Welcome back to another trip to Tromaville, New Jersey, for a brand new B-Movie Enema review!

Back for Christmas 2022, I took a trip to everyone’s nuclear waste-ridden town to discuss Lloyd Kaufman’s original superhero, The Toxic Avenger. That 1984 breakout hit for Kaufman’s Troma Entertainment was brash, offensive, slapdash, but brilliant in many ways. The sheer irreverence in Kaufman’s style of comedy is in full display here. That wasn’t Lloyd’s first film he directed, and it certainly was not his first comedy, but this was the one that skyrocketed Troma into the vocabulary for all those exploitation, trash cinema fans scouring the video store shelves looking for some depraved weekend entertainment in the 80s.

Funny enough, Lloyd Kaufman’s sex comedies between 1979 and 1983 all had titles with exclamation points: Squeeze Play!, Waitress!, Stuck on You!, and The First Turn-On! You gotta love Lloyd’s commitment to the schtick. Then again, considering how bombastic his mannerisms and the way he speaks, I have to assume he shouted the titles he wanted to put on his movies, and the guy who made the title cards just thought that was part of the title.

Eh… Anyway, considering a bigger budget remake of the original The Toxic Avenger is now hitting theaters across the country, starring a for-real Emmy Award-winning actor, Peter Dinklage, I figured it’s time to revisit the world of Toxie. This week, we’re going to look at the 1989 sequel to the original, The Toxic Avenger Part II.

(Oh, and my official review of the new Toxic Avenger movie? It’s a lot of fun and has a surprising amount of heart but keeps the counterculture vibes of Lloyd’s original intact. 4 out of 5 stars!)

There are a few changes that came along with this new entry in the burgeoning series. First, this is the first time in sixteen years that Lloyd Kaufman did not use a pseudonym. In the first film, he used the name Samuel Weil. Like with all his movies between 1981 and 1990, Lloyd is co-directing this picture, once again, with Troma co-founder Michael Herz. So, that’s not so much different, but we do have some casting changes.

In the 1984 original, Mitch Cohen played the physical representation of Toxie while Kenneth Kessler provided the deep voice. This time around, we have John Altamura providing the physical presence of our hero. Ron Fazio does the voice. Fazio also plays a villain in the movie. However, a dozen years later, it was revealed by Fazio himself that Altamura would get fired by Kaufman over bitching about the makeup and then, allegedly, threatened some staff members. Fazio stepped into the role, but Kaufman kept all the original Altamura stuff in the movie. That even included an earlier scene in the movie in which Fazio, as an Apocalypse, Inc. Executive, literally fought against Altamura’s Toxie.

One other interesting switch was made in the character of Toxie’s girlfriend. In the original, she was named Sara. In this, she’s now Claire. Sara was played by Andree Maranda. Claire is now played by musician, artist, painter, writer, and actress Phoebe Legere. Regardless, Sara and Claire are meant to be the same character. Why the change? No idea. I do know that Legere and Fazio would return as Claire and Toxie, respectively, in the third film that also hit the streets in 1989. Since the fourth film, Citizen Toxie: The Toxic Avenger IV, would not be released until 2000, Fazio and Legere were replaced by David Mattey as Toxie and Heidi Sjursen as, well… Sarah/Claire. Yeah, they list Sjursen in the cast as both names… But Sara is spelled Sarah. Oh whatever.

One last bit of something for you… Michael Jai White worked on this film. White is known to many for two primary roles he’s possessed. He played Spawn in the 1997 film adaptation of the incredibly popular comic book. He also played Black Dynamite in one of the greatest exploitation comedies ever made. He’s on screen as another member of Apocalypse, Inc. He also worked behind the scenes to help coordinate some fight scenes shot in New York City.

One of the things you youngsters don’t understand about sequels back in the day was that it was never taken for granted that anyone ever saw the first movie or any previous entry in a series. That’s why you often had flashbacks at the beginning of the first few Friday the 13th movies. Those used a couple of minutes to catch everyone up on the lore. Hell, even as late as 2004’s Spider-Man 2, the opening credits of that caught everyone up on the action and basic story beats of the first movie of that series. Earlier movies that would do that in sequels, like the first few Friday the 13th movies, mostly did so because those were cranked out quickly. From 1980 to 1984, there were four films. That meant some people didn’t get to theaters to see one of the movies, and they didn’t have a VCR or something to go to the video store and rent them. My point, the rockin’ ass theme song to The Toxic Avenger Part II, by Scott Casey, tells the story of Melvin Junko in song form to catch people up since it was five years since the first movie was released. It also may have helped that Troma was not exactly a mainstream outfit, so if you didn’t happen to live in a town that would have played this movie during its theatrical run, you would have had to have known what it was to rent it at the video store… if your video store even had it.

