Troma changed my life. Okay, so maybe that’s a little hyperbolic. But I do think something chemically changed inside me when I first saw The Toxic Avenger at far too young an age, setting me down a path of outrageous cinema, of sleaze and violence, of satire and exploitation, of everything Troma does best. It’s […]
Troma changed my life.
Okay, so maybe that’s a little hyperbolic. But I do think something chemically changed inside me when I first saw The Toxic Avenger at far too young an age, setting me down a path of outrageous cinema, of sleaze and violence, of satire and exploitation, of everything Troma does best. It’s a path I still walk today.
I can remember hearing about The Toxic Avenger for the first time from my dad one morning at the breakfast table. I was getting ready to leave for what had to be fourth grade and he told me he had just seen “the grossest movie he had ever seen.” He went on to describe the plot to me, then went into detail about some of the more noteworthy kills, including heads crushed by a set of weights and one bad guy’s face that gets mutilated under a milkshake maker. He told me the title: The Toxic Avenger. I was just a kid, so naturally I had but one response.
I have to see this fucking movie.
I wasn’t allowed to see it, of course, still being deemed too young to be exposed to that kind of violence (though not too young, apparently, to have that kind of violence described to me over a bowl of Frosted Flakes). Enter USA Up All Night, the long-running cable show that aired every Friday and Saturday night on the USA Network, airing all kinds of trash cinema, albeit edited for television. That didn’t matter. Some Toxie was better than no Toxie, and I had found the loophole in my parents’ objections: if it was on basic cable (not HBO), it must be okay for me to watch. Still too young to stay up late enough to watch the movie, I let a VHS tape record all night and woke up early the next morning to finally taste this forbidden, toxic fruit.
A Troma fan was born.
It wasn’t just that the movie showed me things I had never seen in a movie before, even though it did. It had more to do with how the movie felt, like it was made by lunatics who were getting away with something. The acting style was different from any movie I had ever seen, and yet it seemed to perfectly fit the tone of the rest of the film. The violence was brutal and bloody, but it was outrageous to the point of being funny; it was designed to be gross, but not gross me out. Everything from the sets to the costumes to the film stock itself felt like it had a layer of grime on it, showing me that it was okay not to have the glossy aesthetics of the Hollywood product I had regularly been consuming to that point.
That was maybe the most important takeaway from the movie: it didn’t follow any traditional rules. I know there are any number of indie movies made in the ‘70s and ‘80s from which I might have gleaned this lesson, but I was a kid and Toxie got there first. Troma clearly had its own playbook, and though they were using the basic framework of a superhero origin story (a framework with which we were much less familiar in the mid 1980s), they did so in a way that subverted formula at every turn. The disgusting monster is actually the hero, even when he violently murders every bad guy he comes across. The good-looking jocks are psychopaths. Kids and animals are killed. Nothing is sacred.
The Toxic Avenger taught me to watch movies differently, and it’s a skill I’ve carried with me through the rest of my life. It’s what allows me to still be a Troma fan to this day, even when their films exist in their own universe and operate on a level that’s unlike anything else. I can enjoy a Troma title (or, likewise, a title from Full Moon Entertainment, the Stones to Troma’s Beatles) or a super low-budget indie horror film because I understand what it’s meant to be and take it on its own terms. I sometimes find myself wishing other genre fans shared this mentality, and I don’t just mean when it comes to Troma. We don’t have to like what a movie chooses to be, but we should at least be able to watch it through its intended lens. We can’t get mad at pizza because it doesn’t taste like steak.
The Toxic Avenger – a lot of Troma films, for that matter – is pizza: it’s greasy and gooey and not very good for me, but it’s exactly what I want when I want that sort of thing. The movie has been making headlines again lately thanks to Macon Blair’s upcoming remake (in theaters on August 29), and seeing it talked about so much reminded me of just how special the movie is to me. Loving Troma has never made me cool, even among the horror community, but it’s been hardwired into me for so long that I can barely remember life before Toxie. He introduced me to gore and to exploitation. He made me a more adventurous, open-minded horror fan.
