Summary:
The students at a high school near a nuclear power plant start behaving strangely after smoking irradiated marijuana.
My Thoughts:
Last week my roommates and I watched “The Toxic Avenger” and though I wouldn’t by any means call that film a masterpiece, it was a fun schlocky B-movie. Both “The Toxic Avenger” and this film are Troma productions- a low budget production company that specializes in trashy horror flicks and comedies. While I can’t say I’m always a fan of these kinds of films, every once in a while a good splatter comedy really works for me, and “The Toxic Avenger” certainly struck a chord with all of us watching. So, the following weekend we decided to check out this movie, another Troma production, and one of their most highly regarded after “The Toxic Avenger”. Both films were co-directed by Lloyd Kaufman directed under a pseudonym, and this film came just two years after “Avenger”. I figured it might be a safe bet.
Well, I have to say that while this film didn’t work for me nearly as well as “The Toxic Avenger”; it was more on the level of “Rabid Grannies”, a Troma film I watched last year.
I think my biggest problem with this film was the fact that there weren’t nearly as many practical gory effects, nor were there as many set pieces. The things that worked for Toxic Avenger were mostly the fact that it knew it was a stupid splatter film, and it loved exploiting that. There were dozens of shocking and ridiculous moments in that movie; far less so in this film. While this movie does have some cool special effects (the nerdy kid at the beginning melting after he drinks the water, the monster at the end), it doesn’t have nearly as many crazy things happen.
Another issue is that the directors seem to care more about trying to get us to care about the characters than they do about progressing the story. In many, many films I have said the exact opposite as criticism. Usually, it really bugs me when characters are flat and static, but in a splatter comedy I don’t care how flat the characters are; they’re just fodder for the slaughter. The characters in this movie are bizarre, but they aren’t particularly interesting.
The comedy in this film was a little more sexual oriented as well, and many of those jokes in the post #MeToo era feel incredibly outdated. Honestly most of the jokes, even the ones that weren’t outdated, fell flat. There were a few times where I chuckled, but most of the time I felt like this movie was just trying too hard to be get me to laugh through quirky characters and silly costumes, and in the end quirky characters and silly costumes doesn’t really produce many laughs.
Verdict:
I know this film has a cult following, but I honestly couldn’t tell you why. This movie was popular enough to spawn two official sequels and two more recent installments, so I know some people love it, but again, it didn’t do much for me. If you are going to get into Troma, I definitely recommend “The Toxic Avenger”, but other than that, so far, I haven’t been ultra impressed with what Troma has to offer.
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