The Toxic Avenger was Troma Entertainment’s signature franchise, spawning the 1984 original film and later four sequels, about the titular toxic sludge-enhanced hero. Now there’s a remake, which finally hit theaters last week, more than two years after its film festival debut. The film has a sheen of respectability, at least by Troma standards, as it comes from director Macon Blair (I Don't Feel at Home in This World Anymore), and stars Peter Dinklage. The plot even has Toxie taking on an evil insurance company, led by an ever-mugging Kevin Bacon, playing a character named “Bob Garbinger.” Still, the film combines humor, action, and gore and also some heart, especially in a subplot where Toxie is bonding with his stepson (Jacob Tremblay.)
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Director Kate Beecroft’s East of Wall, about a struggling horse trainer in South Dakota is so committed to realism that it stars a woman named Tabatha Zimiga as a woman with her same name and profession, based on the real Tabatha. A widowed trainer who hosts a gaggle of teenagers at her ranch—one of whom is played by her daughter, Porshia—the fictional Tabatha cuts quite a figure, sporting tattoos and a half-shaved head. She’s been given an offer to sell to a man (Scoot McNairy) with a tragic backstory. Full of gorgeous shots of South Dakota vistas, East of Wall landed in theaters to little fanfare in mid-August, but it’s a very satisfying work that deserves another look.
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Directed by Julian Glander, Boys Go to Jupiter is perhaps the oddest animated film of the year. It’s many things: A parody of gig economy hustle culture, featuring a combination of humans, aliens, and other creatures, as well as the voices of a long list of respected actors and alt-comedians (including Julio Torres, Joe Pera, Sarah Sherman, and Tavi Gevinson). Also, it’s set in Florida and is a musical. The hero, “Billy 5000” (Jack Corbett) is so named because he’s trying to make $5000 by working as a delivery driver, and the plot follows him around for a day, through a series of oddball interactions, with Richard Linklater’s Slacker a key influence. It didn’t work for me: I like weird, but this was too weird.
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Borderline’s a stalker thriller that’s also a comedy, the directorial debut of Cocaine Bear writer Jimmy Warden that got a brief theatrical release in the spring, before going to HBO Max at the start of August. I was more into it than expected, mostly because of a go-for-broke performance from Ray Nicholson.
The film is set in the 1990s, and Nicholson plays a mentally-unbalanced stalker who believes he’s about to marry a pop star (Samara Weaving), and ends up tracking her to her home. That premise doesn’t sound funny, but it is, thanks largely to Nicholson, the son of Jack, who hadn’t made much of an impression on me in previous roles. He was also a Boyfriend From Hell in another recent film, I Love You Forever, but in performance was more of an extended whine. Here, though, Nicholson channels his dad’s turn in The Shining, sporting a tuxedo with lots of mugging. He gets a mental institution accomplice (a scene-stealing Alba Baptista), who delivers a blood-soaked rendition of Celine Dion’s “It’s All Coming Back to Me Now.” This sequence achieves something similar to what the musical Joker sequel was going for, only to greater success. It’s also a great Jim Steinman movie moment, and I wasn’t sure if we’d get any more of those.
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Fantasy Football Ruined Our Lives, on Netflix, isn’t what it sounds like. It’s an Italian movie, in which “football” is soccer, and a group of middle-aged men are way into their fantasy league, to the detriment of their lives, relationships and freedom. Directed by Alessio Maria Federici, the film steals half its ideas from The Hangover movies—starting with a missing groom, and a funny fat guy who holds a baby exactly the way Zach Galifianakis did —and the other half from the old sitcom The League, starting with a character who’s a lawyer and uses those skills to his advantage in the league, as well as a woman who knows more about the sport than the men.