 Welcome to another episode of Frightfully Forgotten's Trash or Treasure, but before we get started, what are we drinking? Again, we are drinking Lords of Death Hopped Rice Lager. Nice, I'll take it. Today, we're going to be doing another Patreon request review. This was requested by Stanley Surrick, and he would like us to tackle the Toxic Avenger, which came out in 1984. Michael Hurz and Lloyd Kaufman directed this. They're Troma Staples, they've done all of them pretty much. Patrick Kilpatrick is in this, and he was in Death Warranty, he was the Sandman. He all kicks his head into that pipe. Okay, so the plot for Toxic Avenger is actually pretty simple, but pretty original at the same time. Our main character, Melvin, the mop boy, mops up the local gym, he's a big nerd and no one likes him, everyone makes fun of him. There's a group of bullies, Bozo, Slug, Julie, and the hot tub, look at that fucking mop boy. Yeah, put the mop in the hot tub by accident, you fucking asshole. Look what you did. I'm sorry, yo. So their plan is to humiliate Melvin, Julie kind of serenades him, oh Melvin, she treks Melvin and putting on this 2-2 and this whole ballerina outfit, he's all strutting through the gym, goes into this dark room and the lights are off, and I'm over here, Melvin, I'm over here, oh Julie, Julie, Julie. Turns on the light and he turns on, he's kissing this, this cheek, yeah it's all done up, Julie. You got the lipstick on, the brawn, everyone is in on this and watching him, he jumps out the window into these barrels of toxic waste which are sitting there in a flatbed truck, truck drivers all doing this cocaine, the vases are all full of it, oh he's all bubbling up, Melvin's on fire, diddly-dee, diddly-dee, diddly-dee, slowly starts transforming into the toxic avenger, that's right. His mother, oh my Melvin, finally hit puberty, yeah, it's not fucking puberty, it's fucking melting, three sort of gangster guys and one of them is this cigar face, this is his name, they're trying to bribe this cop in this back alley, the cop doesn't want anything to do with it right? He's a clean cop, yeah he's a clean cop, they all start beating this shit right out of him, lo and behold here comes the toxic avenger and he kinda just jumps into the scene and starts beating the shit out of all of these guys, he picks up like that cigar face guy and he puts him like face down and that barrel starts punching his nuts all down, look at that, look at the elbows that one got, jeez, no it's all gone, puts his two fingers through that guy's eyes dude, there's also a wicked fight scene at the taco restaurant, this is where he finds his love interest, it turns out that she's blind, he saves her from these like hooligans, they end up having like a nice life together, they make a nice home and everything, in the junkyard, yeah in the junkyard like through all this garbage and everything that they kind of put together, montage, must be love, that song, so like the word is out, this toxic avengers out there, this monster, he's out there and he's like fighting for your rights, we also get introduced to the mayor of this town who's all corrupt and he wants to sell like all this pristine beachfront property to dump toxic waste, the toxic avenger, he's got to beat these corrupt city officials and he's also going to take revenge on the people who did him wrong, who turned him into the toxic avenger, exactly, now this brings us to the treasure of this movie, almost everything is a treasure of this movie, the fact that the movie knows what it is, it knows that it's campy, it knows it's stupid, it knows that the acting is not good and uses all that stuff to his advantage, exaggerates everything, yeah and it sort of helps to cover all the bad stuff up, right, it uses it perfectly, the 80s were a big time of indulgence, so you have a lot of like toxic waste dumping, you have a lot of corruption, drug use, bringing to light and making fun of like all the body image stuff, exactly, with the gym, everybody at the gym, fun, yeah, yeah, he's got to do more, as stupid as it is, it's also great social commentary, exactly, you couldn't make this movie with serious actors, you couldn't hire Anthony Hopkins to be in this movie and have it work, no you have to hire actors who are going to be silly over the top and camp you, and they're using the camp to cover up the fact that they can't act is perfect, oh yeah it is, yeah, the pacing of this movie is so good too, like there's no dull moment, there's not one moment where you're like yeah come on pick it up, exactly, it's balls, the walls, either comedy or action or character building or humor throughout the whole movie, you get no rest, and everything's over the top, so even like the dull parts are super over the top, and you still get entertained regardless, which is awesome, like some movies drag on and they feel like they're super long and they're only an hour and a half, this movie's an hour and a half and feels like it's 45 minutes because it's just like yeah, yeah exactly, it's non stop, that brings us to the effects, like the effects are one of the hallmarks of this movie, it also shows how you can make really good simple effects on a low budget, everything here looks great, there's no CGI, it's all let's use what we can, let's take a watermelon and put a wig on it and make it look like a kid's head and drive over to the car, it looks fucking great, it's all in the cutting and the editing right, it's artistic, I like when they show his foot too and he's putting the pedal to the metal, there's all those beer cans and everything, like subtle things like that right, exactly, and this brings us to like the entire scene in the taco restaurant, it's fucking great, rips off that guy's arm, he goes to flip him around, tears his arm, he doesn't even notice it right away, come on mother fucker, he makes that sunday out of that, that guy's face, that sand man guy, he takes all this time to put all the ice cream in there with the scooper with the clicking thing, it puts his face in that milkshake maker thing and then he deep fries that guy's hand and he like wrenches all those pipes down onto him like fuck that's great, that drug dealer kind of goes through those shitty leg movements on that machine, that exercise machine, then he takes his head and lifts those weights, just lets the weights go and boom, which we did a kill like that in that, we did, that's right, without seeing toxic avenger, no I hadn't seen it that time, I probably ripped it right off, even the melvin's on fire scene is good right, you can't really tell it's a guy in a fire suit, looks like a guy's bare skin, yeah it's not all fat looking like those fire suits always look all fat, and then when he turns into the toxic avenger and he's all bubbling and everything, it's awesome like it looks great, the effects for a low budget movie is spectacular, the comedy is just, it's so over the top but it's also smart and it's placed perfectly too, funny but it's also a little heartwarming too like when melvin finds the love and they're building the house together, it's kinda like aww, the music in this movie is fucking killer, whenever I watch this movie I always get the music stuck in my head especially that body talk song, body talk, I wanna listen to your body talk, it's fucking great, it's like they're all in the gym and everybody's smoking and everything, like yeah it's hilarious, this movie has done more than spawned sequels, it launched a whole company, this movie failed, trauma would have failed, there have been no trauma films, spawned a lot of stuff right in pop culture, sequels, three sequels, yeah and cartoon, a children's cartoon was based off of the Toxic Avenger which is insane, yeah just from something that I'm sure these guys they probably put all their money into it, hoping that it would just make them a bit back and it spawned this huge thing, which brings us to the trash of this movie, so what is bad about this movie, we kind of agonized about this actually and to be honest there is not much that's trash about it, depending on whose eyes you're seeing through, you know seeing through a horror fan's eyes, yeah I can't say anything bad about this film, everything that's everything that should be sort of bad about it is kind of covered up by the camp, yeah and the fact that they use that to their advantage yeah, yeah exactly and so really there's nothing bad about it, hoity-toity film critics would say this movie is a complete piece of trash, just uttered garbage, gore and guts and blood and sex and tits, but it's way more than they're just not even, they're not even skimming the surface right and you know what Siskel and Ebert, you're dead, so who cares, so we're both gonna rate Toxic Avenger a complete piece of treasure, this movie should be in the criterion collection, exactly, it is a piece of American film history, that's right, it's got everything you'd ever want and it's just a fun party movie too like you can put it on and just have a blast watching it, yep, any small low budget company wants to do what Toxic Avenger did, so until next time, keep drinking