The Toxic Avenger review – an infuriatingly unfunny remake

“Just play the fucking hits,” is the advice given by grotesquely combed-over, club-footed Fritz Garbinger (Elijah Wood) to members of local band The Killer Nutz, some way into The Toxic Avenger. He is talking about an open-air performance that they have to give, midway between carrying out abductions and assassinations for Fritz’s brother Robert (Kevin Bacon), who operates a run-down highly pollutant factory producing supposed panaceas that are actually carcinogenic.

Fritz’s words might as well apply to writer/​director Macon Blair’s remake, which still plays many of the old tunes from Michael Herz and Lloyd Kaufman’s 1984 original. The setting, for example, is ​“St Roma’s Village”, concealing within itself, in mutated form, the original toponym Tromaville. For this The Toxic Avenger recombines familiar elements from its source, while making them refer not to Reagan’s Orwellian America, but to an even more putrescent post-millennial corporatocracy where health insurance is rarely honoured and the little man is marginalised, humiliated and oppressed.

Here the little man is no longer the teen Melvin, but widowed single parent Winston Gooze (Peter Dinklage), dealing with a diagnosis of terminal cancer without a safety net. Yet Winston is still a janitor (now at Robert’s factory rather than a gym), and still manages somehow to be wearing that absurdly iconic pink tutu when he transforms into the Hulk-like green-hued Toxie, and still wields a mop as his weapon of choice for cleaning up the community. Yet here there is a new focus on Winston’s attempts to connect with his teen stepson Wade (Jacob Tremblay), and to become a hero in Wade’s eyes – and this theme, entirely alien to the original, is so thoroughly ingrained here that it dominates the post-credits coda. One might even regard it as instantiating Blair’s own struggles to form a meaningful relationship with the father text – and Kaufman himself has a cameo near the end, grudgingly acknowledging this bastard son of a movie.

The original Toxic Avenger was, like all cult films, unlikely. Essentially a superhero origin story with an incongruous mix of juvenile comedy, sex, sadism and ultraviolent slaughter, it smuggled in under the guise of its knowing tastelessness a degree of political satire. Though few would call Herz and Kaufman’s film great, it is often said that mediocre films have the best potential for better remakes. Yet this new The Toxic Avenger is relatively restrained, infuriatingly unfunny, yet entirely on-the-nose for more than just the stench of rot and urban decay that its scenes so frequently evoke. Sometimes the old hits are just better left uncovered.