Spook du jour

On the surface, Look Who’s Toxic may just look like a knockoff of The Toxic Avenger. Upon further inspection, the book matches the cover.

It seems evident that the creators were inspired by the low-budget, independent filmmaking popularized by Troma founders Lloyd Kaufman and Michael Herz. But what happens when you take yourself a bit too seriously and remove almost all farce from the equation? Well, you get something as wholly uneven as Look Who’s Toxic.

There are a couple comedic flares in the film, but they are so downplayed that they don’t seem intentional. The local news station bears the call letters KRAP, and in one scene a gigantic bodybuilder henchman daintily plays a flute for leisure.

So what is it about? The movie opens with a voiceover about how bad pollution is. Then we see a woman giving birth to something horrifying, thanks to said pollution (although we never see said “something”). One man is responsible–

A bed-ridden Trump* needs a new heart, but no donor hearts are available. Solution? Just pay someone $1,000,000 to take one from a living dude. The dude’s now heartless body gets put into the heartless Trump and then Dude’s body is dumped in the nuclear waste produced by one of Trump’s many factories. Dude resurfaces as the slimy bootleg Toxic Avenger, and he wants his heart back!

Simultaneously, Dude’s bodybuilder girlfriend is trying to find out what happened to him, only to be led to Trump and discover that the town leaders are in his hands.

I don’t know about you, but when a movie has the word “Toxic” in the title, I expect plenty of slime and gore. Well…there isn’t much here. We are treated to maybe two scenes of viscera. The majority of the film is spent with Trump arguing with the EPA fella that wants to shut him down. Riveting, eh? I mean, whatever gets you off…

Still, for something so low budget, it wasn’t shot too poorly, and I felt that it still had a lot of heart (heh). I was also treated to the pleasant aesthetic of watching this on VHS (Thanks to Nemesis Video) complete with tracking issues, which is, in my slimy opinion, the best way to ingest low-low-low budget flicks.

TLDR; Not very entertaining, would not watch again, but also didn’t feel like I was sodomizing my psyche watching it.

3/10

*Not actually Trump, just a sleazy-ass billionaire who only cares about money and himself.