The actor Peter Dinklage was in high school in New Jersey in the mid-1980s when he first watched “The Toxic Avenger,” Lloyd Kaufman and Michael Herz’s raunchy, low-budget horror comedy about a sad-sack custodian who tumbles into a vat of toxic waste and re-emerges a superhuman tutu-wearing mutant with mad brawling skills and a distaste for bullies.
“It felt like if John Waters made ‘Porky’s’ or something,” Dinklage said in an interview over video. “It had this fun, subversive quality to it — a teen sex comedy but an absurd idea.”
This summer, decades after “The Toxic Avenger” grossed him out — and four Emmy Awards after playing the cunning Tyrion Lannister on “Game of Thrones” — Dinklage is doing more than reminiscing about death by milkshake machine and other “Toxic Avenger” atrocities. He’s playing a new Toxie, as fans affectionately call their beloved monster, in an unrated reboot in theaters Aug. 29.
Written and directed by Macon Blair, the film mirrors its source most closely in Toxie’s origin story. The leading man in the 1984 original was Melvin (Mark Torgl), a twerpy health spa custodian who, after transforming into Toxie (Mitchell Cohen), fights drug dealers and pimps and finds a beauty-meets-beast romance with a blind girl named Sara (Andree Maranda).
Dinklage’s Winston Gooze is also a janitor but at a no-good corporation run by the sinister Bob Garbinger (Kevin Bacon, kicky in a Suze Orman-style wig). After Winston is tossed into a tub of toxic goo, he becomes a Jell-O-green vengeance machine who battles corporate malfeasance and health insurance hell through rivers of gore, barf-inducing violence and crotch sight gags.
What might ruffle fans’ feathers is how Blair’s film — his sophomore directing feature, following the 2017 Sundance favorite “I Don’t Feel at Home in This World Anymore” — diverges considerably from the first in its central relationship. Dinklage’s Toxie is a kindly and soft-spoken widower stepfather to Wade (Jacob Tremblay), a sensitive preteen who’s partial to performance art.
“He’s a father and he’s this grotesque creature and he’s still having these normal conversations,” Dinklage said. “The absurdity of that scenario I found very humorous and very touching.”
Blair depicts their relationship with a warmth that characters in the he-man original would have derided as beta male stuff. It was a way, Blair explained, to give Toxie “a new emotional thing that he’s got to deal with, not trying to get a kiss from the pretty girls.”
“He’s an underdog and he has to contend with this massive corporate entity — it’s all just a knot of evil,” said Blair, who joined Dinklage on video. “From there it was, what are the jokes that we can connect to that?”
For inspiration, Blair said he looked to the irreverent humor of “Airplane!” and “The Naked Gun,” and to the dark camp of “The Rocky Horror Picture Show” for the Riff-Raff-looking brother that Elijah Wood plays to Bacon’s Bob.
To honor Toxie’s analog roots, Blair insisted that Toxie be portrayed by a performer in a suit, not entirely digitally; the movement artist Luisa Guerreiro is under the slimy prosthetics, with Dinklage providing the voice.
In response to questions via email, Kaufman said that Blair’s film was — hold on tight, fans — “better” than the original, with “a heartwarming familial element and other wonderful touching pathos that was lacking in our original film.”
(Known as a razor-tongued ringmaster, Kaufman, a producer on the new film, also wrote: “Due to our Troma stink, Peter will most likely be snubbed by the racist oligarchs of the Oscars.“)
This is all a turnabout from 1984, when Kaufman and Herz packed their R-rated “Toxic Avenger” with nonstop Looney Tunes-like violence, copious slurs, brazen sex gags, fat jokes, pansy jokes, blind jokes and Jazzercise. This newspaper called it “trash” but with “a maniacally farcical sense of humor.”
Kaufman made the film for Troma Entertainment, the scrappy studio he started with Herz, and that since 1974 has released low-budget schlock chockablock with outrageous sex and carnage in the tradition of Herschell Gordon Lewis and other exploitation maestros.
“The Toxic Avenger” didn’t make a splash at first but became a word-of-mouth hit as a midnight movie. It later gained a wider audience on VHS, resonating with MTV Generation fans who were drawn to its silliness, for sure, but also to its anti-establishment, common-man empathies, the likes of which George Romero championed in his maverick films. Look past the superfluous bosoms and churlish fisticuffs and “The Toxic Avenger” has a heart and a brain.
The original spawned a franchise that includes three sequels (all streaming on various platforms) plus a short-lived ’90s cartoon, a comic book series, a video game and a 2009 Off Broadway musical with songs by David Bryan of Bon Jovi — a longevity that cements Troma and Toxie as horror canon.
Thematically, the “Toxic Avenger” films are exemplars of eco-horror, a genre with roots in “King Kong” and the Atomic Age that explores what happens when nature — from ants (“Them!”) to air (“The Mist”) — turns on mankind.
In the 1980s, “The Toxic Avenger” joined “Mutant,” “C.H.U.D.” and other horror films in which toxic waste and other industrial threats were motivations for monster-making. More recently, climate change has become eco-horror’s main menace.
What sets the “Toxic Avenger” franchise apart? Laughs.
“Most of the eco-horror in the ’70s had to do with animals rebelling against mankind,” said Michael Gingold, a longtime horror journalist. “‘The Toxic Avenger’ took eco-horror and turned it on its ear and came up with something fun.”
Dinklage didn’t hesitate when asked to connect the dots between his Toxie and the characters he’s played onscreen and onstage, including Shakespeare’s doomed monarch in “Richard III” and the lovelorn Rakitin in Turgenev’s “A Month in the Country.”
“They’re all outsiders, outliers, original thinkers,” Dinklage said. “They’re the smartest person in the room but not allowed to make the ultimate decisions.”
(Dinklage is also playing Malvolio in “Twelfth Night,” the Public Theater’s Free Shakespeare in the Park production that runs through Sept. 14. How’s he feeling? “Terrified,” he said.)
Dinklage said he felt a kinship to his characters, and their quandaries, having grown up “in a culture where outsiders or physical differences are removed to the sidelines.” He paused for a beat before adding that he gets “into trouble” when he speaks about anything having to do with his size. “I’ve never had any agenda,” he said.
Still, he said he hoped his Toxie could upend assumptions about what superheroes should look like, besides “gorgeous, six feet tall and dressed head to toe in hot leather with a dimple in their chin.”
“Not all superheroes should look like that,” he said.
Now that a new “Toxic Avenger” is here, who is it for? To Dinklage, having experienced how protective fans were with “Game of Thrones,” the film is a gift for Toxie acolytes, who he predicts will be “super happy.”
In Kaufman’s progressive calculus, it’s for “anyone who wants to rally against big pharma and evil devil-worshipping bloodsucking mega-conglomerates.”
Asked the same question, Blair sounds like he’s ready to party like it’s 1984.
“It’s a raucous rock ‘n’ roll comedy crowd-pleaser that folks can enjoy out of the heat and have a Slurpee or beer,” he said. “Or six.”
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