“I saw the original Toxie at a very formative age in the late 1980s, around the same time me and a group of friends were trying to learn how to make our own movies on videotape”, the director told Zavvi. “It was inspiring in the same way Night of the Living Dead was inspiring – it felt homemade, on its own terms, the exact opposite of a Star Wars.
“We didn’t realise at the time that was something you could do, and so it was a permission slip for us to make movies in the woods behind our house. The mop and the mutants appealed to us as 12-year-olds, but the most powerful thing was how it showed we could do this ourselves.”
Now a celebrated character actor and director in his own right – you may have seen him lead cult thriller Blue Ruin, or his prize-winning directorial debut I Don’t Feel At Home In This World Anymore; you’ve almost definitely seen him as Oppenheimer’s lawyer in Christopher Nolan’s biopic – Blair has now been given the chance to go back to where his love for making movies began. He successfully pitched a Toxic Avenger reboot to Legendary Pictures in 2019 and still couldn’t quite believe it when he got to set.
“I texted (Blue Ruin director) Jeremy Saulnier, my friend I’ve grown up with, and told him it was like we were making movies in eighth grade again, just with proper lighting and Hollywood actors! I had to keep my voice down whenever speaking to anybody on set, as it felt like I was getting away with something by making this.
“I was taking it seriously as a big franchise movie, but wanted it to maintain that handmade quality, which was central to all my conversations with costume and production designers, cinematographers, everybody. I didn’t want too many swoopy, intricate camera movements – I wanted the vibe that this was with a couple of people shooting on their hometown street with a tripod!”
The reboot stars Peter Dinklage as Winston Gooze, a put-upon janitor who has just been diagnosed with a cancer that’s only terminal because his medical insurance doesn’t cover it. His attempt to get his company CEO (a sleazy Kevin Bacon) to change his coverage ends badly, but a murder attempt by his hired goons goes wrong, and the freak accident transforms him into the mutant Toxic Avenger, ready to fight crime with his skull-melting mop.
For a deliberately homemade movie, adapted from a defiantly underground franchise, the most distracting thing about The Toxic Avenger might be the A-list cast; it’s a compliment to Blair to say they all feel like they were tricked into being in it. Dinklage was the first person to sign up for the ride, although he wasn’t originally in mind for the hero role.
“I was initially thinking about Peter as the villain, and finding our lead was taking us in wildly different directions as to what the movie would be. One day, I had the epiphany that Peter should be the lead; I knew him a little, we’d traded scripts here and there, and that was enough to send him this script.
“He read it and got back to me almost instantly – I hadn’t realised, but he was a hardcore fan of the original movie, so what I was aiming to do here needed no translation. He got that it was silly and dumb on purpose, but ultimately very sweet, and when you have a real actor like Peter involved, suddenly it’s easier to approach other real actors and convince them this is an actual movie!
“I’m grateful that I have a cast who got it, who understood they could go nuts and they didn’t need to be inhibited because this whole movie is overheated. I wanted this to look, sound and feel turned up to 11, and the cast were very happy to do that with their performances too.”
Blair’s screenplay is frequently self-referential, breaking the fourth wall as it calls out the cliched narrative conventions it’s playing into. Some have interpreted it as a Deadpool-style parody of the superhero genre, but he insists that the movie's humour is rooted elsewhere.
“Ultimately, I was trying to make a comedy. As much as I'm pulling from superhero stuff, and Universal Monster references that feel straight out of a James Whale movie, my main references were Airplane! And The Naked Gun – this is a very silly comedy, and at the end of the day, my only hope is that people can walk out of this and say they laughed.
“But to use Airplane! as an example, it’s ridiculous and chock full of jokes, but it’s held together by the romance plot and the characters trying to land the plane. You need an emotional thing in there to hang the foolishness on, and that’s how I approached this, whilst knowing it needed to work for longtime fans, so I couldn’t replicate the same origin story as it would be diminishing returns.
“Whenever I’m writing something, I’m always looking to personalise it on some level so I can understand what the emotional engine is, and that’s how I landed on this being a story about a dad trying to bond with his stepson. If the movie is grounded in them navigating that dynamic, then I’ve got free reign to go as absurd with the jokes and the action stuff as I can, knowing that there was a beating heart visible right at the centre of it.”
The only area where The Toxic Avenger doesn’t feel like a home movie is its deliberately out of time setting; this could feasibly take place anytime between 1980 and today, a hodgepodge of nearly 50 years of Americana. It helps sell the cartoonish tone Blair was aiming for, although that’s not the only reason he created the world like this.
“If the setting feels timeless, then it can be about everything and also about nothing”, he laughed. “If we set it in the present day or made it a specific period piece confined to a certain time, then people might read it a certain way – I wanted something that felt a little bit more universal.
“I personally feel this is set in a netherworld between 1988 and 1992, that was the guiding light in how we talked about the clothing and set designs, whilst also making sure it felt like a self-contained universe that wasn’t necessarily restricted to that period. The other guiding light was wanting it to feel decayed, dangerous and scuzzy, but in ways like Repo Man or Robocop; you don’t mind hanging out there, even as it’s falling apart.”
A post-credits scene ends with the gag that Toxie will return in Toxic 2Venger... but only if this movie makes a billion dollars at the box office in the US alone. It feels like a deliberate middle finger to the Marvel method of setting up several sequels down the road too far in advance, but Blair is keen to stress that he wasn’t entirely joking here.
“I feel like the movie can stand on its own; we end on our own terms, and the joke still works well if the audience tells us they don’t want any more of these! But obviously, if anybody wants to have a conversation about making another Toxie movie, I’d say yes in a heartbeat – I love the people involved and would love to work with them again.
“I never thought of this as a vessel to set up future stories, I always considered it a one and done. It’d be a lovely surprise if anything else happens, but I didn’t make this movie counting on that!”
The Toxic Avenger is released UNCUT in UK cinemas on Friday, 29th August.
