Macon Blair's take on the 1984 cult classic of the same name starts with spiraling, violent and colorful visuals overlaid with a commandingly grave voiceover from star Peter Dinklage.
"I didn't want any of this. Not the grief. Not the illness. Certainly not the heroic voiceover. That's not who I am. But sometimes you gotta do something," Dinklage confidently declares.
Dinklage plays Winston Gooze, a janitor who is quite literally dumped into the reluctant role of hero after his workplace robbery takes a noxious turn. After a gunshot to the face and one little dip in a toxic soup, the once timid janitor emerges as the purple puss-filled Toxic Avenger, or as long-time fans know him, "Toxie."
Blair remembers being morbidly curious about the B-movie franchise after coming across its video rental cover.
"Toxie had a completely berserk cover with this mutant American flag and a map, and it was always like 'what is that?'" Blair said. "My friend's older brother, who was the one who would be like, 'these are the cool records to listen to. [These are] the cool movies to watch,' he brought it over and showed it to us and we were totally captivated. The sense of humor on one hand, and also the do-it-yourself quality of it on the other hand. And this was right at a moment when we had just gotten our hands on a VHS camera and we were teaching ourselves how to make movies."
Decades later, Blair talked to NPR about balancing his love of the source material with his desire to leave a mark on the franchise .
It can't be a carbon copy
The foundation for Blair's version of "The Toxic Avenger" is basically the same. Winston Gooze is "kind of an outsider" and "kind of an underdog," he said. But there are some important changes to his character.
Firstly, Gooze might still be mild-mannered, but he's also much older. He's lost his wife and has taken on the responsibility of raising his teenage stepson.
"He's [Gooze] kind of on the receiving end of a lot of different kinds of abuse, either from his insurance company or his job or just where he lives," Blair said. "He's just having a hard time and he's trying to get by and in a way falling into a vat of toxic sludge makes it all worse, as you would think, and in other ways, it's kind of the solution to his problems."
Also unlike the original, Gooze is suffering from an unnamed terminal diagnosis. When his comically Kafkaesque insurance company denies his claim Gooze sets out on a doomed workplace robbery which sees him transform into "Toxie."
According to Blair, the changes make for a captivating update without losing the original's charm.
"You know, in the original, the character was a younger guy and it was about him kind of being bullied and he was kind of trying to meet girls," Blair said. "And it's a very singular movie. I felt like if we did the exact same story, we would be walking too much in the footsteps of the original. And so one of the things that we sort of changed was to make the guy a little bit older and have this whole story be more about trying to hold his family unit together.So that's sort of the emotional thing we hang all the jokes and foolishness on," Blair said.
Toxie enemy #1: The American healthcare system
The city setting for this new iteration of "The Toxic Avenger" makes Batman's Gotham look like a utopia. It's gritty, chaotic and dystopic, but also absurdist.
And just like Batman, "Toxie" has a rogue's gallery of villainous foils to defeat (and unlike Batman, he's not shy about maiming or killing his baddies, whether that's by popping heads off bodies or pulling entrails from anuses). But the overarching villain here isn't a single person–it's an industry.
"It's a David and Goliath story and so [we wanted] to give him the most insurmountable possible villain to sort of go up against. He definitely has to fight the street criminals and these sort of cackling weirdo bad guys, but behind that is this huge monolithic system that's impenetrable," Blair said.
And to underscore just how believable that premise is, the film's distributor Cinneverse partnered with nonprofit Undue Medical Debt to use the movie's remaining marketing budget to help erase the medical debt of real people. A statement from the distributor revealed that "At least $5 million in medical debt gets erased no matter what. And every million bucks the movie makes at the box office, another million in debt will go up in toxic smoke."
Blood and guts can be heartwarming?
Another small change Blair made to the source material is indicative of the softer, warmer interior to the horror-comedy – and no, he's not talking about viscera.
In the original, the younger "Toxie" transforms after bullies force him to don a tutu as they ridicule him and dump him into a barrel of toxic sludge. But Blair has created a sweeter backstory here . In this new iteration, Toxie already had this tutu as part of a family Halloween costume and chose to put it on in a futile attempt to surprise and cheer up his downtrodden teen stepson Wade, played by Jacob Tremblay.
"Like Batman's got to have the cape, and Superman got to have the S, you know the Toxic Avenger has got to have the tutu somehow," Blair said. "Honestly for me I always felt like there was some element of sweetness in the originals for all the insane gore and things that were going on."
Practically everyone likes a good "homemade" movie
One thing Blair was adamant about was sticking with as many practical effects as possible.
"I would say probably like 75% [of the effects were] practical and then we certainly had several effects that were all digital and a little sweetening here and there," Blair said. "When I saw it at a very young… age, the idea that it was homemade struck me for the first time. Like, 'oh, these are just regular people. It's not Hollywood. They just got a camera and made their own movie.' And that handmade quality was a big part of that."
It's also why Blair wanted a real actor in a full "Toxie" getup to be the main attraction. There is no digitally rendered monster in his movie, and Blair said it's precisely for that reason that the movie also feels so authentic and faithful to the original. When people get sprayed with the crimson results of vengeance, the audience doesn't just see it, they feel it.
New generation, same problems
This remake of "The Toxic Avenger" first made its debut in 2023 at Fantastic Fest, but it took a long time for the grindhouse gorefest to finally get a distributor. Yet the film's sociopolitical commentary still touches on today's hot topics.
At one point in the movie a group of young men take the people in a restaurant hostage because its name was changed from Mr. Meat to Mrs. Meat. And the movie also features maniacal tech billionaires, greedy health insurers and a housing crisis to boot.
But Blair cautioned against reading too much into any real-world parallels.
"I think the idea of people being violently resistant to change or rich people extracting everything for themselves at the expense of people underneath them, things like this, they never go out of style. And that would be timely if we made this movie in 1984, [or] if we made this movie 100 years ago, and if it feels especially timely now, then that's a bummer," Blair said.
The 50-year-old director said his first concern was making sure that diehard "Toxie" fans felt seen. At the same time, he said he hopes that a new generation of fans could find themselves in this irreverent allegory for standing up for your community, just like he did all those years ago.
"The first priority was to make sure that the fans – who are the reason why we're still talking about this movie 30, 40 years later – felt served and felt like this thing that they loved wasn't taken off in some totally other direction," Blair said. "But at the same time, there's a responsibility to try and reach a wider audience. So it was sort of trying to do both."
"The Toxic Avenger" is in theaters now.
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