The Toxic Avenger (2025)

Winston Gooze (Peter Dinklage), the janitor at a corrupt drug manufacturer, has just been given six months to live. That night, the single parent gets drunk and roams the streets as he wrestles with the fear of leaving his stepson (Jacob Tremblay) alone. How he ends up in a tutu is less believable than how his counterpart, Melvin Junko, ended up in a tutu in Lloyd Kaufman’s original film of the same name. (This time around, the Toxic Avenger’s origin story isn’t part of a cruel prank, so one wonders: Why didn’t he just take the tutu off before leaving the house?) Ultimately, Winston decides to rob his employers and finds himself in the factory’s toxic runoff, which hideously deforms him, but gives him superhuman strength.

The large cast of villains (I especially like the henchman who never misses an opportunity to do a flip) are led by the corporation’s evil CEO, played by Kevin Bacon, who surprisingly understands the kind of movie he’s making, but at no point tries to hams it up as Hollywood actors tend to do in these kind of films. His runt of a little brother is played by Elijah Wood, who seems to genuinely enjoy appearing in oddball genre affairs ever since securing his massive fortune in The Lord of the Rings trilogy. Meanwhile Peter Dinklage perfects the right amount of grounded acting and comedic timing.

As a lifelong fan of the original, I went into The Toxic Avenger fully expecting it to suck as reboots ~~of cult classics~~ almost always do. I was surprised to find the most competently paced of the five films and, overall, I’d place it second only to the 1984 original… and if you were to rate it higher, I wouldn’t feel the need to fight you. Recently, there’s been much hullabaloo about The Naked Gun reboot potentially resurrecting the spoof film. Here’s literally the same type of cathartic laughter.

The trailers don’t convey how solid the movie is; Lloyd Kaufman’s films flew in the face of Hollywood conventions while the reboot prefers to satirize and indulge in them equally. In some ways it feels like a throwback to the superhero film of the 90s, before they became monotonously noisy and bloated with clap-bait for nerds. I know the competition is extremely incompetent, but director Macon Blair has crafted one of the least insulting reboots I’ve ever seen. This is as good as a mainstream Troma movie can possibly be.

My only complaint is they didn’t kill the cat. What’s a Troma movie without a handful of “that’s so wrong” deaths played for shameless entertainment? In the original you had old ladies beaten to death and children’s skulls crushed by moving cars. You could say this one pulls its punches in that respect, but that doesn’t feel like its intention. It’s just doing its own thing, in its own way, and it does it especially well.

31 Days of Gore: The Unnecessary Reboot! (10th Anniversary)

I haven’t done 31 Days of Gore in years, but I’d be remiss if I didn’t do it again for the 10th anniversary. In search of the best gore flicks, I’ll feature one horror movie a day, every day, from October 1st to Halloween. In order to recapture the thrill of being a pre-internet kid with an unrestricted membership to a mom & pop video store, I’ll be choosing movies based solely on their covers. I have no clue which movies I’ll feature yet, but there are a few traditions during this pointless exercise in endurance:

A shot-on-VHS flick
A melt movie
An anthology film (usually several).
Italo-horror (my favorite).
Slasher films (often combined with Italo-horror).
Empire/Full Moon movies

Returning this year is The Gore Meter, which assigns each movie a rating between 1 and 4 based on the satisfaction level of the gore effects, as determined by yours truly. The ratings are rarely indicative of the movie’s overall quality as there have been plenty of movies I loved that ranked low on the meter. I know, it’s a strange (stupid) rating system, but the gore angle was the only thing that made this feature feel worthwhile as there are already several content creators doing 31-day movie challenges for the month of October (I imagine more than ever now).

In other news, I finally got a stupid Letterboxd. The reason I’ve avoided that site for so long is because Goodreads was like crack to me until I finally kicked the habit and deleted it (and promptly started a new account before deleting that one, too). At any rate, follow me on Letterboxd and I’ll follow your dorky ass back.

So mark your colanders, spaghetti-heads. 31 Days of Gore returns in thirty-one days and I already regret committing to this!

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31 Days of Gore

Frankie Freako (2024)

When Conor’s wife gets dolled up in lingerie for date night, she tells him she was thinking that maybe they could do a little more than hold hands for a change. “What more is there?” Conor asks incredulously. There are many movies (most of them) in which I simply wouldn’t accept a joke as lame as that, but it’s less about the joke and more about the way it’s told. In his previous film, Psycho Goreman, director Steven Kostanski included a scene that had me laugh uncontrollably for several minutes straight; it involved a telepathic connection taking place, without warning, in a bathroom.

