The Toxic Avenger Part 2
Beneath Camp and Beyond Bad Taste
I love garbage can cinema because I like to escape the rigors of mental cogitation—also, boobs and blood and lots of action and tons of laughs at the expense of the filmmakers, who may or may not have been setting out to pass such stool through the bowels of the popular culture demimonde—whatever that means.
To that end, product from Lloyd "Uncle Lloydie" Kaufman, the brawn and brains behind so many unlegendary productions—Sgt. Kabukiman N.Y.P.D., Terror Firmer, Poultrygeist, and of course, The Toxic Avenger—never fails to live up (up?) to the standard of having no standards. At least, of violently and flagrantly flipping the bird at generally agreed-upon cinematic (and community) standards.
The Toxic Avenger 2 is no exception. It is a pitifully stupid comic book movie conceived in the mind of Alfred E. Neuman, about everyone's favorite "hideously deformed hero of superhuman size and strength," who lives in "Tromaville, New Jersey," in a toxic waste dump with his hotsie-totsie blonde bombshell blind girlfriend Claire (the incomparable Phoebe Hemenway Legere). Toxie fights crime while wearing the remains of a tutu and carrying a mop. Here, he tries to rescue Tromaville, which has many happy street scenes of 1989 folks jivin' and wavin' at the camera. Tromaville, unfortunately, is being menaced by sexy badasses from "Apocalypse Inc.," the leader of which I at first took to be Jello Biafra, twenty-five years ago when I first saw this flick. It isn't. It's actor Rick Collins. (I was with my ex-wife, and we had just smoked tremendous amounts of skunk weed.)
The incredible Lisa Gaye as Ms. Malfaire in "Toxic Avenger 2"
The Apocalypse Leader and his maddeningly, impossibly, ridiculously hot female sidekick, Ms. Malfaire (Lisa Gaye*), who is forever rhapsodizing about Claire's "melon-heavy breasts," do something to someone for some reason, but Toxie (portrayed here by John Altamura and voiced by Ron Fazio) is sent windsurfing to Tokyo to find his pops, "Big Mac" Junko (Rikiya Yasuoka). There are some cute street scenes with Japanese folks being good sports about acting silly for the round-eyes' movie shoot.
After saving some nekkid Japanese women in a bath by literally turning a comic book bad guy into a giant bowl of ramen, Toxie hooks up with a young Japanese girl (Mayako Katsuragi) that has a weird, faked, very hoarse "dubbed" voice and discovers that his pops, Big Mac, who also has a parody "dubbed" voice (probably a satirical jab at Western cultural interpretations of Japanese culture), is smuggling coke in fish. Toxie fights a fish-headed guy before returning to Tromaville. This film is just a live-action dirty cartoon.
I found myself sighing a lot at the end, wondering when the interminable car chase and resultant fiery explosion were going to culminate in the credits rolling. The film is mindless, passable fare, if you like that sort of thing, with a fair amount of taut bodies that are nice to look at, some ridiculous costumes, and a few bloody, violent effects that are nowhere near as gratuitous as in previous Troma flicks. If it weren't for the T and A, you could almost screen this movie for juveniles.
The ending, which features a motorcycle-riding baddie called "The Dark Rider," who, seemingly, just rides around, is a tacked-on thing that is resolved quickly, and this is NEVER advisable to do in a movie, no matter what genre and category and level of filmmaking we're talking about. It's a "final scare" ending that is resolved in just a few minutes and leaves the viewer feeling somehow as if the preceding flick they've just sat through didn't have much in the way of any importance or meaning.
This movie is a disappointing follow-up to 1984's The Toxic Avenger, lacking the ugly cojones and adult graphic novel vibe of the first and descending, more and more, into a toxic waste dump of silliness, self-parody, and cheap laughs.
And breasts. Lots and lots of breasts.
You get the point. (It's shaped kind of like a nipple.)
* To find out more about the gorgeous and incomparable Lisa Gaye, go to her website linked below.
Lisa Gaye
The Toxic Avenger Part II (1989) - Trailer
Connect with me on Facebook
My book: Cult Films and Midnight Movies: From High Art to Low Trash Volume 1.
Print:
Ebook:
About the Creator
Tom Baker
Author of Haunted Indianapolis, Indiana Ghost Folklore, Midwest Maniacs, Midwest UFOs and Beyond, Scary Urban Legends, 50 Famous Fables and Folk Tales, and Notorious Crimes of the Upper Midwest.: http://tombakerbooks.weebly.com
The Screams Beneath the Floorboards
Old houses make noise. They creak, groan, and sigh as if remembering things they were never meant to keep. That’s what I told myself when I first heard it—a faint sound beneath my feet, barely louder than the wind slipping through cracked windows.
By David John5 days ago in Horror
The Devil's Cut
“Comrade, finally you’re awake.” The voice was smooth, sensual. A flickering incandescent bar was all that lit the white, sterile room. All Vladimir remembered was everything going black. He tried to move his arms and found them strapped to the gurney.
By Matthew J. Fromm6 days ago in Fiction
Comments (1)
Sounds as thoroughly missable as it did when I first heard about it, lol. Though Ms. Gaye is impressive (by all appearances). BTW, couldn't help noticing that the woman behind her as she's seated looks a lot like a red-headed Carla Tortelli (Rhea Perlman) of Cheers fame.