The Troma Solution, Continued

The Class of Nuke ‘Em High (1986) argues directly against leaving nuclear power plants unchecked by the EPA (Environmental Protection Agency) and the NRC (Nuclear Regulatory Commission) in relation to the same Tromaville, New Jersey, setting found in The Toxic Avenger. As in Toxic Avenger, the opening establishes the toxic environment both condemned and ridiculed by these Troma films. 

But this time the film seems to respond to contemporaneous nuclear disasters such as the 1979 Three Mile Island reactor meltdown in nearby Middletown, Pennsylvania. The film also brings to mind the 1986 Chernobyl explosion and the successful protests against the Shoreham Nuclear Power Plant from 1979 until a plan to decommission the plant was approved in 1989.

Instead of taking a serious look at the dangers of nuclear power, as does The China Syndrome (1979) and Silkwood (1983), The Class of Nuke ‘Em High plays eco-horror for laughs. School jock Warren (Gil Brenton) and his cheerleader girlfriend Chrissy (Janelle Brady) are transformed by toxic “atomic” marijuana into comic eco-heroes who are perhaps less bumbling than Toxie.

Both The Toxic Avenger and The Class of Nuke ‘Em High beg the question, what’s so funny about environmental disasters? But they also point out a change of strategy—laughing about the environment and its degradation may not only stimulate awareness; that laughter might also point out a path toward change. In spite of their sometimes overpowering campy humor and horrifying violence, these Troma films show the consequences of disturbing a pristine ecosystem and offer a viable solution to greedy humans’ exploitation of the natural world. They may clearly be what Derek Armstrong calls “horror comedies,” but they may also serve as viable alternatives to the serious ecocinema of the 1970s and today.

This shift to eco-horror comedy occurs for at least three reasons. First of all, the genre has come of age and can now be satirized through comic versions like Toxic Avenger and Class of Nuke ‘Em High. These films also exploit their cultural and historical contexts, making us laugh, while also revealing everyday environmental disasters we need to address. These Troma films also reflect a movement from rugged individualism to a more communal approach to solving ecological problems, a change in the evolutionary narrative that reflects a movement from a tragic to a comic eco-hero. This evolutionary change also aligns with anthropological theories of laughter’s origin.

Examining the Toxic Avenger and Class of Nuke ‘Em High movies in relation to theories gleaned from cultural studies, anthropology, and examinations of the comic eco-hero may also demonstrate the positive results possible when a genre comes of age: a raised awareness of the disastrous consequences of environmental degradation.

Laughter and the Eco-Horror Film: The Troma Solution Part I: The Toxic Avenger

Beginning in the 1980s, Troma Studios has turned monstrous nature on its head, playing campy yet subversive eco-themes for laughs by showcasing comic eco-heroes instead of the tragic hero of most horror films. Troma’s Toxic Avenger series from 1984, 1989, and 2000, and Class of Nuke ‘Em High and its sequels, from 1986-2013, look at toxic waste dumping, energy overconsumption, and radiation poisoning from a more comic perspective than 1970s eco-horror movies like Soylent Green and Silent Running. 

In these films, rugged individualism is replaced with more communal approaches to solving ecological problems. But Troma films move beyond traditional comic horror films by exploiting, satirizing, and sometimes parodying historical and current events with help from the laugh-inducing antics of a bumbling comic eco-hero. In The Toxic Avenger and Class of Nuke ‘Em High films, toxic waste and radiation contamination disasters are played for both laughs and results.

As comic eco-horror, The Toxic Avenger (1984) uses the negative repercussions of toxic waste for comic effect. To accentuate both its comedy and eco-message, the film’s hero, Melvin (Mark Torgi), mutates into the Toxic Avenger (Mitch Cohen) after being humiliated by a clique of vicious jocks at the health club where he works as a custodian. The jocks not only terrorize Melvin, the “mopboy”; they also gleefully seek out other victims with their souped-up car. They repeatedly run their car over a child on a bike and point a shotgun at a baby, for example. 

Ultimately, though, they chase Melvin through a health club window into the vat of toxic waste that changes him into a superhero. So the Toxic Avenger’s gory revenge seems just. To heighten his moral standing, the Toxic Avenger saves those in distress, destroys corrupt politicians, and is rewarded with a beautiful blind girlfriend. The message here supports a community free of those who exploit the weak. 

The film’s take on nature may seem less clear cut because toxic waste—an environmental pollutant—causes Melvin’s transformation into The Toxic Avenger and prompts the moral readjustment of Tromaville. Yet Nature seems to fight back in the Toxic Avenger films, since exploited figure turned comic hero Melvin destroys the power-hungry.

