Some monsters crawl back from the grave; others crawl from the sewer.
With The Toxic Avenger (2025), writer-director Macon Blair has achieved something bordering on alchemy — turning the sludge of 1980s exploitation cinema into a molten reflection of our contemporary world. It’s less a remake than a resurrection: a grotesque, heartfelt eulogy for a time when bad taste was an act of rebellion.

The original 1984 Toxic Avenger was pure Troma chaos — an anarchic cocktail of slime, slapstick, and splatter. It was both anti-superhero and anti-society, gleefully dismembering the Reagan-era obsession with moral cleanliness. Blair’s revival doesn’t sanitise that legacy; it weaponises it. If the first film was a punk scream from the gutter, the new one is a howl echoing from the biohazard bin of late capitalism.

Peter Dinklage’s portrayal of Winston Gooze — a meek janitor transformed into a radioactive antihero — anchors the absurdity with tragic weight. Dinklage plays the part not for camp, but for catharsis: his deformity becomes the mirror of a system that feeds on deforming its own. Kevin Bacon’s villainous corporate baron, all Botox and bile, feels like a mutant descendant of every Troma CEO caricature — but here, he’s horrifyingly real.

Blair’s vision retains Troma’s vulgar spirit while finding unexpected poetry in the putrescence. His Toxic Avenger is as much about class rage and environmental collapse as it is about geysers of green goo. Every viscera-slick punch lands with the melancholy of a generation choking on the toxins it helped create. The violence is ludicrous, yes, but the laughter catches in the throat — this is camp reimagined as ecological despair.

What’s remarkable is how The Toxic Avenger feels simultaneously nostalgic and corrosively modern. Blair pays homage to Lloyd Kaufman’s transgressive humour, but refracts it through the aesthetics of contemporary superhero fatigue. His monster isn’t an accident of nuclear waste but of bureaucracy — a man destroyed by the very infrastructures meant to protect him.
The film’s gore set-pieces are less about indulgence than excess as indictment: when the blood sprays, it sprays neon, irony, and sorrow.

There’s an undercurrent of empathy that never existed in the original. Blair, ever the humanist even amidst the carnage, treats his freaks with tenderness. The mutants, misfits, and malformed are no longer punchlines; they’re the ones inheriting the Earth — or what’s left of it. It’s as though the spirit of Troma grew up, got angry, and learned how to aim its sludge cannon.

The Prognosis:

In the landscape of 2025 horror, where clean franchises and polished dread dominate, The Toxic Avenger feels like a badly needed contamination. It reminds us that horror’s job isn’t always to terrify — sometimes, it’s to repulse, provoke, and unsettle in the service of truth. Blair’s remake drips with the very stuff most studios would rather wash away.

And that’s precisely why it matters.
Because amid the algorithmic uniformity of modern genre filmmaking, The Toxic Avenger dares to be disgusting — and in doing so, it becomes pure again.

• Saul Muerte

THE TOXIC AVENGER – BUY OR RENT NOW