The Toxic Avenger (1984) – What Happened to This Horror Movie?
It’s frightening to think how close we live on the fringes between success and utter failure. John Carpenter’s The Thing was widely hated by critics upon its release. The Exorcist almost wasn’t made at all because the book hadn’t sold well. The Toxic Avenger almost never disemboweled the mayor in front of the town’s children for all to see. Well, he still probably would have. It’s just that none of us would have seen it. The film we’re talking about today came from the minds of two men who decided to make a living off topics Hollywood was once too good for. They made sex comedies long before Jim ever had his way with that apple pie, and they just told their mother that they ate it all. But when Hollywood lowered its standards, Lloyd Kaufman and Michael Herz had to pivot to somewhere no one else wanted to go: slapstick, gore-fueled, and offensive horror. Still featuring sex. It’s the story of a movie that no one wanted, that nine times out of ten would have never been screened at a single theater, now being given the wide-release remake treatment more than forty years later. It’s a butt punching superhero movie, one of the gnarliest horrors you’ve ever seen, and as offensive as it is entertaining. A property with its own musical, comic book, and children’s cartoon despite its origin story featuring a man beaten to death with his own severed limb after trying to assault a blind woman in front of an entire Mexican restaurant. This is the story of how a movie defied the odds and created the world’s longest-running Independent Production Studio. Here is what happened to The Toxic Avenger.
After graduating from Yale, Director and co-founder of Troma Lloyd Kaufman had worked on various projects, from locations executive on Saturday Night Fever to uncredited production manager on Rocky. And don’t forget the multiple porno films he directed under various aliases. In 1974, he and Michael Herz decided to start Troma Entertainment and distribute their own films. But it wasn’t always with horror in mind. The pair found some success in sex comedies, but eventually studios lowered their standards and moved in on their territory with films like 1981’s Porky’s. It was when Herz read an article in the trades claiming that horror movies were no longer commercially viable that another idea was formed. One man’s toxic waste is another man’s treasure.
Troma’s The Toxic Avenger would start a trend of keeping the comedic elements of their films, while swapping the sex for Hollywood’s new taboo: horror. Well, kind of. I mean, there’s still a lot of sex. Like, a LOT of sex. But with a focus on horror and comedy. And sex. The cherry on top of this sin smoothie would be the surprising ingredient of environmentalism. Remember, these dudes went to Yale. Kaufman had recently read Rachel Carson’s Silent Spring (about the indiscriminate use of pesticides) and taken an unfortunate camping trip into an area polluted by garbage, so the topic was at the forefront of his mind. Kaufman’s script (alongside cohorts Gay Partington Terry, Joe Ridder, and Stuart Strutin) was also inspired by a story swap of the character of Frankenstein, making bolts the hero in their scenario. The original title was Health Club Horror, with the desire to spoof the ridiculous health club craze at the time as well. The Toxic Avenger didn’t come up as a name until after it was produced, which is why you never hear him referred to as that nor “Toxie” in the film, but rather as “the monster hero” or “that thing.”
Troma auditioned hundreds of kids for the role of Melvin, but eventually realized they wanted an actor named Mark Torgl in the role after working with him as another social outsider in their previous film, The First Turn On. Actor Mitch Cohen took on duties as full-grown, ass-kicking Toxie in his first role as an actor, and Kenneth Kessler handled that all-too-smooth and demanding voice post-transformation. Much like Frank Henenlotter films would cast, the majority of the roles went to first-time and unknown actors in the New York and New Jersey area. The entire production had a budget of around half a million dollars, which would require those same actors to accomplish their scenes in one or two takes after a lot of rehearsal, so as not to waste precious film.
One would imagine it also helps to cast unknowns when casting for roles where drug-fueled psychopaths touch themselves in saunas to pictures of the kids they ran over in the street. Or dudes named “Cigar Face.” Amidst the litany of insane and hilarious extras running through the world’s most crab-infested health club, also walked Oscar-winning actress Marisa Tomei as an extra leaving a shower. John Travolta also makes an appearance. He’s not actually in the film, but can be spotted on a cover of Playgirl magazine in a laundromat.
