The Toxic Avenger

My favorite Troma movie. A dog is shot in the belly, a baby gets a shotgun pointed at its face, a fat dude gets lard pulled out of his stomach, girls in lingerie dance in the background of certain scenes for no reason, a kid's head bursts all over the pavement as it gets run over by a car, the list goes on.

Director Lloyd Kaufman was originally going to call this "Health Club Horror". He wanted to make a horror movie because Variety ran a story proclaiming "The horror movie is dead." Instead of making a horror movie, Troma made an epic. The Toxic Avenger was followed by three sequels. None of them were as good as the original.

A Blockbuster Video in my neighborhood hung The Toxic Avenger poster over their counter when the movie first came out. That shit freaked me out! It's one of my oldest memories. I shit you not, but I must've been two or three years-old at the time. That shit SEARED into my consciousness. That's how powerful The Toxic Avenger is.

Here's the first head-crushing scene (one of my favorite sequences in film history) -



Here's the second -