jamesgandrew Melvin, a dorky teenager who works as a mop boy at the Tromaville health club, is harassed by his peers which results in him landing in a vat of toxic waste. He then transforms into The Toxic Avenger where he endeavours to fight crime and bring justice to Tromaville. Lloyd Kaufman got the idea of setting a horror movie at a health club when he was working as a pre-production supervisor for Rocky. He then set out with his friend Michael Herz to make the movie under the name 'Health Club'. This later developed into what we now know as 'The Toxic Avenger'.The Toxic Avenger is one of those b-movies that is so well done in its execution that you can't help but love it. From the outrageous and over exaggerated performances to its tongue and cheek writing to its extreme graphic violence, it's got everything you want from a movie of this kind. It's self-aware of its outrageous premise and has fun with it by satirising eighties culture and pushing the limits of controversial content. It spawned a plethora of sequels and spin offs, even infamously a Saturday morning cartoon for kids which also resulted in toys and other merchandise. However, the original The Toxic Avenger is NOT for kids. It has sex, swearing, drugs and violence that I can imagine many parents at the time were shocked to find out if they didn't look at the R rating on the cover of the VHS. The Toxic Avenger is an entertaining and hysterically funny film that I recommend to fans of superhero comedies.

shlunka Joe Ritter's script felt like the lines from Commando extras infused with a tinge of glamour and a Dante/Raimi darkness. The lead protagonist is a C.H.U.Dian built superhero version of Day of the Dead's "Bud". (So, in essence, it's Bud the C.H.U.D...) Andree Miranda plays the attractive but flat testosterone absorbing female better than Roxanne Kernohan. The gore is cartoonish but satisfying for those who expect the entire movie to be like Emil's toxic demise in Robocop. Lloyd Kaufman's direction was perfectly lackluster, being sure to get plenty of gore and cheese without any substance to throw off the taste. While Mark Torgl's lead feels eerily similar to Simple Jack, in a good way. If anything, this movie shows that, in order to go full vengeance, sometimes you have to go full retard.

Jack Hawkins (Hawkensian) I have been informed that The Toxic Avenger is one of Troma's better films, so it was perhaps not the most appropriate introduction to their notorious catalogue that contains titles such as Nazi Surfers Must Die and Class of Nuke 'Em High.I was expecting gratuitous nudity and violence, and I was presented with it, but one thing I didn't expect was the pantomime acting. There's an array of absurd caricatures, including Bozo (Gary Schneider) a psychotic, gym frequenting idiot who enjoys running children over with his friends Slug (Robert Prichard) and Julie (Cindy Manion). Whilst at the gym, they antagonise the janitor Melvin (Mark Torgl), a ridiculously dorky moron who spends much of his screen presence squirming and baring his comedy-looking teeth. I thought there would be a good old fashioned revenge film to be found in The Toxic Avenger, and there is to a certain extent, however the relentlessly silly acting broke any modicum of investment I may have had in the characters to the point where it became almost unwatchable.Other characters include Mayor Belgoody (Pat Ryan Jr), the corpulent, corrupt mayor of 'Tromaville'; the German police chief (David Weiss), who accidentally exposes his closeted Nazism by compulsively performing the Nazi salute and referring to the mayor as his Fuhrer and Sara (Andree Maranda), the Toxic Avenger's attractive, blind girlfriend whose condition is often the subject of juvenile jokes, the most frequent one being her stick inadvertently making contact with Toxie's crotch.I'm sure most are familiar with the premise – during a particularly humiliating session of bullying, Melvin the janitor falls out of a window and into a barrel of toxic waste, transforming him into a super strong and super righteous mutant – The Toxic Avenger.Performed by Mitchell Cohen, the Toxic Avenger's, or Toxie's, screen presence is the film's chief merit. The prosthetics and makeup applied to Cohen's body are very good considering the budget and Troma's reputation. The scene in which Melvin transforms into Toxie is also appropriately painful looking and gruesome, reminding me of the transformation scene in An American Werewolf in London released three years prior.What I found particularly funny was the Toxic Avenger's voice. He initially only grunts and roars, I assumed he could no longer speak, however the toxic waste somehow provided him with a silky smooth mid-Atlantic accent (the voice acting provided by Kenneth Kessler). Kessler's diction is made for radio, it never gets old hearing it emanate from such a grotesque mouth. Amusingly, whenever Toxie speaks in this accent, his back is always facing the camera; this I thought was a reflection of the budget, so I was surprised when in the latter stages of the film you see Toxie speaking directly into the camera with no technical hitches at all – a sudden influx of money, perhaps?Like everything else in the film, the violence is amateurish. At times it reminded me of my friend and I's home movies. Using the 'DigitalBlue' camera, we created whole horror film franchises including the terrifying 'Oven Glove Man' series and homages to the infamous Jason Voorhees of Friday the 13th. Inevitably, the two characters eventually clashed in a Freddy vs. Jason fashion, my friend was the 'Oven Glove Man' and I, wearing a fancy dress hockey mask, was Jason Voorhees.If my memory is correct, the majority of the films followed the same format of a murder scene followed by a still shot of the victim covered in terrible blood and gore effects that I applied with relish using the software's paintbrush function. Now and again the film felt like this, there would be lengthy fight scenes with little in the way of tangible choreography and nothing in the way of viscera. The viewers' bloodlust is only given slight satiation when Toxie deals a finishing blow and the incapacitated victim's wounds are shown in often motionless close-up shots, some of which being very gory, particularly the scene in which Bozo runs over a teenager's head.With gore, scantily clad women and ridiculous campy humour, The Toxic Avenger has many earmarks of a Troma film, however, unlike most comparable films, there are enough laughs to make its 87 minutes bearable and at times somewhat entertaining.60%www.hawkensian.com

BA_Harrison Meek mop-handler Melvin (Mark Torgl) is transformed into a tutu wearing, muscle-bound, crime-busting mutant (played by Mitch Cohen) after a cruel prank results in him falling head first into a barrel of radioactive sludge. With his home town of Tromaville ruled by a crooked mayor (Pat Ryan) and his corrupt police-force, there's plenty for this hideous hero to do, but it's not 'all work and no play': Toxie also finds love with super sexy blind babe Sara (Andree Maranda), with whom he sets up home in the local industrial waste dump.Loaded with terrible dialogue, outrageous gore, puerile humour, and gross caricatures, this is pretty much the archetypal Troma movie—an extremely dumb trash classic designed for those days when thinking feels like too much of a chore. Topless bimbos, gratuitous violence against minors, dogs and a dwarf, some surprisingly good stunts (including an impressive full body burn), a few genuinely amusing moments, baddies with stupid names, baddies wearing silly outfits, car crashes, baddies doing inept kung fu: for the select few for whom good taste and quality are of zero importance when it comes to their entertainment, The Toxic Avenger should prove to be a whole lot of demented fun.