Review by Ben Bussey
So- how does one go about making a sequel to a film as knowingly absurd and excessive as Troma’s original Toxic Avenger? With some difficulty, it would seem. As much as Troma’s output is designed to be more or less critic proof – that old ‘so bad it’s good’ thing – there’s really no getting around the glaring problems of the first sequel to the 1984 splatter favourite on which the indie studio built their legend. Yes, a great deal of what occurs in The Toxic Avenger Part II is of course as knowingly, deliberately distasteful and dim-witted as in its predecessor – but then again, a great deal more of it is plainly and simply bad filmmaking and bad storytelling. Messiness may be key to Troma’s charm, but The Toxic Avenger Part II takes this all just a tad bit too far, and it doesn’t take long for the old joke to stop being funny.
The essential set-up is simple enough, and suitably comic book, given that in a fucked-up way The Toxic Avenger movies were kind of pioneering in the cinematic superhero format (fascinating to think this sequel arrived the same year as Tim Burton’s Batman…) Having wiped out all crime in Tromaville, our young hero Melvin is struggling to adapt to a normal, peaceful life in which he longer gets to hideously maim and mangle bad guys on a daily basis, and as such is in therapy – but naturally, that all changes as the obviously evil Apocalypse corporation show up in town, killing a boatload of innocent blind people, and waking Toxie out of his ass-kicking atrophy. After Toxie kills a slew of their toughest goons (in a painfully drawn-out comedy fight sequence that gets old really quick), the corporation hold a meeting (also painfully drawn-out and quick to get old) in which it is eventually revealed the only way they can conceivably kill Toxie is with some technological macguffin that their guys in Japan are working on. But rather than ship this device out to them, they decide a better option is to send Toxie to Tokyo, by manipulating him via his shrink into believing his long-last father is over there.
As I said when 88 Films released the original Toxic Avenger to Blu-ray earlier this year, I am a long way from being an expert on Troma and its history, so I don’t have any idea what led to The Toxic Avenger Part II being a Japanese co-production, though it’s not hard to see how the cartoonish and tasteless nature of proceedings would resonate well over there. Indeed, once Toxie arrives in Tokyo, gets confused by the sight of the Tokyo Tower and wonders if he wound up in Paris by mistake, and of course gets into some ridiculous fistcuffs with local hoodlums, it’s not hard to see The Toxic Avenger Part II as a spiritual forebear of sorts to the glorious Japanese trash cinema we get from Noboru Iguchi, Yoshihiro Nishimura and company these days. The bad dubbing and the severely contrived circumstances under which Toxie winds up in Japan are hardly an impediment to the sense of trashy fun.
Of somewhat greater concern, however, are the pace and the plot. Toxie going to Japan isn’t a bad hook for a sequel at all – but it takes about 45 minutes of meandering for us to get to this point, and once Toxie gets to Japan the meandering only continues, and the film turns into a semi-travelogue, following Toxie and Masami, his quickly acquired Japanese escort (in a non-sexual way – well, she does gratuitously lose her top at one point, but Toxie seems to be a one-woman guy), as they wander the streets of Tokyo in a rather touristy fashion. For someone apparently dead-set on finding his dad, then getting home to beat the bad guys once and for all, Toxie seems more than happy to dawdle a lot of the time – and at a little shy of two hours, the film is far longer than it has any reason to be, and really would have benefited from at least twenty minutes of fat-trimming.
There are some strengths to be sure; a few good comedy moments and splattery deaths, although it’s a good deal tamer than the first movie (no dead kids or animals this time), and it ends on a surprisingly good car chase. All in all, though, The Toxic Avenger Part II is so poorly paced, overlong and overloaded with superfluous waffle that we really can’t deem it anything but a failure. Sure, we can always use the old ‘it’s not like the first one was Oscar material’ argument, but ultimately that’s just crap. Once again – there’s a difference between ‘so bad it’s good’ and just plain bad filmmaking, and The Toxic Avenger Part II leaps right over that line.
The Toxic Avenger Part II is released to UK Blu-ray on 17th November, from 88 Films.