when idiocy is so liberating

Il Toxic Avenger the original, the one from 1984, is perhaps Troma’s best film – assuming that it makes sense to think of a “best film” by this production company that has become the epitome of trash and bad taste under the sign of the hat-trick gore, tits and laughter – but it is certainly the most famous. Furthermore, it is very possible, indeed even very probable, that the vast majority of those who will go to see this new Toxic Avenger I have never seen, but perhaps not even heard of, the first one.
And so it would be a bit useless here to underline whether and how and to what extent this new film may or may not have betrayed the spirit of the original, which in any case was above all – to put it briefly – a very acidic, demented and subversive attack on the hedonism and individualism of the Eighties. More useful, perhaps, to underline how today only two elements of that Troma trifecta remain, while the third, sex, eroticism, or simply nudity, has essentially evaporated.
On the other hand, times have changed, and we all know very well that we are living in times that are much more moralistic and censorious, on certain topics, than was previously the case.

Times have changed, forty years have passed, the world and cinema have evolved (not necessarily for the better), and everything we find in this new Toxic Avenger is the result of that evolution.
For example: instead of sadistic bullies, almost gods Patrick Bateman demented and demented, a not much more brilliant CEO of a parapharmaceutical company, who spreads tumors like they were sweets thanks to the products he sells and the waste (toxic, obviously) he produces. And so Eat the rich here too, in some way, with the revenge of a very proletarian hero on the one who was his employer and the cause of all his evils: in step with the times, in fact.
Keeping up with the times also seems to be the motivation behind the choice to insert a familiar subplot of the protagonist which perhaps isn’t entirely sappy, and which all in all doesn’t go very well with the rest of the film, but which betrays its more anarchic spirit a little. But, in fact, times have changed, films must satisfy certain criteria and respect certain limits, especially if what produces you is no longer (only) Threebut the mini-major that is the Legendary.
Times have changed, and it is not strange, actually completely logical, that Macon Blair in this film he also took into consideration – while reviewing levels, aspirations and production scales, not to mention the cut and point of view – everything that has happened since the birth of the modern cinecomic to today.

But in the end, not even all this matters that much.

What matters is that, whatever his backstory, this Toxic Avenger also ends up tearing off limbs, disemboweling bellies and exploding skulls. It matters what Macon Blairalthough protected by Linus’s cover of a few too many subplots, and a few too many feel-good messages (the pseudo Riff Raff played by Elijah Wood is a late but timely example), had the desire and the recklessness to shoot, today, a film truly free to be stupid and even almost demented at timesto embrace gore like we once did, and to really try, with all its limitations, to make it happen a B-movie in an era where the real B-movie has essentially disappeared from the radar: co-opted from above on the one hand, enraged and darkened by nihilistic ultra independence on the other.
If you accept all this, like the fact that even Blair’s film, all things considered, thrives on a little great control from the other, then here The Toxic Avenger can be a fun film and even a little liberating in its deliberate, uninvolved idiocy.