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The Toxic Avenger
The Toxic Avenger 1984
A lot of B-movie fans, and especially horror B-movie fans likely know the name Troma. It’s a small company that’s churned out a whole lot of low budget films over the years with titles like Yeti: A Love Story, Surf Nazis Must Die!, and Killer Condom. But before doing horror movies, they mainly did sex comedies. The Toxic Avenger was more or less their first foray into horror, even though it’s not what anyone would call full blown horror, it has the death scenes and blood and gore which is a staple of these kinds of horror movies. And it was a success… eventually. It wasn’t quite the slow burn that the Rocky Horror Picture Show would become, but it found a foothold as a midnight movie and is considered a cult classic. Heck, there was even a children’s cartoon of it. As for my own experience with Troma films, I know I was familiar with the Toxic Avenger, but I can’t for the life of me remember exactly how. I think I watched at least one of the films when I was younger, and I know I caught some of the episodes of the cartoon. I also watched Tromeo and Juliet, which was directed by the James Gunn who would later go on to direct Super. But my knowledge of Toxie had mostly faded when he came back on screen in all his cheesy glory. This is a cult movie for a lot of the same reasons the Room is a cult movie. The acting is horrible, the effects are obviously cheap but brutal (for the time at least), but in the end, I had a blast.
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Do You Enjoy Watching Bad Movies?
I think I may have asked this question a long while back, but since I’ve been watching several bad movies lately I thought it was prudent to ask the question again. There are a lot of bad movies out there, and there are a lot of articles out there lambasting those same movies. Many of them appear to obviously have been a bad movie before the writer ever decided to watch the movie, so the question becomes “Why did you watch the movie if you knew it was going to be bad?” I can’t answer that question for everybody else, but for myself, it’s because I still enjoy watching them. Even a movie that I wasn’t really looking forward to going into, the Host, I still greatly enjoyed watching it because when those awful moments in the movie showed up, it made me laugh harder than some of the best comedies around. Besides superheroes and sci-fi, there are also plenty of horror movies out there that are atrocious and plenty of sites that are devoted to watching these low budget, occasionally good, but often just plain bad movies.
As You Watch #10: Halloween Tournament
I’ve been away for a little while and there were a couple episodes of the podcast that I missed. Be sure to check out our Podomatic page to listen to this week’s episode and our earlier episodes without me there. I would have posted here except I didn’t have much free time, and I also didn’t have any other content to go alongside it. There have been many great guests so if you haven’t already, be sure to check them out. And that brings me to our latest episode which is a bit of an experiment. We forego our typical current release/top 3/movie of the week format and have a horror tournament with our guest Jason Soto of Invasion of the B Movies. Find out which horror movies rise to the top out of several different categories of horror, and for those regular listeners, I actually turn out to be more versed in horror than I thought I was. It was a fun episode and we get back to normal next week. Until next time, this has been Bubbawheat for Flights, Tights, and Movie Nights. Check back in a couple days for a new Superhero Shorts with an interesting new Superman short film.
Man-Thing
Man-Thing 2005
For a while, I’ve gone back and forth on whether or not to file this movie under my new “Almost Super” category. It’s pretty much a straight up horror movie, but the fact that it’s based on a Marvel comics character and the fact that it’s similar to Swamp Thing which is more easily a superhero movie, I decided to stick with my first instinct. This was one of Marvel’s early jumps into the independent film-making waters, but apparently the testing was so poor on it that it got relegated to a home video release and later came out as a Sci-Fi Channel original movie. It appears at first glance to be Marvel’s version of Swamp Thing, but it’s handled in a very different way. Man-Thing is much more like a villain, or at least a force of nature that’s been unleashed and destroys anything that gets in its way. And so it would seem to make a great horror movie villain, but they decide to stick with almost every horror movie cliche in the book to make this movie completely boring and unoriginal in the end.
Almost Super: Gremlins 2 The New Batch
Almost Super: Gremlins 2: The New Batch 1990
My last edition of Almost Super went over quite well, so I just had to follow it up with the sequel. I’m not sure how regular these will be, probably just whenever I’m in the mood for one. But anyway, where the original Gremlins was somewhere in between being a horror and a comedy, Gremlins 2 is a flat out comedy with only a hint of horror left in it. And things are amped up in every way with more Gremlins, and even plenty of super Gremlins that get into several different batches of genetic potions. This was the real reason why I reviewed the original Gremlins in the first place, but I definitely wasn’t wrong to watch the first one again as there are plenty of callbacks that I might not have recognized.
First Impressions: A Look at the Lammys Best Horror/Sci-Fi
First off, I’m sorry I don’t have another Superhero Shorts for you today. I really enjoy this feature, but the part I enjoy most is the interviews. And unfortunately, I can’t write both halves of the interview so I’m beholden to the filmmakers who are willing to give me the time to answer my silly little questions. I do have a couple in the works where I’m just waiting on their response, and I’m always on the lookout for fan films new and old to try and contact. If you know of any that I haven’t featured yet, please let me know, especially if you have any contact information. So instead, since the Large Association of Movie Blogs is right at the start of the voting process for their Lammy awards, I thought I’d take a page out of Fogs’ Movie Reviews and take a closer look at all the blogs nominated for Best Horror or Sci-Fi blog, which includes this site.
Flights, Tights, and Movie Nights 