The Most Creative Superhero Movie Of The Year Is Finally In Theaters

Some horror movies double as allegories for social issues, while others are all about good old-fashioned scares and special effects. Balancing the two, however, can get tricky. Get too preachy and it just becomes a PSA with blood spatter, but get too gory, and the message is diluted, like Jigsaw’s hamfisted justifications for his many traps across the many Saw movies.

In 2023, one movie found that perfect balance… then took more than two years to reach theaters. But now that it’s finally here, it doesn’t shy away from anything, be it injustice or industrial waste.

For fans of The Toxic Avenger, the remake’s arrival in theaters on August 29 has been a long time coming. For its writer and director, Macon Blair, it’s been even longer. “It came out in 2023, we shot it in 2021, I also wrote it in 2019,” he tells Inverse. But when watching the movie, it feels like it was filmed yesterday.

The remake of Troma’s 1984 film stars Peter Dinklage as Winston Gooze, a janitor who becomes a superhero after a work accident turns him into a mutant. While the original was your classic “revenge on the bullies” tale, this update positions Gooze as a struggling single stepfather trying to access expensive healthcare.

“This is a fantasy story about a mutant with a mop fighting bad guys,” Blair says. “The overarching dynamic is that he is trying to fight against very wealthy, unaccountable people, getting away with stuff at the expense of people who don’t have money and don’t have access to power. And that is something which, unfortunately, never goes out of style.”

Style is something The Toxic Avenger has in spades. Blair made it clear that practical effects were a priority for him, and that ethos comes across in everything from the actual Toxic Avenger suit to the Penguin-esque prosthetics on Elijah Wood’s henchman. Even the color grading has that slightly off-kilter saturation that makes it feel like an old low-budget splatter horror.

Speaking of old-school, the movie’s humor doesn’t feel like quippy Marvel-style wit or Scream-esque wink-wink fourth-wall breaking. Instead, it’s full of organic jokes, like this whole universe is one where everyone happens to be pretty funny.

“All I had to go on was just what jokes would make me laugh,” Blair says. He points to a gag where a masked villain is revealed to have a tiny baby head. “When I was writing that, that just sort of made me chuckle. And I mentioned it to a guy who was doing some concept art for the characters, and he started laughing over the phone, and I was like, ‘Oh, okay. That’s all I needed. I’ve got one guy out there who’s on my side, so we’ll go ahead.’”

The movie’s best weapon might be Macon Blair’s intimate knowledge of everything Toxic Avenger. He watched it as a kid, and now he’s poured himself into this new telling. “He’s an older guy and he’s trying to contend with holding together some kind of a family unit,” Blair says. “That was how I tried to personalize it while still keeping all the ‘he’s going to fight bad guys and he’s going to swing ’em around,’ and all that stuff that people would expect.”

The Toxic Avenger is playing in theaters.