Monster Melvin Makes Madness

I feel like any time I discuss a Troma film I have to raise the same caveats. When you watch a Troma film you have to accept that you’re watching something at a very different level from a Hollywood production. Troma exists in their own sphere, sort of like the films from the Asylum, except with a much weirder, darker, and zanier bent. The Asylum’s mockbusters are shitty simply because they were produced at the lowest-cost to make something with a similar name and dupe people into buying a crappy film. Troma, though, made low-budget schlock-fests that at least had the decency to know they were supposed to be shitty, so they had fun. They weren’t good movies, but they were enjoyably awful.

Take a film like Frankenhooker. You don’t watch a film called Frankenhooker because you expect it to be good. You know, just from the title, that it’s going to be a winking parody of sci-fi monster films, with a generous amount of titillation and stupidity, like a Z-grade to a Z-grade version of The Reanimator. But the charm of it is that it lives up to expectations. It’s weird and silly and takes some very strange turns as it follows its plotline. No doubt, though, the film knows what it wants to be and it follows its weird, freaky heart.

That’s the charm of these films, and their 1984 effort, The Toxic Avenger, certainly has that same spirit. A parody of superhero stories, especially those that involved a nerdy guy getting a dose of something that should have outright killed him but, instead, gives him superpowers, The Toxic Avenger is a weird, gross, over-the-top film that goes-for-broke in just about every scene of the movie. It’s not good, not by normal standards, but it certainly meets all the expectations people would and should have from a Troma film. That means it’s not for everyone, but for a certain segment of the viewing public, this film is exactly what they want.

The film focuses on Melvin Ferd (played in human form by Mark Torgl), a nerdy guy that works at the Tromavilla health club as a janitor. He’s picked on most days by aggressive bro-dudes Bozo (Gary Schneider) and Slug (Robert Prichard) and their girlfriends Julie (Cindy Manion) and Wanda (Jennifer Babtist). After an incident where Julie engineers a particularly embarrassing moment for Melvin, the guy goes running out a window, right into a barrel of toxic waste (because Tromavilla is the toxic waste capital of the world). Everyone points at him and laughs as he goes running off, down the stream, toxic sludge streaming off of him.

The toxic waste should have killed him, but curiously it doesn’t. Instead it transforms Melvin into a massive, hulking brute (performed by Mitch Cohen, voiced by Kenneth Kessler). The transformation also seems to give Melvin a kind of psychic alignment. He could sense evil and would show up at the scenes of crimes, ready to stop the bad guys. After a few of these events, where the monstrous Melvin shows up, stopping bad guys (by murdering them in gruesome ways), the townsfolk of Tromavilla begin to view him as a heroic monster, one that cares about them. The evil mayor, Peter Belgoody (Pat Ryan Jr.), suspects that once the monster is done cleaning up the streets he’ll start in on the government, as as a corrupt official making money off the ruination of the city, Belgoody simply can’t let that stand. It’s time, he thinks, to kill the monster and keep Tromavilla for the villains instead.

The Toxic Avenger is a curious film. It’s a superhero parody but it came out at a time when there weren’t really that many superhero films to parody. The biggest superhero films of the time were the SupermanThe first big superhero from DC Comics, Superman has survived any number of pretenders to the throne, besting not only other comic titans but even Wolrd War II to remain one of only three comics to continue publishing since the 1940s. movies starring Christopher Reeve, but The Toxic Avenger doesn’t set its sights on those films. It goes older, poking more fun at the old 1960s superhero stories, like those written by Stan Lee and Jack Kirby. A normal guy finds himself bathed in some kind of radiation and suddenly becomes a hulking monster with a heart of gold. What should have killed him made him stronger instead.

It’s a solid premise, and from a certain perspective it works well as a parody. There are moments of genuine amusement to be had as our heroic monster shows up randomly at the scene of a crime, ostensibly to stop the bad guys. And he does, just with more viciousness, brutality, and murder than any of the classic Silver Age heroes would have performed. There’s a simple, decidedly gory, directness you can appreciate about Toxie as he goes about, slaughtering his way through bad guys, one that certainly adds to the humor of the film.

At the same time, the movie itself really doesn’t try to be realistic or grounded. Even outside of its mutated superhero, the film plays everything as wildly over-the-top as it can. Performances are heightened well past overacting, and there isn’t a single character in the film that behaves like a rational, normal human. Melvin’s bullies, Bozo and Sludge, are so campy and silly you’d think they were starring in some kind of after school special about the dangers of vehicular homicide (a sport they engage in regularly) but, no, these are the villains of this film.

Well, sort of. One of the big flaws with The Toxic Avenger is that it really doesn’t have any kind of focus to its story. Melvin turns into Toxie in the first act and then, from there, he randomly wanders around, killing bad guys. He dispatches each of his bullies one at a time, but they’re disposed of before the climactic last act. Meanwhile the evil Mayor is introduced but rarely used in the film until suddenly he has to become the heavy before the film reaches its conclusion. The movie has too many pieces going on in too many directions, removing any sense of cohesion to the story.

And while we’re picking flaws out in the film, I’d be remiss if I didn’t note how many offensive stereotypes the film trucks in. The movie is aggressively racist, sexist, homophobic, transphobic, and more. It’s all done tongue-in-cheek, yes, but by the third time you see the over-the-top leather-daddy gay couple taking up space in shots, you begin to think that the film doesn’t really have much in the way of humor outside of punching down at various minority groups. The superhero parody stuff is funny, but everything else around it is not.

That is, really, the biggest issue with the film: for a superhero parody it’s not really funny. While I was amused at how the film showed that classic Silver Age superhero origins would have led to horribly mutated people that couldn’t function in normal society (taking the idea of the The HulkOnce the brilliant Dr. Bruce Banner had dreams of making the world a better place by building super soldiers to act as a shield for all mankind. Then an accident at his lab bathed him in gamma radiation. Now he has a living nightmare, as a big green guy lives within, just waiting for the rage to take over so he can be free. and pushing it to its natural limits), and I did think the gore was fun, I never laughed (or even lightly chuckled) at the film. Most of its humor didn’t land for me at all, and I came out of the film giving it more of a shrug than a compliment for its few good ideas.

I can see why some liked The Toxic Avenger back in the day. It was a cult hit that found a solid audience on home video, making back far more than its tiny $500k production budget. I applaud what the film could do, and I certainly don’t want to yuck anyone else’s yum. If you liked this movie that’s fine. It’s so over-the-top that even the offensive material is hard to take seriously. All the same, it didn’t click for me. It’s one of a dozen or so Troma films I’ve watched where I’ve said, “I see what they were trying for, but it just didn’t work.” The Toxic Avenger is a Troma film, through and through, and just because it’s one of their better movies doesn't make it actually good. Rising about the toxic sludge of their catalogue is the bare minimum a film should achieve in my book, and The Toxic Avenger barely does that at all.