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hen the Tromaville School for the Very Special is overrun by the gun-wielding members of the Diaper Mafia, it's up to the Toxic Avenger (Mattey, Lewis) to save the day. With no small amount of head-smashing (literally), Toxie does away with all the baddies, but it's Toxie's sidekick, Lardass (Fleishaker), who disposes of the Diaper Mafia's bomb by eating it. The resulting gas blows up the school anyway, though, creating a space-time rift that sends Toxie to the dark and twisted town of Amortville, while his dimensional alter-ego, the evil Noxious Offender, is left to terrorize the good citizens of Tromaville.
A team of superheroes, lead by the legendary Sgt. Kabukiman (Kyrmse), is assembled to battle the wicked Noxie, but is quickly dispatched, making the threat to Toxie's (blind) wife, Sarah (Sjursen), who's just recently become pregnant, that much greater. Meanwhile, Toxie is trying to clean up Amortville as best he can, while at the same time trying to look out for the two Very Special students (Budinger, Terezakis) who were pushed through the rift with him and for the still-living head of a man (Brisco) he "saved" from being dragged behind the truck of a couple of rednecks.
As the body count rises (in both dimensions), Noxie's campaign to gain complete control over the town of Tromaville is meeting with success after bloody success, aided by a local police officer and closet Nazi, Sgt. Kazinski (Snow). If only Toxie could get back home! Perhaps Chester (the dimensional alter-ego of Toxie's late sidekick)—a theoretical physicist who's turned to selling sexual favors for cash or pastries since his wife, Claire (the deaf dimensional alter-ego of Sarah), left him for Noxie—could help?
A comedy that's toxic and proud of it
Even allowing for Troma's peculiar, independent filmmaking "philosophy" (aggressively low-budget bad taste sexual-horror-comedy), this latest Kaufman shock offering has few redeeming features. The always tenuous balance of smart-enough parody and marvelously grotesque humor that has made other Troma films like the original Toxic Avenger and the more recent Tromeo & Juliet the successes that they are is largely missing from this sequel.
There's over-the-top and then there's that which is so relentlessly obnoxious that it gets boring. There are amateur actors and then there are those who will do just about anything to be in a Troma movie, and who will do it for free. And if Citizen Toxie's extreme bad taste doesn't send viewers into fits, its frequent, nearly-seizure-inducing editing just might. (One would think that the Troma Team would want audiences to actually be able to see the orgies of violence and sex they've put together, wouldn't one?)
There are a couple of laugh-out-loud moments in Citizen Toxie (for those not offended by, well, most things), and Clyde Lewis' voicing of the hero/villain (David Mattey's the actor who runs around in the mask) is at times quite funny and smart. And of course cheesy-gore fans have much to keep them entertained here. There are even some cameos from the likes of Ron Jeremy (as Tromaville's God-fearing mayor), Motorhead's Lemmy, Julie Strain, Randy and Jason Sklar, the late Hank the Angry Drunken Dwarf (as God) and—yes—Corey Feldman, that make things somewhat interesting every once in awhile.
But even all these "qualities" don't make sitting through a 108-minute movie that feels close to twice as long (for a Troma movie, the budget must have been huge!) much more enjoyable. The story develops not so much as a narrative than it does a series of awkwardly linked gross-out set pieces. And as for the title? It's got about as much to do with Citizen Kane (or, rather, with parodying it) as porno movies that imitate famous movie titles do—though maybe Troma would consider that a compliment.
After apologizing for the previous two, the prelude to The Toxic Avenger IV claims that Citizen Toxie is the real sequel to the original. (Do we call this the Highlander Syndrome?) Maybe such things should've been left unsaid. Unfortunately, this movie left me only with questions like "Did they really crash a car for this movie?" and "How the hell could it have taken that many people to write this?" — Matt
Also in this issue: Jason X
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