Peter Dinklage dons a tutu, Elijah Wood looks like Gollum in Toxic Avenger remake

Toxic Avenger was a low budget piece of superhero schlock that came out in 1984. Mostly ignored by critics at the time, it went on to become a hit on the midnight movie circuit, where connoisseurs laughed at the screen while shouting advice to the characters. It’s gone down in history as a camp classic, and now director Macon Blair is mounting a remake with a budget and cast the original movie couldn’t dream of.

The Toxic Avenger, which spawned several sequels as well as a cartoon and even a stage musical, is about a janitor at a health club who falls into a vat of toxic waste, like you do, and becomes a deformed mutant with super-strength. He then goes around fighting crime…and also getting revenge on the stuck-up hardbodies at the gym who used to torment him. For instance, they made him wear a tutu, which in some versions of the character gets grafted to his skin after the acid incident and becomes part of his superhero uniform.

Playing the janitor — named Melvin Ferd Junko III in the original movie and Winston Gooze in the remake — is none other than Game of Thrones veteran Peter Dinklage. In the remake, Winston will work in a chemical factory rather than a health club. I guess it makes more sense how he’d stumble into a vat of toxic waste…not that sense was ever what drew people to The Toxic Avenger.

The villains will be a bit different too. According to Entertainment Weekly, Kevin Bacon will play Bob Garbinger, a corrupt Lex Luthor-type business mogul that the Toxic Avenger will dedicate himself to defeating. Garbinger will sic his younger brother Fritz Garbinger on the Toxic Avenger. Fritz is played by Lord of the Rings star Elijah Wood, looking a lot like Gollum with blackened teeth, stringy hair and pallid skin.

Check out some images of the cast below:

The Toxic Avenger director wants audiences to forget Elijah Wood was in The Lord of the Rings, makes him look like Gollum

Wood’s visage especially sticks out. Blair says the look is “sort of Riff Raff from The Rocky Horror Picture Show and the Danny DeVito Penguin mixed together.” That about sums it up.

“The look came about by discussions I had with our designers and with Elijah himself,” Blair continued. “I wanted it to feel like a Peter Sellers type of performance where he just goes invisible. The idea is that you forget that it’s the Elijah that you know from Lord of the Rings or anything else.”

Fritz will have at his disposal a “a gang of dangerous lunatics” known as Killer Nutz, who are both murderers and musicians. Clearly the movie is keeping it campy, although I question whether you can really capture the anarchic spirit of something like The Toxic Avenger when there’s so much professionalism in the air.

Still, it’s clear that Blair and his team are having fun, and all the gross practical effects sound appetizing. “You can see all the goopy little boils and stuff like that,” Blair said. “And we definitely stayed true to some of the really iconic elements: the tutu that’s melted onto his body, the janitor’s mop as his super weapon.”

The Toxic Avenger also stars Jacob Tremblay, Taylour Paige and Julia Davis. The movie will have its world premiere at the opening night at Austin’s Fantastic Fest, which runs from September 21 through the 28.

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