Punk rock, toxic waste, mutations: The Toxic Avenger in a 4K home cinema test

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What do you do with a film that is so bloody, anarchic, and politically incorrect that test viewers leave the cinema in droves and the legal departments of major studios develop toxic stress bumps? You send it through years of post-production hell, declare it "unreleasable," and finally release it in Germany as an uncut 4K spectacle for home cinema.

That's precisely what happened to the film "The Toxic Avenger." Great fun that has just been released on Blu-ray disc, Ultra-HD Blu-ray (UHD), and streaming – and which we definitely don't want to withhold from our readers.

Macon Blair's new interpretation of the 1984 original "The Toxic Avenger" is not a soulless Hollywood remake, but a highly explosive declaration of love for the trash film. It proves that radioactive slime and star power don't have to be mutually exclusive. Original and remake play wonderfully with the methods of so-called camp by radically exaggerating good-and-evil schemes, emotions, and violence, thus countering any claim to seriousness.

Those who want to know if Peter Dinklage with his glowing green mop can outdo the evil Kevin Bacon and Elijah Wood, thus saving the legacy of the old Troma studio for the present. They will find the appropriate analysis on the following pages. Before we turn to the picture and sound quality of the new discs and streaming versions, we will first take a look at the production history and the legacy of the original.

The Return of the Mutant

Before we dive deep into today's radioactive muck, we must bow to the institution without which modern genre cinema would hardly be conceivable. It is the year 1974 when Lloyd Kaufman and Michael Herz founded the Troma label. Their goal was as simple as it was radical: to produce films whose budgets would barely cover the catering for an average Hollywood production. Troma became the Gallic village of independent cinema – a place where bad taste was elevated to an art form and social taboos were not just broken, but lustfully trampled.

This anarchic spirit of Troma had an impact far beyond the studio and influenced later directors and styles. The studio was an unofficial film school for everyone who understood that raw energy and attitude are often more important than flawless surfaces.

The original Toxic Avenger from 1984 was by no means just cheap video store trash, but a subcultural bombshell that can currently be seen on Amazon Prime. Formally, the films borrowed elements from splatter horror, but in terms of content, they stood in the tradition of comedies by John Waters or "The Rocky Horror Picture Show." Camp celebrated subversion, as sociologist Susan Sontag described in her 1964 essay Notes on Camp.

The Toxic Avenger uses camp as an aesthetic strategy of over-affirmation: the emotions are too big, the morality too crude, and the violence too over-the-top. The monster is not a cool avenger, but a good-natured simpleton who is loved by a blind woman and helps old ladies across the street. The violence doesn't seem dangerous, but like a bad costume. It's loud and sticky – visibly fake. It's like a five-year-old child smearing themselves with tomato sauce on Halloween and shouting, "Look, Mom, I'm a zombie." You immediately see: this is play, pose, costume.

With these methods of camp, the film practically mocks culture-conservative outrage and youth protection. The age rating "18 and over" treats it as if it wanted to glorify real violence or provide moral role models. By reacting with seriousness to camp, then, as now, youth protection falls for the film's trick. It mistakes tomato sauce for blood and, with the large red seal "FSK 18," becomes part of the joke itself.

Without these bloody excesses, there would probably be no meta-violence of Deadpool or the visual radicality of Takashi Miike in this form. Lord of the Rings director Peter Jackson combined camp and splatter multiple times in his early films like "Bad Taste" or "Meet the Feebles." Even James Gunn, now the architect of the DC cinematic universe, began his career as a screenwriter for Troma. And even Quentin Tarantino over-the-top his violence scenes to such an extent that, like camp, they lead reality to the absurd and evoke laughter instead of fear.