Metacritic reviews

This is the main movie that built the house of Troma, Lloyd Kaufman's production company devoted to low-budget camp. The Toxic Avenger tells the humorous story of a geeky weakling who is turned into a superhero when he is slimed by some toxic waste.

This madcap spoof on The Incredible Hulk is an outlandish mix of gory violence and realistic special effects.

Cruddy, primal, extremely violent, and fairly entertaining, this 1984 feature from the New York-based exploitation outfit Troma, Inc. (Lloyd Kaufman and Michael Herz) captures some of the snot-flicking spirit of the old EC comics. How much you'll enjoy its deliberate crudity probably depends on how far you can let yourself regress to surly adolescence.

The Toxic Avenger may be trash, but it has a maniacally farcical sense of humor, and Tromaville's evildoers are dispatched in ingenious ways. One is dry-cleaned to death, another made into pizza, a third partly french-fried.

Despite borrowing from sources as diverse as Frankenstein and The Producer, it all falls apart after an hour.

All-in-all a fairly unpleasant experience for most audiences.

Though it is silly, sleazy, and graphically violent, The Toxic Avenger does hold a bit of warped charm for fans of this sort of thing.

A monstrously crude, blatantly tasteless film reminiscent of the now bygone drive-in movies. It's also sterling evidence of why they haven't been missed.