Citizen Toxie: The Toxic Avenger IV (2001)

I've mentioned my affection for USA Up All Night and MonsterVision more than once, both here and my personal blog. And when Up All Night was a regular staple of my weekends, I would always look forward to when they would air the Toxic Avenger trilogy. I'll be the first to tell you that the movies aren't great or anything, but to quote someone else, a movie doesn't have to be good to be awesome.

And that's exactly what I thought of the Toxic Avenger movies. I'd always secretly hoped Troma would make a fourth entry in the franchise, but so many years passed that I thought it would remain a trilogy forever. That changed, however, when Troma released Citicen Toxie: The Toxic Avenger IV in 2001. And although Up All Night is not around to show the movie, I still had to see it anyway. So just how was it?

Our story begins as the psychotic Diaper Mafia invades the Tromaville School for the Very Special and holds its students hostage. The Toxic Avenger (Dave Mattey, with the voice of Clyde Lewis) and his morbidly obese sidekick Lardass (Joe Fleishaker) arrive to save the day, but the Diaper Mafia manages to detonate a bomb they'd set as a failsafe.

The explosion somehow opens a rift that causes Toxie to switch places with his evil doppelganger from an alternate dimension, the Noxious Offender (Mattey and Lewis in a dual role). While Noxie begins violently slaughtering the citizens of Tromaville, Toxie is trapped in the slums of Amortville. Will Toxie ever be able to return to his own dimension and save the day? Let's hope so, because if he doesn't, all Tromaville has left is Sgt. Kabukiman (Paul Kyrmse). And who wants to be saved by Sgt. Kabukiman?

Troma has kept something of a low profile over the last decade or so, something I've assumed was due to the financial hardships the studio had to endure some time back. Their only really notable works in the new millennium have been Citizen Toxie and Poultrygeist: Night of the Chicken Dead. I have yet to see Poultrygeist, but Citizen Toxie really seems a lot different from the Troma movies I remember enjoying during my youth. It's a lot more mean-spirited, a lot more focused on being offensive and just plain gross and wrong.

Lloyd Kaufman helms this particular Toxic Avenger movie without Michael Herz, and his work is sound. It's no great shakes and sometimes feels as low-rent as the production value, but Kaufman keeps things moving without letting the movie become boring.

It's unfortunate, however, that he's working with a real stinker of a script. Written by Kaufman, Trent Haaga, Patrick Cassidy, and Gabriel Friedman, it pales in comparison to even the worst parts of the other two sequels. A lot of the jokes aren't funny in the slightest, and so much of it is gross or offensive for the sake of being gross or offensive. Yeah, they used gross moments for comedy in the other three Toxic Avenger movies, but they weren't so overt about it. It's like Kaufman, Haaga, Cassidy, and Friedman decided that they'd eschew all of the franchise's goofy charm and just be disgusting.

At least the cast tries to make up for it. Dave Mattey and Clyde Lewis are awesome as both Toxie and Noxie, and Paul Kyrmse is hilarious as Sgt. Kabukiman. I also liked Joe Fleishaker, despite his lack of screen time. There are even a few cameos that are fun, specifically Ron Jeremy as Tromaville's mayor and Corey Feldman as a wacky gynecologist.

The cast isn't all gold, though. Michael Budinger and Lisa Terezakis are annoying as a pair of students from the Tromaville School for the Very Special who are transported to Amortville with Toxie, and Heidi Sjursen is utterly terrible. Her scenes are so badly acted that I wanted to crawl into the movie and yell at her until she stopped sucking. I know Troma movies are not known for good acting, but Sjursen is particularly awful.

I called the second and third Toxic Avenger movies disappointing, but Citizen Toxie is even worse. I can forgive the inadequacies of the other movies because at least they were charming and fun. Citizen Toxie, on the other hand, is quite simply a bad movie. I don't want to say that, but it's the truth. And that's a real shame, because it could have been something cool. Alas, it's not. I keep hearing that there is talk of more Toxie movies down the road, specifically a remake and/or another sequel titled The Toxic Avenger Part V: The Toxic Twins. Let's hope that if either of those happen, Toxie will be able to redeem himself.

Final Rating: *½