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.