Anyway, the theme song rocks.

The movie picks up properly in the shadow of the “big city” in Tromaville. Melvin narrates about how he defeated all the criminals of Tromaville. He still lives in the toxic dump, but the people of Tromaville are happy. They dance in the streets, exterminate vermin, go to the movie theater, produce orange juice, get tattoos, and dance in the streets. Tromaville’s streets are clean, and everyone is doing great.

Because there are no bad politicians or crime anymore in Tromaville, Melvin/Toxie is out of a job. That’s okay, though. He’s happy to have cleaned up the town and made it safe and good for all the closest people who are important to him – his mother, his blind girlfriend Claire, and his sexy Freudian therapist. So, out of a job, Toxie took a job at the Tromaville Center for the Blind, a place Claire spends a lot of her time. He organized physical activities like basketball and croquet, and rooftop nature walks. The job is a tad depressing, though. He misses the days of smashing criminals’ heads in.

As Claire ponders what she can do to help Toxie feel more needed in Tromaville, a black limo with the words “Apocalypse, Inc.” on the side pulls up so the CEO of the company can spy on the situation.

While Toxie is inside cleaning the toilets of the center, and Claire is outside, unaware of their presence, the CEO has a guy dressed as a deliveryman deliver a ticking package to Toxie. The “deliveryman” runs into a blind woman in a wheelchair begging him to help her inside for dinner. So, he pulls out a machine gun and blows her away – as you do. Hearing this, Claire runs outside just before the time bomb in the package completely destroys the Tromaville Center for the Blind in a big ol’ ‘splosion.

Apocalypse, Inc. believes they have secured a big victory in its master plan. You see, Apcalypse is from the “big city,” and they see Tromaville as a perfect little town to raid and take over. To do so, though, they need to rid the place of the Toxic Avenger. So, first, they tried to bomb him at the Center for the Blind, where they not only believe they killed Toxie, but they hang up a sign saying the site is now condemned and belongs to Apocalypse, Inc. I dunno, I guess it’s kind of like war? You just go in and invade a spot, and you can call it yours or something.

Toxie was not destroyed by the bomb. Like, no duh, right? He busts up through the rubble covering him, and he is pissed. More importantly, he’s got renewed purpose! He picks up the guy hanging the sign claiming the land for Apocalypse, Inc. and tosses him. The guy who killed the old lady in the wheelchair gets Toxie’s revenge next. He puts that guy in the lady’s wheelchair and folds it, crushing him into a pile of goo. He finds the guy he tossed to the side and ties him up with Claire’s roses she tends to in the garden. The thorns slit the guy’s throat before Toxie stuffs his eye sockets, nostrils, and mouth with roses… stem first.

The CEO of Apocalypse, Inc. has a whole clown car of goons to step up to the plate to rid him of the Toxic Avenger, leading to a glorious battle with arms being ripped off, faces getting puched through, heads punched so hard that they spin around, a guy in KKK garb, a crossdressing goon, dancing, a guy getting hammered by a croquet mallet into nothing, heads exploding, scalpings, more dancing, cultural appropriation, ears getting ripped off, balls getting ripped off, a little person muscle man who gets balled up into a basketball, the classic bad guys shooting each other after Toxie dodges their attack, Toxie eating a machine gun, and Michael Jai White doing fucking kung fu.

This is Lloyd Kaufman just going crazy for over eight minutes, and it’s wonderful.

Because this is a world in which blind people are completely helpless and unaware of their surroundings, Claire initially believes her Melvin was killed. He finds her and tells her that he’s just fine, but all the other blind people at the center were senselessly butchered. Claire, naturally, thinks Melvin is wonderful. Of course, Melvin knows that just across the river in the big city, someone doesn’t share Claire’s sentiment.

Apocalypse, Inc. is a massive conglomerate. They deal with lots of chemical stuff. They dump waste everywhere. They also sell radioactive grenades to third-world countries. They pump shit into the air. They are decimating the ozone layer. That ozone layer business will also lead the initiative to sell domes that will protect people from the holes in the ozone. So they create the problem and provide the solution as well.

