IT WASN’T LIKE Macon Blair harboured a dream of remaking one of trash cinema’s most bizarrely beloved products. As a 12-year-old kid, he and his buddies (including Jeremy Saulnier, who would years later direct him in indie thrillers Blue Ruin and Green Room) would watch and rewatch The Toxic Avenger, Michael Herz and Lloyd Kaufman’s deliberately offensive yet oddly sentimental 1984 gross-out ‘classic’, about a goofy, mop-wielding young janitor who falls into a vat of toxic waste and becomes what is described in the films as a “hideously deformed creature of superhuman size and strength”. They even “constantly ripped it off”, Blair says, in their own home videos. “But it was not something I carried around in my head as something I wanted to do when I grew up.”
However, when Legendary Entertainment (home to Man Of Steel and Godzilla) secured the rights from Herz and Kaufman’s company Troma and approached him in 2018, Blair — by this point an actor-turned-director with indie crime comedy I Don’t Feel At Home In This World Anymore — saw it as a great opportunity. “I had written several spec scripts that were very gross, brutally violent and rated R, with monsters in them and a purposefully juvenile sense of humour,” he says. “But they were never going to get made. So when ‘Toxie’ came around, it occurred to me this may be the only studio IP that could support that combination of silliness and brutality and sincerity and comedy. In fact, it demanded it.”
Winston Gooze (Peter Dinklage) is all dressed up and wishing he had somewhere to go