Although it already got a premiere at Fantastic Fest earlier this month, the regular movie-going public has seen precious little of Peter Dinklage’s new remake of the Toxic Avenger so far. (Outside of a quick photo set from Entertainment Weekly a few days ago that revealed, among other things, that Elijah Wood was going full “fucked-up little dude” for this one, always a treat.) Now the film has released its first trailer, giving us a few glimpses of Toxie’s world. But while you can tell director Macon Blair is going hard for the feel of the original low-budget Troma superhero series, he’s also playing a little too coy with any of his big reveals for the promo to be totally satisfying.
Which is to say that, not only do we not get to see Wood doing his best “Danny DeVito as The Penguin” impression, we also don’t see Dinklage himself as the title character, in anything but silhouette. And, hey, we get that it’s a teaser, but you can’t just hire some local news anchor types and ask them to do their best Tim & Eric impressions without giving us a little bit of carcinogenic steak to go with all this sizzle, right?
(Okay, yes, we do get one absolutely gory shot, as the leader of the “Nasty Lads” gets his jaw ripped off by the mop of an unseen Toxie. But everything else is just blood spatter, bad Photoshops, and implications.)
It’s also, from a first-impressions point of view, a little difficult to suss out whether the movie can match the tone of the old Troma stuff, which was, yes, schlocky and exploitative and puerile and dumb, but in an authentic sort of way. The new film feels like it might be in danger of coming off as an imitation of that natural crudeness, which can feel painfully false when it misses. We’ll presumably know more, though, as the movie’s release gets closer.