While everyone is reporting great successes in their various subsidiaries, the CEO is NOT happy. He wants Tromaville. Apocalypse, Inc. had businesses in Tromaville, but they lost all that to the Toxic Avenger. Without Tromaville, they don’t have their staging ground to take over New York. The CEO’s right-hand woman, Mona Malfaire, is working to figure out a way to defeat the Toxic Avenger. Her plan is to have the Japanese arm of Apocalypse, Inc. figure out a way to negate the “tromatons” in Toxie’s body that give him his great strength and his unmatched desire to destroy evil.

Michael Jai White asks if they can’t actually get the volatile anti-tromatons to Tromaville from Japan, so Mona Malfaire says they need to figure out a way to get Toxie to Japan.

Toxie’s in a funk. He feels he should have acted faster to prevent the deaths of all those blind people. Claire suggested he increase his visits to his therapist to eight times a week to help him with his guilt. His therapist attributes all of his guilt to being raised in a single-parent home. His father left him when he was young. He doesn’t really think that’s the case. After all, his mom was great as both a mother and a father figure in his life.

Regardless, his toxic funk is deep, and no one can bring him out of it.

At his next therapist session, Toxie is clued into something being up because his usually strictly Freudian therapist is now trying some new technique that is a little… sexier. Due to this, Melvin is putty in her hands. He doesn’t realize that it’s kind of odd that she’s done some checking into this whole father business. She’s discovered that Finneas T. Junko is now living in Tokyo, Japan, under the alias of Big Mac. He doesn’t realize that his therapist has been bought off by Apocalypse.

Toxie has to weigh the options here. He doesn’t want to leave Claire or his mother to go to Japan. But then again, he can see his father if he goes there. Claire is a little too naive to question anything his therapist has to suggest, so, of course, she’s into the idea of him finding his father. They spend their last day together until he returns, having lots of sex.

Toxie begins exploring the wonders of Japan, only to be seen as a monster. After all, he’s new to this side of the world. One of the guys at the Tromaville Sushi Bar gave Toxie a napkin with his father’s name written in Japanese to help him communicate with the locals. But it’s proving to be a difficult task.

Also, I’m about 102% positive no one in Japan was aware they were shooting a movie with a guy who looks like the Toxic Avenger. Some of the people looking on in complete and total consternation are kind of hilarious. Also, it’s very easy to spot when guerrilla filmmaking is being deployed in smaller budget movies, and, hoo boy, can you see that being used in great effect here.

At a snack cart, he meets a girl who doesn’t recoil in terror at the sight of him. As he gets a snack, she walks off only to be attacked by a roving gang of Japanese thugs who attack and attempt to rape her. Toxie’s tromatons start to go nuts in reaction to the evildoing, so he takes off to save the girl.

He catches one of the villains and uses the snack cart vendor’s own tool to make the fish-shaped snack to turn that guy’s nose into a, well… fish-shaped snack.

He chases the other two thugs and follows them into a bathhouse. I feel like this is Lloyd just wanting to make sure there are some more tits in this movie. We, naturally, saw Claire’s tits when she and Toxie were celebrating their last day together for a bit. We saw the Japanese girl, whose name is Masami, get her shirt ripped open to see her perky little boobs. But that ain’t enough for Troma, dammit! We need to see the girls in the bathhouse too!

Anyway, one of the thugs is tossed into a tub, and Toxie brings the water to a boil with his toxic powers. He dumps vegetables and soy sauce in with the guy to make a stew. The last thug, a woman, is then chased into a radio station. He ties her up with cords and then plugs the cords into the girl’s body to turn her into “the first human transmitter.”

You know what? I have a feeling Japan fucks with Troma. I mean it. There is some pretty off-the-wall shit out there in Japan. Some of their anime have very bizarre concepts and ideas. Have you ever seen some of their game shows? Holy shit, they are bizarre! More seriously, though, there is an underground in their culture, like we have, that would go for the more gonzo stuff that Troma and Lloyd Kaufman traffic in. I have a feeling that Japan just digs the shit out of the Toxic Avenger.

And I think they probably liked having an American movie of this kind of silly and crazy stuff.

Despite his looks, Toxie earns a friend through his good deeds. Masami says Toxie has put himself in terrible danger on account of her. He explains he couldn’t help it. The tromatons in his body are what goaded him to act. Still, she wants to repay him for his bravery. She agrees to help him find his father.

Because people in Tokyo also like dancing in the streets, Toxie realizes that it’s just as nice a place to live as Tromaville. The people he met with the help of Masami were all very kind to him, and tried to cheer him up despite not having any luck finding Big Mac Junko. To help Toxie fit in even more and make him feel less self-conscious about people staring at him, Masami helped disguise him as a Japanese businessman.

