Indie film studio Troma combined gory horror with juvenile humor to surprising success, starting with their cult hit The Toxic Avenger. Kind of like Frankenstein meets Beauty and the Beast meets Superman, but updated for the 80s generation (in other words, more aerobics gear, bad music, occasional nudity, and horrible jokes), the Toxic Avenger is a bullied nerd who gets dropped in a vat of nuclear waste and turns into a deformed freak who battles crime and falls in love. This was Troma’s quintessential achievement, an ode to offensive humor and low-budget gore that serves as one of the most entertainingly cheesy exploitation flicks ever made. This is the dark side of the 80s that Reagan didn’t want you to know about, so enjoy the type of gleeful bad taste only found in movies where drunken teenagers intentionally run over a child’s head for laughs.
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