The Toxic Avenger (2025) Movie Review: Troma’s Radioactive Mascot Returns to Lay Waste to Good Taste

Stewing on the back burner in a radioactive sludge of its own making for the better part of two years following its Fantastic Fest premiere, Macon Blair’s much-anticipated reboot of “The Toxic Avenger” couldn’t help but steadily feed that anticipation like the alluring glow of a dumpster fire under a shower of gasoline. Surely aiding in this sense of expectation is the swirling understanding that the delay in release was compounded (chemistry pun?) by the fear from potential distributors that the film’s ghastly gore was too volatile for the risk-averse suits. The film’s “Unrated” subheading—a piece so fundamental it appears right under the title at both the opening and close of the film—would thus be seen as a badge of honor for hungry horror fans.

In practice, it would then appear unfair to assess that “The Toxic Avenger” fails to meet such impossibly lofty expectations, but the entire legacy of Troma Entertainment—bossman Lloyd Kaufman appears as producer on this reboot of his most cherished baby—seems contingent upon the earnest and relentless war waged upon the very concept of “good taste.” (“Occupy Cannes,” and all that…) All Blair’s film truly needed to do was bring on the guts to undercut the glamor, and in large part, that’s what he manages to bring to the autopsy table. Surely, this will be enough to marginally sate starved Troma addicts awaiting their long-dormant fix of infectious (and infective) splatter, though the increase in production value may prove more of a balancing element than this gleefully unsettled concoction seeks to unload.

Wiping the slate clean (so to speak…) with a whole new Toxie, Blair’s film casts Peter Dinklage as Winston Gooze, a lowly janitor working the volatile floors of the pharmaceutical corporation BTH, located on the far side of St. Roma’s Village. The plant has been rather transparently dumping toxic sludge into the nearby rivers for ages, but charismatic(?) CEO Bob Garbinger (Kevin Bacon) is more concerned with how he’ll keep his dwindling profits afloat in this stew of deadly sludge.

Gooze learns firsthand of these priorities when a failed attempt to appeal to Garbinger’s good nature leads him to a failed robbery, the results of which are a one-way trip into a vat of radioactive waste that soon turns him into the hideous but bulletproof hero we all came to see. Armed with a new sense of self-confidence (and a glowing mop), Gooze-turned-Toxie sets off to take down his smarmy adversary, free the town of his deadly radioactive ways, and earn the respect of his distant stepson (Jacob Tremblay).

The Toxic Avenger (2025) Movie — A still from “The Toxic Avenger” (2025)

Now, asking a self-acknowledged elitist to review a Troma film would be like asking any self-respecting individual to seriously assess a Daily Wire production; not to draw any ideological comparisons (what has Kaufman ever done to me?), but essentially, you’re asking someone to scrutinize a piece of work that seems expressly designed to piss them off. By that token, a film like “The Toxic Avenger” would—Could? Should?—feasibly be graded based on how irksome it is to the so-called disciples of snobbish filmgoing. In that sense, if Blair and Kaufman fail to offend our sensibilities, do they succeed?

That really depends on what you’re looking for in a film like this. As a piece of exploitative blood-splatter, “The Toxic Avenger” certainly delivers, but even with the gory carnage that earned the film its (lack of) rating, Blair’s more polished, standardized style of presentation doesn’t do much to uphold the ramshackle charm that made Troma such an enduring force in underground horror entertainment. (This more enhanced budget should not, however, serve in any way as a detriment to Anna Andreeva’s ace makeup team, who use every last cent to layer Toxie with gruesome vein work and toned muscle definition to make Luisa Guerreiro—who, rather than Dinklage, is the one actually donning the Toxie suit—entirely unrecognizable.)

As a film in the more “critic dons his monocle to engage in deep thematic analysis” sense, obviously, Blair is falling short of the aims he hasn’t even set for himself. A film made for the Fantasia crowd rather than the Cannes crowd, “The Toxic Avenger” entertains with enough unapologetic vulgarity, but even through the lens of those of us fully willing to embrace—celebrate, in fact—the out-and-out stupidity of Akiva Schaffer’s recent “The Naked Gun,” Blair’s sense of humor is mostly relegated to a 50/50 hit rate of offhand comments and try-hard jokes from offscreen crowds.

Not quite grungy enough to fully satisfy its core audience nor fine-tuned enough to expand to the audience this entire franchise was built to sidestep in the first place, “The Toxic Avenger” sits uncomfortably on the fence, left to marginally satisfy those with a craving for splattered entrails and few other—and more thoroughly gnarly—avenues to find them. In that sense, whether or not the heightened profile Macon Blair is affording Troma’s most celebrated mascot is perceptible as a needed boost for a dying market, or a glaring sanitization of a field that should never have even seen a steadicam in its entire existence, remains to be seen.