One man’s trash is another man’s Troma.

The real miracle of The Toxic Avenger isn’t that it got made – although that’s quite something in itself – but that it refuses to apologise for anything it puts on screen. Amid the Reaganite boom of self-serious action heroes and glossy comic book pretenders, Troma’s irradiated janitor lurches into frame with a mop, a grimace, and a budget so meagre the cast probably had to bring their own lunch and possibly their own goo. What Lloyd Kaufman and Michael Herz cooked up in 1984 wasn’t just low-budget – it was subterranean, and yet it brims with an energy and intent most modern multimillion-dollar fare can’t muster despite three rounds of brand consultation and an algorithm.

The film’s genius, such as it is, lies not in refinement or restraint but in absolute saturation. Every frame is either stuffed with trash, trashiness, or both, and the end result is a kind of grindhouse grotesque that asks you to laugh, wince, gag, or cheer, sometimes all at once. The toxic waste that transforms Melvin the mop boy into Tromaville’s mop-wielding vigilante messiah might be fluorescent green paint in a barrel, but the alchemy it unleashes is closer to countercultural gold.

It helps that Kaufman’s filmmaking isn’t so much archly anarchic as cheerfully indifferent to cinematic etiquette. The performances come in two flavours: pantomime villainy or accidental sincerity, and while none of them would pass muster at RADA, they land exactly where they need to. The goons are so vile, so cartoonishly sociopathic, that their inevitable squishy fates feel not only justified but overdue. Toxie himself, a mutant hybrid of brute strength and bashful teenage insecurity, is one of the few superhero protagonists whose moral compass is as warped as his physique, but in a town as comprehensively rotten as Tromaville, any attempt at subtlety would just get eaten alive.

The film’s salacious streak, meanwhile, is impossible to miss. Troma doesn’t just include sex and nudity – it weaponizes them. Unlike the sterilised PG-13/ 12A four-quadrant crowd-pleasing that would eventually define and some say constrain superhero cinema, The Toxic Avenger revels in the grotesque collision of exploitation and action. It’s not tasteful, but it is intentional: the nudity is leering and excessive, yet also inextricable from the film’s larger war on hypocrisy. Villains leer, grope, and exploit, their sexuality as vile as their violence. Even Toxie’s own love story, though dipped in cheese and absurdity, offers something stranger: an earnest connection nestled among the filth.

It’s tempting to label The Toxic Avenger as satire, but that gives the film a shade more composure than it actually exhibits. It’s more like a nuclear-mutated tantrum at the hypocrisy of consumer culture, municipal corruption, and superhero cinema. Its targets are big, broad, and get regularly punched in the face. A mayor with mob ties and a waistband like a deflating paddling pool? Splattered. Corrupt cops and murderous gym bunnies? Pulverised. A blind love interest whose idea of flirtation involves caressing an open wound? Somehow endearing.

The gore is outrageous, the humour gleefully tasteless, and the plot barely stitched together with surgical suture and wishful thinking. But every wonky frame crackles with intent and invention. It’s not incompetence masquerading serendipitously as style; it’s a grubby triumph born from necessity, turned into iconography. Troma never had the resources to make something polished, so they leaned into grime – and grime, as it turns out, has a filthy charisma all its own. The haphazard prosthetics, the abrupt edits, the canned screams – all part of the film’s strange, radioactive charm.

Beneath the guts and goo, though, there’s a weird – if twisted – moral clarity. The Toxic Avenger is unflinchingly binary. Bad people do bad things and are obliterated. Good people are occasionally drenched in fluids but ultimately liberated. It’s vigilante justice filtered through exploitative logic and sophomoric sexuality but delivered with such earnest, lopsided conviction that it’s hard not to root for it. Toxie may melt the odd head, but he’s also the unholy lovechild of Frankenstein and Captain Planet, retribution in flesh fused melted spandex.

Four decades on, the film still refuses to fade away. It’s been reissued, sequelised, musicalised, and now rebooted with Peter Dinklage, but the original remains untouchable (at least without gloves) – not out of reverence but because its DNA is corrupted beyond replication. Troma’s crowning achievement isn’t just that they made a film this chaotic, but that they made it stick – and sticky. The Toxic Avenger shouldn’t work, kind of doesn’t work, and yet absolutely does…something right. It’s a misfit masterpiece, proudly sleazy and impossibly sincere – a grimy mop-wielding parable that somehow scrubs clean a corner of cinematic history nobody else dared touch.