One would expect the cast of “The Toxic Avenger” — a bloody, violent, unrated horror-comedy about janitor-turned-superhero Winston Gooze (Peter Dinklage) whose body is gruesomely deformed from toxic waste — to drop a few f-bombs during their panel at San Diego Comic-Con on Thursday. And that did happen after Dinklage, Elijah Wood, Taylour Paige, Jacob Tremblay, writer-director Macon Blair (“I Don’t Feel at Home in This World Anymore”) and producer Lloyd Kaufman took to the stage inside Hall H. Before they even started talking, their co-star Kevin Bacon appeared in a video apologizing for not making it to San Diego, which he capped with a song pleading for people to see what he called a “hilarious, punk, fun, bloody ride” in the theater.
“Stayin’ at home going to make you blue / You need the movies and the movies need you,” Bacon sang. “Down to the theater, try your luck / ‘Toxic Avenger,’ show the fuck up.”
Because Comic-Con operates as a family event, Bacon’s profanity was bleeped; moments of explicit violence in the film’s trailer were also censored when it opened the panel, as was profanity in the scene from the film that closed the panel, depicting how Winston became the Toxic Avenger. But what was even more striking was how the rest of the panel largely focused on sincerity, from the “very sweet” story they wanted to tell with their film to the filmmakers’ love for the 1984 original “Toxic Avenger.”
That movie was produced by the grade-Z independent studio Troma Entertainment, co-founded by Kaufman in 1973. Even though, Kaufman said, the MPAA forced the company to cut 20 minutes from the original, “eventually, people were able to get the director’s cut with the full head-crushing.” Its gross-out gore and tongue-in-oozing-cheek premise won a devoted cult following, spawning four sequels, an animated series, a video game and a musical.
After a few attempts to reboot the franchise with a larger budget in the 2010s, Legendary Entertainment took on the rights and brought on Troma founder Kaufman as a producer. The film shot in 2021, and premiered at Fantastic Fest in 2023, but its literal eye-popping violence and general embrace of noxiously bad taste reportedly made it difficult to find distribution. In January, Cineverse — which distributed 2024’s horror hit “Terrifier 3” — took on the movie and will release it unrated on Aug. 29.
The cast appeared thrilled to be able to talk about a movie that at one point was at risk for disappearing entirely. Blair said he wanted to capture the “spirit” of the original film without matching its plot beat-for-beat, so he knew the violence had to have “the goopy goodness you expect” but he also wanted to match what he saw as the “warm-hearted” nature of the first film.
After a symbolic passing of Toxie’s mop, Kaufman praised Blair for making a better movie than Troma’s efforts. “It’s everything we tried and didn’t quite get there,” he said.
Dinklage talked about growing up on the original film, watching it on Betamax as a kid at a friend’s house. “There was always an older brother,” he said, “and their parents were not around.” His appreciation for Blair as a filmmaker and his interest in making a crowd-pleasing movie about environmental devastation sealed the deal for him.
“This just felt so perfect and necessary and needed,” Dinklage said.
Wood, an avowed horror super-fan who plays one of the film’s villains, said he loved how this “Toxic Avenger” “is filled to the brim with ideas and fun and playing with the medium.” But he singled out the “father-son” story between Dinklage and Tremblay’s characters as central to the “charm” of the movie.
Dinklage also made a point to note that “over 70% of my performance” was actually played by actor Luisa Guerreiro, who wore the full-body suit and makeup once Winston is transformed into the Toxic Avenger. (Dinklage then dubbed over the dialogue in post-production.) “That was a real exercise in trust, in relinquishing something that was important to me.” Dinklage said Guerreiro studied his movements as the character for the four weeks he shot on the film to match his performance. “She does a better me than I do of me,” he said.
Not everything during the panel was this sincere, however. Blair said one of the most challenging scenes shoot was when “somebody ends up head first in the engine bloc of a car,” which, because of his determination to shoot as much practically as possible, required “a lot of moving parts and pumping fluids.”
Towards the end of the panel, the director was asked what had changed from the 2023 version to the theatrical release.
“We added really just one VFX shot,” he said tentatively. “I believe this is an all-ages crowd. It involves a depiction of a body part and that’s going to be added for theatrical release. I think you’ll notice it.”