The Toxic Avenger was filmed at multiple New Jersey locations and featured a shocking amount of awesomely gnarly special effects. It will likely surprise you to find out that the special effects makeup artists were brand new to the horror genre at the time. Unless you count Tom Lauten’s learning experiences on Geek Maggot Bingo or the Freak from Suckweasel Mountain (all one movie title by the way). Special effects and makeup artist Jennifer Aspinall would recount the experience as her first time ever using big special effects. She was hired based solely on the fact that the folks at Troma knew she was game for a seemingly insurmountable challenge after working with her on The First Turn On. Not to mention the discount from hiring someone with almost no experience. She’d be required to create an entire buffet of gore and dismemberment, having never so much as sculpted a mask before. I think we’d all agree that she killed it. Literally.
Aspinall based the design of Toxie on a picture she had found of a soldier who had been horrifically disfigured by a bomb. Her input on the character would leave an insurmountable impact on the cult classic. She was the one who campaigned for the film to feature a transformation scene, citing the impact An American Werewolf in London’s transformation had on audiences. It hadn’t been in the script but the producers gave her the green light to storyboard and direct the scene herself so long as she could shoot it in a single day.
Toxie originally had a more cartoon-like vibe to him that Aspinall also influenced, making him as anatomically correct as possible. She convinced the powers that be that audiences needed to love the character, regardless of how horrific he looked. They would create three or four masks for the production to use and prepared many of the effects seen in the film from her mother’s basement alongside Tom Lauten. Her grandfather was even cast as the stunt driver who drove over the victims’ heads in the street using his own 1966 Mustang.
During these scenes, concerned police officers came up on the set and, for a moment, believed the carnage to be real. To create the effect of victims’ heads exploding under car tires, they injected a melon covered with a wig with corn syrup and red food dye, and it looked awesome. Far better than any horse shit CGI blood they probably would have used today.
Another on-set issue allegedly occurred when a homeless person didn’t appreciate them using his living room as a set, threatening them with a gun. Pretty scary until they realized the gun was just a prop the homeless guy had stolen from the set. Then there’s the poor sheep with very real lice that no one knew about until after the scene was shot.
One particular scene in the Mexican restaurant, which inexplicably features samurai swords on the walls, called “The Mexican Place,” caused the most controversy. The scene required actor Patrick Kilpatrick to point his shotgun at a baby, which allegedly led to his quitting the film. Understandable. But at least he didn’t shoot it. Right? Nope, instead they shot and killed a sweet, innocent seeing-eye dog. A scene that unsurprisingly led to the most complaints about the film. Even more so than the complaints of them running over small children. They even doubled down and later showed the dog lying out in a corner with its guts out. But don’t worry, that was merely spaghetti covered in gray paint.
In all actuality, The Toxic Avenger actors had it worse than the dog. Mitch Cohen would suffer through four hours of makeup and only be able to eat through a straw, while Mark Torgl’s bathtub soak scene led him to suffer through six hours of makeup before his prosthetics stuck to his skin. Afterwards, he had to be taken to a local YMCA to soak in the showers until it peeled away.
Speaking of suffering, once the film was finished, they couldn’t find a single theater to play it. They took it to Cannes and came away without a single offer. Finally, weeks later, a theater in Greenwich Village, New York, agreed to play the film and was rewarded with lines around the block. After months of popular screenings at the theater, other establishments came around, and Toxie was bashing heads and punching dicks on around 2,000 screens. When Cannes came around the next year, the movie was a hot commodity.
The Toxic Avenger had completed filming in 1983. Six full years later, Kaufman would inform The Wall Street Journal it had made around $15 million dollars.
The Toxic Avenger went on to gross out, offend, and delight critics everywhere. The film currently sits at a 70% Fresh rating on review aggregate site Rotten Tomatoes. Not bad for a flick that features a sex scene between a blind woman and a mop-wielding mutant. The franchise would eventually spawn comic books, sequels, a family-friendly kids cartoon, and even a musical. More importantly, it would become the staple of Troma Entertainment and the linchpin for the long-running studio’s success. If New Line is “The House That Freddy Built,” Troma is the shanty that Toxie put together with his hot, blind girlfriend.
You could say that The Toxic Avenger walked so that films like Terrifier could run. Ironically, the same company that successfully released Terrifier 2 and 3 unrated to a wide audience with incredible success, Cineverse, also released The Toxic Avenger remake everywhere in 2025. Pretty good for a film that was supposed to die on Bleeker Street. And that is what happened to The Toxic Avenger.
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