Horror and Thriller Films in Illinois

Today I started researching horror and thriller films set in Illinois and directed by Illinois filmmakers for our 2017 Embarras Valley Film Festival. This festival showcases filmmakers and folks in the film business from Central and Southern Illinois primarily. And our 2017 theme is thriller/horror films that will be shown the weekend before Halloween.

We co-sponsored Stay the Sweet by Quincy Joyner several years ago, so I knew we could begin with that one. But I know other local filmmakers have directed independent horror films, some of them set at the Ashmore Estates pictured above. Michael Savinsky directed Rag Doll back in 2011, for example, with one of my film students, Tyson Kroening, assisting and acting as a corpse.  

I plan to explore more thrillers and horror films set in Illinois. For now, though, I have a short list of Illinois directors of more professional horror and thriller films:

Manny Velazquez, Savage High (2015)/I Recorded a Murder! (2016)
David Ayer, Suicide Squad (2016)
John Carl Butler?
William Friedken, The Exorcist. Bug. Killer Joe
Reginald Hudlin, Marshall, Django Unchained
Mark Romanek, Never Let Me Go
Lee Sholem, The Doomsday Machine
 Robert Zemeckis, Monster House, Death Becomes Her
 Edward Zwick, Jack Reacher: Never Go Back
Gregg Toland (cinematographer)/William Wyler (director), Dead End?

The Hellstrom Chronicle: Turning insects into monsters

With the 1971 Academy Award for Best Documentary, The Hellstrom Chronicle connects amazing micro-documentary footage with a horrific voice-over from fictional character, Dr. Hellstrom (Lawrence Pressman). The film’s faux documentary stance, however, is complicated by its confusing rhetorical message. It warns of mass elimination due to environmentally disastrous practices performed by insects at the micro-level. But it also suggests their survival will not be threatened. Such a complex perspective may draw on the expertise of the documentary’s filmmakers: Co-director and co-cinematographer Walon Green also co-wrote the screenplay for Sam Peckinpah’s hyper-violent The Wild Bunch (1969). The documentary’s screenwriter David Seltzer was also the author of The Omen (1976) and Prophecy (1979), and the producer, David L. Wolper, also produced Appointment with Destiny (1971), a pseudo-documentary television series. The series used grainy film stock and chiaroscuro lighting to simulate the appearance of actual documentary footage from pre-cinema eras to enhance episodes such as one highlighting the shootout at the O.K. Corral.

Reviews of Hellstrom were also mixed, primarily because the film combined a fictional narrator with authentic documentary footage. Roger Ebert states for example that the film “has hypnotically fascinating color photography of insects. The camera becomes so intimate with insects, indeed, that at times we are actually in bed with copulating spiders …. Precisely because the photography of insects is so astonishingly good, the narration is annoying.” DVD reviewer Glenn Erickson maintains that the film “has top-level docu credentials” and “uses excellent footage of insect life” but also thinks the voiceover weakens the film.

Perhaps in an attempt to warn humanity about the negative consequences of their own exploitation of the natural world, the film constructs insects as monsters first by highlighting characteristics that Stephen R. Kellert suggests promote fear in humans. But those traits may also draw on the qualities shared by the most horrific versions of ourselves. According to Kellert, insects have “vastly different ecological strategies, spatially and temporally.” They rely on an “extraordinary multiplicity” rather than “individual identity and selfhood,” and their “shapes and forms appear ‘monstrous’” (quoted in Brown xi). But insects are also “often associated with notions of mindlessness and an absence of feeling,” as with the link between insects and madness, a link that explicitly connects the insect and human worlds. And they also possess a radical “autonomy … from human will and control” (Kellert quoted in Brown xi), a disposition also associated with humans who resist subjugation. Their incredible fecundity seems to generate the most fear in humans, according to Kellert, a stereotype associated with some humans, as well.

By emphasizing these fear-inducing characteristics, the film seems not only to warn humanity about insects seeming invulnerability, but also to attribute their possible dominance on Earth to humanity’s own mistreatment of the natural world. If we continue to destroy our environment, the film suggests, our species will be usurped by the insect world. Despite the film’s attempts to separate humans and insects, however, its narrative and film footage suggest insects will inherit the earth not because they are superior to humans but because they are just like us.

Ultimately, insects become monstrous in The Hellstrom Chronicle because they resemble humans at their worst, as, what Eric C. Brown calls “humanity’s Other” (xi). Drawing on all levels of anthropomorphism proposed by Persson et al., the film constructs insects as monsters by highlighting their primitive psychological qualities, their connection to human folk-psychology, their traits and “dispositions,” the social roles they play, and the emotions they both display and produce.