Review by C.J. Bunce
The 1989 Batman movie, the original RoboCop, any version of Frankenstein, and every other Marvel Comics superhero origin story. What do they have in common? Their tropes all find their way into The Toxic Avenger: The Official Novelization by Adam Cesare, now available here at Amazon. If you’ve not encountered an adaptation that outpaces its source material, and if bad 1980s cult horror movies are your thing, you may want to check this out. Likewise you shouldn’t blame a tie-in writer for the story when the source material goes so far off the rails as happens in the third act of this bizarre tale of a monster superhero and what must have been a studio’s inner-struggle to outdo itself with goo, gore, and practical monster effects.
The upcoming Toxic Avenger film is a re-imagining of sorts of the 1984 movie The Toxic Avenger, changing a few characters around, but leaning harder into the realities of today’s battles between consumer protections and unleashed corporate mogul profit-seeking. In the 1980s America had significant restrictions on corporations’ ability to spew sludge, poisons, contaminants, and worse into the soil and water supply. Some companies still violated the rules anyway (see A Civil Action, see Erin Brockovich). But today Congress and the White House have been hammering away to remove every consumer protection that has been formed since the 1970s. The Toxic Avenger novelization of the new film doesn’t preach about this reality, but you can’t read this story and not see the comic bookish horrors as closer to reality than they were in the 1980s.
Every step and pretty much every character’s path is predictable. But Cesare makes some strides in creating a father and son that are appealing and endearing. Cesare does a nice job setting up what reads like a good ol’ superhero story for the first act. The writing is similar to one of the movie novelizations I read in the 1980s–the novelization of Tim Burton’s Batman. If you put the profanity aside this could have been the origin story of Luke Cage, Bloodshot, Deadpool, Teenage Mutant Ninja Turtles, or with the profanity, RoboCop. It’s handled better than probably half of the screenplays from this century’s superhero movies (like Morbius, I, Frankenstein, The Spirit et al). You can have bizarre circumstances in your superhero origin, but treating the source material with respect needs to be a priority. Cesare gets that right, when plenty of superhero movies don’t.
Should Toxic Avenger, only the latest in a long line of movies in the franchise, even rate a novelization? It’s undoubtedly a cult horror comedy film, but is it a “classic”? The disfigured vigilante seems to fall way down the list below many a D-hero from Marvel or DC that has yet to be mined for the latest big screen release. Most people probably can barely make it through the movie’s trailer. So it’s surprising this book even exists. Fortunately the goo and gore are easier to stomach in written than live-action form. That is, for the first two acts. These movies seem to require irrational, over-the-top, bloody and uber-violent gross-out sequences for the finale. This story provides that in spades for fans of the genre anticipating it. And they do–after all that’s who the movie is made for.
The strangest bit is reading the novelization before seeing the trailer (or remembering it) and knowing what actors were cast in key roles. Peter Dinklage, Kevin Bacon, and Elijah Wood star in the movie. That makes no sense. First, Dinklage should slap his agent for getting him into this role. Hey, it’s possible he had his reasons. But this is about as back of the video store, 99 cent rental wall as you get. That said, Bacon and Wood seem to gravitate to strange roles like this. It’s like they don’t want to be in big, popular films anymore. I’d be surprised anyone would read the script or novel and see Bacon and Wood as the corporate bad guys. But we’re not reviewing the movie here. That would require a screening of it. But don’t count the movie out–marketing dollars for the movie were reallocated to help actual people with medical bills, so the spirit of its hero lives on in real life.
Count this a good writing effort for Adam Cesare, and a story with potential–for a mainstream reader–but may be just the thing for fans of the original and the 2025 movie. It has the horror, the comedy, and the violence and goo. The Toxic Avenger: The Official Novelization is now available here at Amazon. The original movie is streaming on Prime Video, and the 2025 movie is available to rent on Google Play and other services.
