Review by C.J. Bunce
Macon Blair has had a pretty good year. The co-star of the hit series The Lowdown is also the man behind the return of 1980s cult horror hero Toxie aka The Toxic Avenger. Despite premiering back in 2023, the reboot movie The Toxic Avenger didn’t get a wide release until 2025 in the U.S. We just reviewed the novelization here at borg last month, and now fans of the reboot will want to check out a look behind the scenes in the new book The Toxic Avenger: The Art and Making of the Movie, available now here at Amazon. So how do you reboot such an odd cult horror movie? This book tells the story via interviews with writer and director Macon Blair and other key production leads and nearly all of the key cast members including star Peter Dinklage.
Below take a look inside this hardcover guide to the movie, written by Dan Jolin.
More about the development, writing, location scouting, and casting of the movie than a book of concept artwork, this book will take fans from decisions to greenlight the movie to finding the right person who would create a modern movie loyal to the original. That person was Macon Blair.
None of the filmmakers hesitate to acknowledge the unusual nature of the movie, which is the story of a struggling everyman janitor who is pushed into a vat of toxic waste, then transformed into a grotesque mutant freak who must go from shunned outcast to underdog hero as he races to save his son, his friends, and his community from the forces of corruption and greed.
How do you build a cautionary tale of social and environmental consciousness that doubles as social satire and is also a monster movie full of over-the-top gore? In the book Blair points to influences that have done similar strange feats before, like Tim Burton’s Batman Returns, the original RoboCop, Frankenstein, Repo Man, and Kick-Ass, pulling in all kinds of tropes.
What the heck were they thinking? Blair and others explain it all, and photographs document all the key filming locations in Bulgaria.
Also key to understanding the film is casting Luisa Guerreiro, who plays Toxie in full prosthetics instead of Dinklage, who says he didn’t want to wear full prosthetics six hours per day in the summer heat. Guerrero discusses how she approached the role, which she says she saw as playing Dinklage playing Toxie. Oddly enough the discussion reminded me of the making of E.T. the Extra-Terrestrial, which also had an actress inside the hero alien suit.
I expected far more details from the special effects team on creating all the body parts and other gore that pepper the movie. Instead the book includes insight into the big slate of actors that played characters large and small, including discussions of the characters played by Kevin Bacon and Elijah Wood, the movie’s bad guys.
Fans of the original and the reboot won’t want to miss the story of how a cult classic made its way to theaters again. The Toxic Avenger: The Art and Making of the Movie is just out from Titan Books, available now here at Amazon.