Because he looked and smelled so professional, he was sure that his father will be so proud of him.

However, not everything is going as swimmingly with Toxie’s loved ones.

With the Toxic Avenger halfway around the world in Tokyo, Apocalypse, Inc. was now able to roll right into Tromaville to take it over. They systematically dismantle Tromaville’s businesses to turn them into waste and pollution-producing subsidiaries of Apocalypse, Inc. They’ve turned literal crap into a drug for addicts to smoke and get them that much more under the thumb of Apocalypse, Inc. The company even changes the name of the town to Apocalypseville. The citizens try to organize against Apocalypse, but the CEO is ready to stop at nothing and use any means necessary to hold their power.

In Tokyo, Masami has tracked Big Mac to the fish market. Masami then learns about a particular bridge where she and Toxie can find him. Toxie is so excited to meet his father. His father is also super happy to see his big, heroic son. There’s a joyful reunion.

Unfortunately, as he reunites with his father, Toxie’s tromatons go nuts. The evil his tromatons are reacting to is his own father. Masami realizes Big Mac is smuggling cocaine in fish. Big Mac says that the drug smuggling is just a small part of his business. It’s much smaller than his white slave trade! Even worse, Toxie says that his father smokes cheap, smelly cigars!

This guy is one evil man!

But wait! There’s more! Big Mac, who is really an agent of Apocalypse, is on the docks creating anti-tromatons. He has enough in his little bottle to create a chain reaction that will break down Toxie’s body and reduce him into a puddle of… something they don’t know yet.

Before putting those anti-tromatons to work, Big Mac’s goons want to have some fun of their own. It’s karate time. Of course, some of these goons are characters themselves. One guy has a pair of nunchucks, so to fight that, Toxie finds a pair of fish on a rope and uses them as his own pair of nunchucks. Then, he fights off two guys, one guy wearing a green body suit, the other a red one, who have animal-print underwear as part of their costumes. Then, Toxie fights another crossdressing goon, this time a Japanese schoolgirl who gets his own ball and cup toy rammed up his ass upon Masami’s suggestion.

Next, Toxie has to fight a legit ninja with a sword and two kabuki guys with their own karate-style weapons. He first fights them off with the head of a swordfish before resorting to throwing dried starfish as ninja stars. He fights a woman goon and cuts her dress off, causing her to stumble around the streets nude for a bit when she’s knocked silly by a hammerhead shark by Masami.

Now, all of this is normal Japanese stuff that happens in this movie. You know, the stuff you expect to see any day of the week over there. Ninjas. Killer schoolgirls (crossdressing or otherwise). Guys in kabuki makeup trying to start fights. Fish dealers. You know, normal stuff.

Then comes one of Big Mac’s failed experiments while trying to create anti-tromatons. This is when we get into what I’ll call Mondo Japan.

Oh yeah… now this is what I sign up for when it comes to bizarre Japanese shit. And that’s with or without Lloyd Kaufman running around the streets filming his batshit insane stuff. We have a Toxic Avenger and a fish-head villain doing battle on the streets of Tokyo. Who could ask for anything more?

Oh! Did I mention fish-head man spits white shit? No? Well, here ya go!

Now, Toxie gets the upper hand quickly on this creature. Their fight drags the two of them near a sushi stand. Using one of the tools of the trade, Toxie bashes the fish-head man into a plate of sashimi.

Now, it’s time for Toxie to take on his father, but… I dunno how to say this, but I’ve got a weird feeling. It’s like something is missing. I mean, nothing is missing from the bonkers, insane Troma shit, but there’s something else that feels… I don’t know, dear readers. I feel like something is missing from the Japanese element here.

There it is. Of course Melvin’s father would be a sumo wrestler. Melvin’s reaction to this is pretty funny. He says that it was hard enough to fight his father, but it got harder and stranger when his father started taking off his clothes. Then, he put on a diaper! Seeing his father in a diaper becomes what he calls a “toxic head shrink!”

A lot comes to a head to finish off this big battle. Big Mac is going to douse Toxie with the anti-tromatons. Toxie kicks the vial way up into the air, and that distracts Big Mac long enough to be kicked into the sushi stand. Meanwhile, that naked woman from the earlier battle stumbled into the lap of a news reporter who had arrived nearby. He continues to hold the dazed and naked woman while he carries on what appears to be an interview with her. The naked girl distracts the sushi cook who is hacking away with a cleaver, ultimately catching Big Mack on the leg and hacking it off. The vial of anti-tromatons lands at Toxie’s feet, causing it to break and begin the chain reaction that is going to defeat the hero.

