Dan Says its Alright

Search This Blog