By WILLIAM J. WRIGHT
Most fans thought it would never happen, and if it did, it would likely be an unmitigated disaster. A remake of THE TOXIC AVENGER? Surely, our beloved Uncle Lloyd Kaufman would never sell out his most famous creation, the literal figurehead of TROMA, the scion of true independent cinema. Yet, in 2010, the impossible became likely with the announcement that a remake was indeed on the horizon, with Hot Tub Time Machine director Steve Pink set to helm the project and none other than action-movie megastar Arnold Schwarzenegger attached to wield the mop as the monster hero. Never happened.
In the ensuing years, the property exchanged hands. Big names were floated, including that of horror maestro Guilermo del Toro. Scripts were written and rewritten. Still no new Toxie.
At last, the rights landed in the hands of Legendary Pictures, the production company behind blockbusters such as The Dark Knight and Jurassic World – movies about as far afield of the grungy outskirts of Tromaville as imaginable. The good news? TROMA’s twin titans of schlock, Lloyd Kaufman and Michael Herz, were back in the fold. Macon Blair, a skilled screenwriter and, most importantly, a dedicated TROMA fan, would direct a cast headed by Peter Dinklage as Winston Gooze, an all-new incarnation of Toxie; Kevin Bacon; and Elijah Wood. The film was completed in 2023. Nevertheless, Toxie’s legion of fans would have to wait another two years. Despite successful festival screenings at Fantastic Fest and Stiges, the film initially failed to find distribution, supposedly due to its violent content – an inexplicable predicament in a cinematic landscape where Terrifier‘s Art the Clown ran roughshod over big-budget theatrical releases.
Both an homage to and a true reimagining of the original, Macon Blair’s THE TOXIC AVENGER is finally before the masses, thanks to distributor Cineverse. RUE MORGUE caught up with the director ahead of the film’s August 29 theatrical release.
I watched THE TOXIC AVENGER last night. I’ve found that with cinematic reboots, remakes and reimaginings, you have to have to go in with an open mind and no expectations. I was really pleasantly surprised. I think it surpasses the original in a lot of ways.
Oh, that’s wonderful to hear. We were always talking about how we wanted it to feel like, if you were a fan of the original, you could just sidestep into this one and not feel like we had taken a wrong turn. So, that’s good to hear.
How did you wind up as the caretaker of Lloyd’s baby and Toxie’s legacy?

Filmmaker Macon Blair.
It’s so strange. It’s so fucking surreal. Dude, I gotta tell you, I saw the [original movie] when I was a little kid. It was hugely inspirational at that time, but that never occurred to me. It was never a goal, let alone even a physical reality, that I would get to do something like this. So it’s very strange still.
In 2019, Legendary partnered with TROMA to do a new version of it, and they were soliciting pitches for the screenplay. And I was kind of hesitant at first because I did have the feeling of, like, why do it at all? The first one is so singular, but I didn’t really have a story. But I knew the vibe of it should be a couple of things: It’s got to be a guy in a suit. It’s got to be rated R. It’s got to be silly. It can’t be gloomy and self-serious. It should be a lot of fun.
The executive – I didn’t know this at the time – but the executive that I was talking to turned out to be this old metal head who was a huge TROMA fan, and he had chased down the rights to the original Toxie. He heard me say that, and he was like, “That’s it. Right on!” I was kind of expecting that they would be like, It’s got to be PG-13, and we have to explain why everything is happening. And he was like, “Nah, dude, that’s exactly it.” And that just turned into a writing job, which turned into a directing job.
This is a very different TOXIC AVENGER, but there are a lot of familiar elements. What were some of the challenges of updating the material while maintaining that signature Lloyd Kaufman/TROMA vibe?
I didn’t really think of it in terms of challenges. I really wanted to kind of keep the sense of humor alive, and I say this with affection, kind of like a juvenile, trashy sort of sense of humor. And I wanted to bring that along. I think it was really about wanting it to have that handmade quality. So putting a person in a suit and having the world feel kind of decayed and degraded and everything, I think the balance that we did try to work on a lot was, obviously, this is relative to the original Toxie, a bigger budget. I think for Legendary, it’s quite small, but for Toxie, it’s big, but we put a lot of thought into how to shoot it and design it so that it didn’t feel like an overly slick, overly produced movie. We wanted it to feel like it was, to a certain extent, a couple of guys who have a camera on a tripod. We put some artificial limitations on ourselves so it didn’t feel too flashy. That was something that we were always trying to keep our eye on.