Masami doesn’t know how to treat the effects of the anti-tromatons in Toxie, but figured, since the event that led to this chain reaction starting happened in a sumo-related event, she takes him to a bunch of sumo wrestlers. There, they used their various homeopathic medicines to help cure him. The sumo wrestlers try to cure both his body and mind, but Toxie has to try to get over killing his own father. He decides to depart Japan and return to Tromaville.

Back in Tromaville, it’s only getting worse. Apocalypse, Inc. employees and executives are running wild through the streets. They brand the citizens with their logos. They’re just straight-up shooting people, too. Michael Jai White karates the fuck out of people and even steals a guy’s prosthetic leg.

As Toxie windsurfs back home, Apocalypse’s gang of bad girls approaches his home, where they attack Claire. Toxie returns home to beat the shit out of these bad girls. For the most part, he just tosses them around and spanks them while Claire personally deals with Mona Malfaire.

One of the biggest laughs in the whole movie was Claire tossing Mona onto the bed, climbing on top of her, and, in the high-pitched voice Phoebe Legere uses in this saying, “I’m going to break you in half like a fucking wishbone!” Perfection. Pure Troma perfection.

Immediately, the Toxic Avenger goes about cleaning up Tromaville and ridding the town of Apocalypse, Inc. The evil Chairman decides that if he can’t control Tromaville, he was going to destroy it. The Chairman calls up his most dangerous goon, the Dark Rider. The Dark Rider has 300 pounds of nitro strapped to him with orders to crash into Tromaville City Hall and destroy the entire town. That’s not just Claire or his mother that would perish, but the hopes for The Toxic Avenger Part III!

Toxie commandeers a taxi to chase the Dark Rider before he can blow up the town. This chase is a long one, but it does all the things a movie chase should do. There are kids trying to cross the road while the high-speed chase is happening. A car wrecks into a fruit stand, sending apples and bananas everywhere. That car then goes up a ramp and lands on other cars. The cars all explode. Then, a semi-trailer gets in the way, which makes the Dark Rider slide under it on his bike, and the taxi that Toxie is in, with the cabbie and an old couple, drives under it, losing the top part of the car. You know, typical movie car chase stuff. You can’t say Lloyd Kaufman doesn’t know his moviemaking tropes.

Subverting some expectations, it’s the cab that runs into another car and explodes to end the chase. But, because the Toxic Avenger movies are always cartoonish, it doesn’t kill anyone in the cab, just covers their face with soot and dirt. To continue the chase into Tromaville, Toxie asks to borrow a guy’s hovercraft, which can skirt over land. He is able to head the Dark Rider off and divert him into a different building. While it does explode and kill the Dark Rider, it does not destroy Tromaville.

As the town celebrates the Toxic Avenger cleaning up Tromaville once again, a man with one of those bitchin’ staches that curls up at the ends comes in asking to find the Toxic Avenger. This is the real Big Mac Junko. The man Toxie killed in Japan was Big Mac Bunko, a man Melvin’s real father is constantly confused for.

All’s well in Tromaville once again. The Chairman was run out of town. Toxie’s broken id is now repaired. He’s ready to continue defending the citizens of Tromaville. He’ll have to do that in the very near future because The Toxic Avenger Part III: The Last Temptation of Toxie would come along just nine months later. I’ll have to make a point to get to that one soon.

While I certainly agree that The Toxic Avenger Part II is one of those classic sequels that expand the scope in a grander story and plot, it’s truly different from the original entry, and it makes it hard to compare them. Which one do I like better? I think my heart will always go with the original The Toxic Avenger. Which one ramps up the scope while still delivering laughs and fun? Well, obviously it’s Part II.

If I had to critique one thing, the movie is a tad too long. I watched the Blu-ray Director’s Cut edition that came in the box set of all four originals. Bringing this movie in at around 1 hour, 50 minutes does pose some pacing issues. Still, there is a heart to this movie that is so undeniably Lloyd Kaufman. It’s sincerely brash and uncivilized. That’s why people love these movies, and it’s why I can’t really say anything too negatively about Part II.

We’ll catch up with Part III in early 2026. For now, we need to travel north of the border for a slice of Canadian thrills and chills with 1982’s Trapped. Join me for that one next week, will you? Until then, I need to go on a globetrotting adventure to find my father and beat the shit out of some Japanese yakuza fuckers.