Film Review: The Toxic Avenger (2025)

The little slasher B-movie that could.

Official poster for The Toxic Avenger (2025). Image via IMP Awards.

After sitting in release limbo for nearly two years, The Toxic Avenger finally stumbles its way out of cinema purgatory and into theaters. It originally premiered at Fantastic Fest in September 2023 and promptly vanished, dismissed by distributors as unreleasable. But thanks to the rising profile of Cineverse — riding high after last year’s Terrifier 3— this scrappy oddity gets a second shot. And it’s kind of a perfect comeback story for a film like this.

Peter Dinklage stars as Winston Gooze, a down-on-his-luck single stepdad and janitor at a corrupt pharmaceutical plant who finds himself transformed into a mutated antihero after a dunk in some conveniently glowing green sludge. It’s a silly, over-the-top setup with plenty of built-in nostalgia, leaning hard into the spirit of the original 1984 cult film. Kevin Bacon chews the scenery as the evil CEO, delivering cartoon villainy with glee, while Elijah Wood goes full weird in a performance that lands somewhere between Renfield and a sewer rat. Both are clearly having fun and somehow that energy carries things farther than it probably should.

Still, the film isn’t without its issues. Pacing is a problem. At 100 minutes, the movie drags in spots and often seems to confuse absurdity with momentum. The gore is playful but repetitive, the jokes are inconsistent, and the novelty starts to wear off halfway through. A leaner cut would’ve tightened the experience and helped the better gags hit harder. Tonally, it also flip-flops between throwback cheese and modern gross-out humor, not always in a way that blends.

What does work is the commitment to its own bizarre world. This is a film that knows it’s not for everyone — and doesn’t care. There’s a scrappy kind of charm in that. For horror-comedy diehards, there’s enough blood, bile, and bonkers performances to justify a watch. And while it may not launch a franchise revival, The Toxic Avenger wears its cult-movie badge with pride. It’s not great cinema, but it knows exactly what kind of mess it is.

King’s Ruling: A grimy, gooey underdog with just enough radioactive charm to earn a seat at the midnight movie throne.