Things are sleazy when you’re big in Japan.

There’s something perversely appropriate about The Toxic Avenger Part II deciding that what its radioactive predecessor really needed was an international travel segment and a slightly bigger budget. That budget, of course, still wouldn’t cover craft services on a mid-tier slasher, but for Troma, it was practically blockbuster money – and like any studio suddenly flush with success, they responded by splitting the film into two and watching the chaos blossom.

Narratively speaking, The Toxic Avenger Part II is held together with the same level of logic involved in bubble-wrapping a cactus. Toxie (now fully embracing his status as Tromaville’s mop-wielding mascot) heads to Japan in search of his long-lost father, leaving behind his blind girlfriend, a town full of cartoonish crime, and the distinct impression that nobody involved has quite agreed on what film they’re making. The journey East brings with it not only a cultural whiplash so severe it should come with subtitles, but a tone that slides freely between slapstick, splatter, and sincere attempts at family bonding – though “sincere” is doing more heavy lifting than usual.

There’s an oddness to this sequel’s ambitions that feels both grandiose and grubby. It wants to open up the world, to globalise the franchise, to make The Toxic Avenger feel bigger – and yet it’s still stapled together with the same offcuts of gore, gags, and gratuitous nudity. Troma’s exploitation instincts haven’t faded, but they’ve shifted from satirical to scattershot. In a trend that will grow with the sequels, nudity is now a narrative placeholder: a jolt of skin to prop up a sagging moment or take up runtime, rarely connected to plot or character.

Much of that is due to the film’s split identity. Behind the scenes, The Toxic Avenger Part II was originally one long, overstuffed sequel that had to be cleaved in half mid-edit. As a result, what remains here feels like one third of a plot, one third of a road trip, and a remaining third of a fever dream held together by mop glue and often naked determination. Toxie’s journey to Tokyo is sporadically peppered with slapdash action sequences and barely contextualised local flavour, all shot with the wide-eyed confusion of a tourist armed with a Super 8 and no translation guide.

But this is Troma, and disjointed chaos is practically a feature, not a bug. There’s still a peculiar charm in how earnestly the film tries to balance grotesque gore with awkward sentimentality. The practical effects remain shameless and sticky, the performances tilt between amateur theatre and street performance, and the whole thing unfolds with the logic of a child telling a story before bedtime – distracted, erratic, but weirdly compelling.

Before it makes the baffling decision to follow in The Karate Kid Part II’s footsteps by heading East for its sequel (albeit by windsurfing there from New Jersey), The Toxic Avenger Part II starts brightly enough with gloriously dark humour in the Home for the Blind sequence, daring the audience to laugh while squirming. It plays out like a gloriously crass live-action cartoon, pushing accessibility-based sight gags to grotesque extremes but still managing to frame the blind residents as bizarrely dignified in their own right. It’s one of the rare moments The Toxic Avenger Part II remembers how to provoke with purpose rather than just flail for effect.

Toxie himself (still played by Ron Fazio in creature mode, with John Altamura briefly but chaotically occupying the suit before being replaced mid-production) has now graduated from accidental avenger to globe-trotting peacekeeper. His moral compass still points magnetic north by way of vigilante absolutism – evil must be destroyed, usually via increasingly baroque means. And while his relationship with his girlfriend Claire is retooled (along with the character name and the actress), it remains endearingly ludicrous: tender scenes are framed with the same sincerity as exploding heads, and neither feels more out of place than the other.

The film’s central antagonist – the nameless CEO of Apocalypse Inc. – arrives with a pinstripe suit, slicked hair, and a smirk that owes a conspicuous debt to Louis Cypher of Angel Heart. Whether homage or accidental mimicry, it works: the film’s core conflict may be nonsense, but there’s something perversely satisfying about watching a mop-wielding mutant square off against a budget Beelzebub styled like a Wall Street vampire.

Where the original used sleaze to reveal hypocrisy, The Toxic Avenger Part II deploys it more like seasoning – sprinkled across scenes whether or not the moment calls for it. The result is a franchise no longer interrogating exploitation, but cannonballing into it without checking how the deep the thematic water is. Troma’s satirical swagger still flickers here and there, but the film’s grasp on what it’s trying to mock has begun to slip.

What The Toxic Avenger Part II loses in anarchic spark, it tries to recoup with scale – and while it mostly fails, its conviction to overreach remains oddly infectious. There’s a half-buried thread about disability and identity, echoing the first film’s more subversive elements, but it’s swamped beneath a tide of prosthetics, pratfalls, and ‘funny foreigner’ gags that land with all the grace of a 1970s stand up comedy routine.

Still, it’s hard to be too cross. This is a film made with conviction, however misplaced, and for those on the Troma wavelength, The Toxic Avenger Part II remains a necessary if clumsy chapter in the studio’s radioactive mythmaking. For everyone else, it’s probably the moment to start questioning how much mop-based justice you can safely consume as part of your cinematic diet.