Did Lloyd Kaufman and Michael Herz have much direct input?
Not too much. I stayed in contact with them, and the first thing I did when I got the job was to check in with Lloyd and make sure that I had his blessing. And he was very, very sweet and very supportive. He kind of went out of his way to make sure that he was like, “We’re not going to micromanage you, whatever you want to do.” He had a suggestion for one kill that came in late in production, and I felt bad because we couldn’t incorporate it into the script at that point. Things were already underway. But for the most part, he was just sending texts of support: “How are you doing? Is it looking good?” We got him out to Bulgaria, where we were shooting, and he got to see all the sets and the props and everything. And I feel like that was kind of a special thing for him to see all these reinventions of this thing that he had brought to life so many years ago and nurtured all along. That was the nature of why I wanted his cameo specifically to be him telling me to keep my voice down because, like, I wanted the joke of it to be like, you know, the Grand Master being like, “Slow your roll.”
Lloyd is a powerhouse, an unstoppable force of nature.
Totally unstoppable. And I love his P.T. Barnum approach. Everything is a show, you know? And everything is an opportunity to put on a show. I’m very fond of that.
The film has an amazing cast. Kevin Bacon is super sinister and funny, as is Elijah Wood. And of course, you have Peter Dinklage in the lead, one of the best, smartest actors in the world. How did you get Peter involved in this project?
That was sheer luck, but it goes back a couple of years. I met him at a film festival, and he had seen the first movie that I did. He just sent me a very nice email saying that he liked the movie, and we ended up staying in touch. Periodically, he would send me a script to read, or I would send him a script to read. So, we never worked together, but there was a little bit of communication there, just enough. It’s not like we were close-close, but there was enough of, like, I think he could read this if we sent it to him.
When we were casting, we knew we needed a famous face to anchor the movie, to get the financing. I just felt like, you know, we’ve got 20 minutes before this guy turns into a monster, so we need somebody who can really do a lot of stuff very quickly that’s very empathetic, funny, sad, physical – everything in about 20 minutes. I thought he would be great, but I didn’t know if he was going to say yes or not, but I knew I could at least get him to read it. So, I sent it to him, and he wrote back the next day, saying, “I’m a fan of The Toxic Avenger from my childhood,” which I didn’t know. “I’m totally in.” It was a very quick yes, and once you have someone like that in the lead, then all of a sudden, it makes these conversations with people like Kevin Bacon much easier. It anchors things. It provides this momentum for the casting. And after Peter got on board, all these other people came on quite quickly.
Peter Dinklage’s physicality is obviously a lot different than that of the original Toxie, but also, he’s just such a damn good actor. Did that affect the script or your approach during shooting?
That’s a great question. It never mentions his size in the script at all. So, in other words, if somebody else had ended up playing Winston, it would have been that. But my thinking was this: In the original Toxie, you got Mark Torgal as Melvin, and he’s 5’6,” 5’7″, something like that. He transforms. He becomes Mitch Cohen, and he’s 6-foot-something, so he doesn’t double in size. He gets a handful of inches taller, and he gets big muscles. I felt like, Okay, well, we’ve got Peter in the human form. He transforms. I guess he could become 6 feet tall, but that’s kind of arbitrary. Why wouldn’t he become 15 feet tall or 20? It just sort of seemed awkward to me. And so, I felt like, let’s just do what they did in the original. He gets a handful of inches taller, and he gets some muscles. I felt like that was the most straightforward way to address that, not make a big deal out of it. He is who he is, and he gets a little bit bigger when he transforms. He gets a little bit bigger muscles, and that’s Toxie.
If anything, I wanted to see even more of Winston, pre-Toxie. Peter Dinklage brings so much humor and pathos to the character. He’s restrained at times, but really knows when to go over the top.
I’ll tell you, honestly, there were some other scenes, sort of flashback scenes of him, that I really, really liked, where he was interacting with his wife. Beautiful, beautiful scenes, but they ended up being cut for time. I don’t know. I guess there’s a possibility, maybe there’ll be deleted scenes on the Blu-ray, but I’m honestly not sure. There is a little bit more out there, but just for the momentum of the movie, we had to cut them.
See THE TOXIC AVENGER from Legendary Pictures only in theaters, beginning August 29.