The Toxic Avenger

Grade: D-

The post-credits scene of The Toxic Avenger has the title character walking us through how to make a good grilled cheese sandwich. It has more brains, heart, organization, and meaning than anything that came before – and it’s the best scene from the worst movie of the year.

This is more of a spasm than a film. The campiness never stops. The score almost never stops. The movie doesn’t breathe. It is wall-to-wall overacting, noise, and exaggerated gore. Something like this can be done well, and has been, like in the underrated, underseen Ick from last month. Ick at least came up for air from time to time, with some sincere moments where the characters could be characters. The soundtrack certainly helped matters, too.

In this remake, Peter Dinklage does the honors as the title character, who we first meet as mild-mannered Winston, a single widowed stepfather to Wade (Jacob Tremblay). He is experiencing headaches, and a doctor gives him 6 months to a year left. At a work function, he is thrown into toxic chemicals that mutate him into a bald green monster/type. He decides to devote the rest of his life to fighting crime. I did enjoy a bit where he is captured and chained up, and let’s just say the fluids that come out of him are toxic as well, as they can disintegrate the metal around him, as long as he’s careful with his aim. Elijah Wood and Kevin Bacon are also in this. Otherwise, it’s total junk food, with no nourishment. It’s a stupid annoying pointless narrative failure that goes nowhere, and I hated it.

I’m back to telling my Human Centipede 2 story, for the second time in a year and a half. The Human Centipede 2 was one of the grossest, most offensive movies I’ve ever seen. Its main character likes to masturbate with sandpaper, which I would rather do than ever see it again…but, I graced it with a D- instead of the F. There were some sounds of farting and diarrhea that gave me a chuckle, and prevented me from flunking it. 2024 saw the release of Not Another Church Movie, where a character does his share of colon bowlin’ – yet it still got my F. It taught me that in my older age, apparently you can no longer fart your way out of a failing grade. But if Kevin Bacon shows up, and somebody acid-pees their way out of shackles? We’ll see how things go.

Grade: D-