Movies
Kaufman Talks Plot Details For Fifth ‘Toxic Avenger’
Forget talk about a TOXIC AVENGER remake, it appears that Troma founder and director Lloyd Kaufman is planning a fifth entry to the cult franchise that started back in ’86 when a local mop boy falls in a vat of toxic waste transforming him into the local superhero known as Toxie. You can read all the juicy details indie.
“Unlike Superman, who never seems to age, Toxie gets older with each movie,” Kaufman tells Fangoria. “In THE TOXIC AVENGER PARTs II-IV, he has gotten married and had children. Now he’ll have to deal with his wife’s menopause, his erectile dysfunction–which is a constant erection–and his rebellious kid. We’re on to the next generation, like STAR TREK. We’ll see a little of Toxie’s twins in kindergarten, and then as teenagers. The son is rebellious, while the daughter is ultra-politically correct. We’ll show her going through puberty, which should be the most colorful monthly cycle ever put on film! We want to focus on the father/child relationship, and the generation gap. There is also a villain who wants to rename Tromaville Scheisseville…”
Kaufman plans on keeping it real when he brings Toxie back to the big (or small) screen.
“We want to be true to the citizens of Tromaville. But the series has always dealt with topical issues before other films would touch them. The original TOXIC AVENGER focused on chemical waste and dangers to the environment. Also, the important issue of head-crushing. We touched on that long before anyone else. Now everyone is getting on the head-crushing bandwagon! We want to keep things fresh and hip, because there is nothing hipper than an old Jew like myself with a bum hip.”
Knowing Troma, the film won’t be done for another two years, with it sitting on shelves for another year or two after. I’d put this one out of mind for the time being.
There’s been a lot of talk about how Christopher Nolan snuck in some horror elements into his epic adaptation of The Odyssey. However, even before the Cyclops began to eat Ithican soldiers and Circe subjected them to magical body-horror, cinemagoers were already witnessing supernatural terror through a certain trailer that was attached to most IMAX screenings of Nolan’s film.
It turns out that this trailer was for Rob Savage’s Other Mommy, an adaptation of Bird Box author Josh Malerman’s horror novel, Incidents Around the House. With the teaser now available online and revealing that the award-winning Jessica Chastain is playing the titular antagonist (as well as her ill-fated human counterpart), not to mention the fact that the picture is being helmed by the director of hits like Host and The Boogeyman, genre fans are understandably hyped for this upcoming thriller.
That’s why I’ve decided to take a closer look at the trailer and share four things we learned from this sneak peek at Other Mommy!
4. Rob Savage is Going Back to His Supernatural Horror Roots
I know I’m in the minority when I admit that Dashcam is my favorite Rob Savage movie, but even I understand why the filmmakers’ fans have been waiting a while for the director to get back to telling more grounded paranormal stories as he did with 2020’s Host.
Other Mommy obviously isn’t a found footage movie, but moments like the poltergeist activity on the kitchen table combined with the nature of the source material, which actually features a full-on exorcism, indicate that this adaptation is more than a simple creature feature. That’s why I think Savage is once again going to borrow from the same ghostly narratives that made his debut film such a viral hit.
3. Other Mommy is a More Convincing Doppelganger in the Adaptation
Part of the horror from Malerman’s original novel came from the fact that the entity taking on the form of Bela’s (Arabella Olivia Clark) mother wasn’t very good at passing itself off as human. This resulted in several uncanny moments where other characters began to notice that there was something visibly wrong with the family and decided to keep their distance.
Savage’s film appears to be taking a different route, with the trailer showing a version of the entity that can, at least physically, imitate Chastain’s character perfectly. This change is likely the result of the filmmakers wanting to incorporate more paranoid scenes where Bela and her father, played by Jay Duplass, are confused about which Mommy is safe to interact with.
2. The Family is Also Better Off This Time Around
Incidents Around the House featured some interesting subtext about how poverty can negatively affect American family dynamics. After all, the main characters were already feeling scared and isolated before the entity emerged from Bela’s closet and began scratching at their emotional wounds. The trailer for the movie, however, depicts the family as being relatively well off before these incidents begin to occur.
I can only imagine that this part of the story was changed so that the family’s fall from grace can be even more dramatic as the mom and dad’s pasts are revealed and Bela falls further into the clutches of the demonic antagonist.
1. Jessica Chastain is Embodying Evil Dead Rise’s Alyssa Sutherland
Mothers turning against their children is one of the most disturbing horror tropes out there (just check out classics like Hereditary and Carrie if you need proof), but it takes a remarkably skilled actress to pull off such a monstrous transformation. This is especially true when both a regular, loving mother and the Other share the screen in the same film.
That’s why I appreciate how Chastain appears to be channeling another evil redhead mother that recently traumatized audiences with her performance. It’s too early to be sure, but I’m fairly confident that Chastain’s character has at least some amount of Ellie in her cinematic DNA – Ellie being the iconic deadite brought to life by Australian actress Alyssa Sutherland in 2023’s Evil Dead Rise.
Let us know in the comments if you think we missed any important details from the trailer, and don’t forget to check out Other Mommy when it hits theaters on October 9!
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