In an even earlier picture of his, Manborg, Kostanski crafted an entire feature held together by a few hundred bucks, duct tape, and a load of guerrilla creativity. That movie relied heavily (and charmingly) on the kind of CGI that wouldn’t convince a toddler, but boy was it fun. The bigger his budgets get, the less he relies on CGI and the more he employs the kind of practical effects that tickle me to pieces. In Frankie Freako, I’m thrilled to report the creature effects are obvious puppets.

Conor, frustrated by the fact that even his boss thinks he’s a hopeless square, decides to call a party hotline as advertised on TV. Perhaps it’s more of a Canadian thing, but I ate, slept, and breathed late night television in the states and I absolutely do not remember any such advertisements for party lines that didn’t promise scantily clad women would call you, but I digress. Upon waking up the following morning, Conor discovers he blacked out while partying hard the night before. His trashed home is now inhabited by three prankster creatures of the Ghoulies variety who refuse to leave until Conor learns to lighten up permanently.

It’s not long before the evil corporation that subjugated Frankie Freako’s entire planet catches wind of the creatures’ whereabouts and kidnaps them along with Conor. The bad guys are voiced by the Red Letter Media regulars, which was particularly surprising as I clocked Rich Evans’ voice in Psycho Goreman immediately, but in this one, I had no idea he had such a large role (the main villain, in fact) until the credits rolled. At any rate, Conor must let his freak(o) flag fly in order to get back to earth and rekindle his relationship with his wife. All the while, Kostanski has fun with the kind of absurd plot conventions that were only routine in the coked-up 80s.

As of this writing, the movie is available on Shudder.

28 Years Later

I can’t remember the last time a trailer gave away so little plot information. It advertises a man and his twelve year old boy will leave the safety of their fortified island community to explore the mainland, which has been overrun by those infected by the psycho-virus Rage for twenty-eight years. This accurately represents perhaps twenty minutes of the film’s runtime. What happens next feels like truly uncharted territory… which is fitting for the crazed subject matter.

The enigmatic trailer also gives us only a fleeting glimpse of Ralph Fiennes, looking absolutely insane with his bald head and red skin. His mysterious character is spoken about in hushed whispers throughout the first half of the film, adding to the suspense of his eventual reveal. You think you have a pretty good idea of who he is and what kind of role he’ll fulfill, but you probably don’t. To say I was hyped to see this character is an understatement. I wasn’t let down in the least as he’s the best part of the movie.

As with 28 Weeks Later, this movie opens with a flashback to the first year of the virus’s spread. The opening isn’t as intense as the one which featured Robert Carlyle making an impossible decision, but it’s comforting to see Danny Boyle hit the ground running for his return to the series. You’d think the director’s Oscar might’ve gone to his head, steering this sequel straight into “elevated horror” territory; instead he has a group of infected psychopaths shred through a roomful of helpless children before descending on a hysterically laughing priest. Anyone who’s spent any time reading this blog will know this is exactly the kind of horror I cherish: the kind that isn’t embarrassed of the genre’s roots.

In more than one interview, Danny Boyle has tried to make the case that the 28 series aren’t zombie movies. In this movie, screenwriter Alex Garland has a Swedish soldier wash up on shore and flat-out refer to the infected people as “zombies,” perhaps jokingly. This is a jarring thing to hear when actual zombie movies typically go out of their way to avoid the “Z” word (which is even riffed on in Shaun of the Dead), as if they take place in a universe in which George Romero never existed. Speaking of the soldier, I previously pointed out that these movies are at their best when the military forces are absent. I’m happy to report the military presence in this one is applied even more sparingly than it was in the original picture.

In his genre movies, Danny Boyle has had a strange tendency to go off the rails in the final act (28 Days Later, Sunshine, Trainspotting 2) with wildly uneven results. This time Boyle tempers his tendencies… until the final two minutes, at which point he gloriously doubles down. Before that, however, 28 Years Later delivers the most emotionally satisfying conclusion, which relies less on spectacle and more on character and performance.

Movies like this tend to grow on me with time as I forget all but the most memorable scenes. It will likely be another ten years before I can honestly say which I enjoyed more: the original or this one. I would not be a bit surprised if it’s this one. There’s so much I want to discuss here, particularly the effortlessness of Jodie Comer’s performance, but I wouldn’t dream of spoiling what the trailer didn’t.