Remake of The Toxic Avenger comes to EIFF

We’ll say this for EIFF: it’s got catholic tastes. The first four films announced for the festival offer something for pretty much everyone. There’s the opening film Sorry, Baby, an offbeat drama about a young woman working through trauma. Midnight Madness, the festival's late-night genre film strand, will open with BULK, the mysterious new film from Ben Wheatley. The closing film is Paul Sng’s Reality Is Not Enough, a documentary about local literary legend Irvine Welsh and follows him as he explores the boundaries of consciousness through a hallucinogenic trip. And today, EIFF announce that the closing film of Midnight Madness will be The Toxic Avenger, a biggish-budget remake of Troma Studio’s gonzo 1984 extravaganza of the same name, which became a VHS favourite among adolescent film fans hungry for cartoonish gore and violence.

For those of you who didn’t spend the 80s watching grotty exploitation films, The Toxic Avenger follows a whimpy janitor called Winston (played in the remake by Peter Dinklage) who tumbles into a vat of toxic waste and emerges as a mutated superhero. Rather than save the world, his first order of business is to clean up the streets of his local community by taking revenge on all the bullies, brutes and corporate overlords in his neighbourhood. “In a world where greed runs rampant… justice is best served radioactive,” goes the tagline.

A remake of Troma’s cult B-movie featuring big-name stars like Dinklage, Elijah Wood, Kevin Bacon and Jacob Tremblay didn’t sound too exciting until I spotted who’s directing: Macon Blair, the writer-director behind Blue Ruin and Green Room, two of the finest genre films in recent years. We're also intrigued to see that British comedy legend Julia Davis, the genius creator of Nighty Night and Sally4ever, is among the cast. The choice of The Toxic Avenger in the programme also leans into EIFF’s history as one of the first elite film festivals to take genre films seriously, and solidifies this new incarnation of EIFF’s vision to “unleash the very best in new genre cinema from around the world”.

Paul Ridd, EIFF's director, certainly seems excited. “We are absolutely over the moon to be hosting the UK premiere of The Toxic Avenger, which will bring our Midnight Madness strand this year to an extravagantly gory and hilarious close,” he says. “Peter Dinklage’s terrific reimagining of this iconic character in Macon Blair’s genius film makes for an absolute blast of cult cinematic energy.”

---

EIFF runs from 14-20 Aug; the full programme is released in 2 Jul

The Toxic Avenger is released by Signature Entertainment across the UK on 29 Aug