The Toxic Avenger Uncut (18)

Bob Garbinger is the money-oriented CEO of a factory that is pumping out dangerous chemicals into the close-knit community of St Roma's Villa. Residents are slowly poisoned by toxins, including widowed janitor Winston Gooze, who works at the factory and learns he has an incurable brain condition. Whistleblower JJ shares devastating information about the factory's reckless disregard for public safety and Winston undergoes a physical transformation in response to exposure to toxic ooze.

LondonNet Film Review

The Toxic Avenger Uncut (18) Film Review from LondonNet

Campy 1980s B-movie The Toxic Avenger receives a gore-laden reboot courtesy of writer-director Macon Blair. He retains the severed tongue-in-cheek silliness of the original with a starry cast led by Peter Dinklage, Kevin Bacon and Elijah Wood, who gleefully chew scenery in between effusive spurts of wanton violence. A harpoon gun in the opening five minutes teases a full-blown orgy of slaughter festooned with gooey prosthetics and make-up effects that demand a strong stomach and macabre sense of humour…

A severed head is squished to a pulp, numerous limbs are torn merrily from their joint sockets and one victim has their intestines pulled forcefully out of their body through a most unfortunate orifice. Once the destruction begins, no dangling appendage is safe from a sticky fate. Dinklage and co surrender wholeheartedly to the self-referential madness in Blair’s script, beginning with a profanity laden narration: “I didn’t want any of this, not the grief, not the illness, certainly not the heroic voiceover…” Some gags strain to land (quite a few miss entirely) but fans of the original low-budget incarnation will be able to discern the heady scent of nostalgia among the noxious chemicals and rotting flesh.

Winston Gooze (Dinklage) has worked in Hygiene Services at the BTH factory in St Roma’s Villa for 13 years, diligently mopping floors and unclogging toilets while chief executive Bob Garbinger (Bacon) knowingly pumps dangerous chemicals into the surrounding community – population 12,800 and quickly dying. Shortly after a terminal diagnosis that will wrench him away from socially awkward stepson Wade (Jacob Tremblay), Winston plots to steal the money to clear his debts from the BTH’s Corporate Fartplex.

Alas, his timing is impeccable. The heist coincides with corporate whistleblower JJ (Taylour Paige) gathering chemical samples from the factory and evading Bob’s odious brother and head of security, Fritz (Wood), who has been taking fashion tips from Danny DeVito’s Penguin. Winston is caught in the crossfire and his lifeless body is dumped into a vat of chemical waste, where he metamorphoses into the titular terror to a bombastic blast of Mussorgsky’s Night On Bald Mountain (immortalised in the final segment of Disney’s Fantasia with the monstrous Chernabog) and proceeds to eviscerate anyone who threatens his sickly town. Bob, Fritz and BTH personal assistant Kissy Sturnevan (Julia Davis) are all earmarked for sadistic demises.

The Toxic Avenger Uncut is a blast from the past for anyone who enjoys their horrors served exceedingly rare and bloody. Macon’s script lays on the environmental activism with a trowel, declaring war on the rich, powerful elite who willingly sacrifice community spirit and wholesome family values at the altar of greed. Stomach-churning justice is served with a mop and righteous anger.

– Sarah Lee