nostalgia

Nostalgia for extreme tackiness is surely one of the funnier outcomes of a cult film’s success. (Does one sigh wistfully at such memories or smile through a grimace?) The gleeful cine-garbage factory Troma is, at 50 years and counting, now a hallowed name in outsider movie circles, with much of its reputation stemming from an ’80s output that seemed appropriate for the Reagan era. That especially goes for its 1984 monster comedy “The Toxic Avenger,” about a head-smashing vigilante forged from green chemical sludge. It was antipollution if you wanted to be charitable, but really, it was anti-everything. Haste plus waste, made for very bad taste.

Now, of course, we all recycle trash in our daily lives. But does it work as a film principle? Troma aficionado Macon Blair, a key on-and-offscreen collaborator of Jeremy Saulnier (“Blue Ruin,” “Hold the Dark”) and a Sundance-winning writer-director in his own right (“I Don’t Feel At Home in This World Anymore”), has taken up the challenge with his own “The Toxic Avenger,” starring Peter Dinklage as this version’s mutant hero, Toxie, and maybe the worst thing one could say about it is that it’s well-made.

Cue the disconnect when, expecting to be offended by garish, cheap filmmaking, one realizes that so much of the Troma style — gratuitous gore, filthy mouths, blunt-force parody — is ubiquitous to any regular genre diet in film or TV. That leaves matters of artistic character and there’s no getting around the fact that Blair has made the conscious decision that his “Toxic Avenger,” though rude, violent and goofy to a fault, wouldn’t look bad. It’s even got appealing stars: Kevin Bacon, Elijah Wood, Taylour Paige. Is nothing sacred?

But when even the biggest-budgeted movies now look terrible, everything’s already upside-down. What Blair has assembled, then, is diverting homage-schlock: a one-joke Halloween costume you’ll never wear again. Only this time, it asserts its environmental consciousness like a middle finger. The story’s Big Pharma outfit, called BTH, is a full-on villainous entity now, run by rapacious CEO Bob Garbinger (Bacon) who’s pumping consumers with harmful lifestyle drugs when he isn’t hiring a dim-witted punk band to kill a journalist (Paige) trying to expose him. (A muckraking mentor, seen only at the beginning, is called Mel Ferd, a shout-out to the original Toxie’s name.)

And yet things are also, in Blair’s setup, anchored in emotional sincerity (gasp). Dinklage’s affectingly drawn Winston Goose is no mere browbeaten BTH janitor — he’s a soft-spoken widower struggling to raise a stepson (Jacob Tremblay). Winston has also been diagnosed with a terminal illness and medical insurance won’t cover it. His Kafkaesque phone call about his employee plan is almost too realistic to find funny.

Trying to rob his employer one night with a mop dipped in toxic muck, Winston is shot and thrown into said slop. Instead of killing him, though, it transforms Winston into a disfigured creature (performer Luisa Guerreiro does the post-mutation suit work) with a removable eye, blood running blue, and — in a Tromatic touch — acid for urine. His gory dispatching of criminals notwithstanding, the mop-wielding Toxie becomes a community hero for calling out BTH as “ruiners.” But it also puts a target on his splotchy, misshapen head, especially when Garbinger senses in his nemesis an exploitable biofuel.

Whether poking at superhero cliches (there’s a choice post-credit scene) or trying to be kill-clever, it’s all in dopey, gruesome fun, although, to reiterate, a “Toxic Avenger” even normies can enjoy doesn’t exactly sound like a true Troma tribute. Which may explain why its trashmonger founder (and original “Toxic” co-creator) Lloyd Kaufman’s cameo, late in the film, is him crankily muttering next to Blair, who looks just as peeved. They probably had a blast filming it.

“It’s 1997 all over again. Isn’t that nostalgic?” Freddie Prinze Jr. says to fellow millennial heartthrob Jennifer Love Hewitt in this fittingly silly resurrection of the B-movie slasher franchise “I Know What You Did Last Summer.” In the ’90s original, based on the young adult novel of the same name by Lois Duncan, Prinze and Hewitt played Ray and Julie, the sole survivors of a teen clique that accidentally runs over a stranger, conceals the crime and then, one year later, needs to flee a hook-wielding avenger over the Fourth of July weekend. Having endured that escapade and a sequel that chased them to the Bahamas, the duo is back for this mildly meta installment to mentor a new generation of manslaughterers. A mysterious raincoat-clad killer has a point when a message in blood is smeared: You can’t evade the past.

The five youngsters fleeing the inevitable are sensible Ava (Chase Sui Wonders) and her bland ex-boyfriend Milo (Jonah Hauer-King), daffy blond Danica (Madelyn Cline) and her rich fiancé Teddy (Tyriq Withers) and hard luck Stevie (Sarah Pidgeon), who just got out of rehab. Slightly older than their forebearers were during their misadventure, they’re all in their early 20s and launching their adult lives when they repeat the same deadly mistake on the same night, on the same stretch of coastal road in Southport, North Carolina. Danica groans, “It’s called Reaper’s Curve for a reason.”

Director Jennifer Kaytin Robinson’s perky update has a few things going for it, including low expectations. Co-written with former journalist Sam Lansky, this horror throwback just wants to get some giggles at the mall, even cracking a joke about Nicole Kidman’s beloved AMC ad. Robinson, who created MTV’s “Sweet/Vicious” and has helped shepherd a handful of other fluffy amusements, is a promising popcorn wit, deftly ensuring the tone is neither too sober nor too snide. You don’t feel that guilty gobbling her empty calories.

Robinson seems to respect the first film as though she was adapting Proust. Perhaps to people of a certain age who grew up watching it on VHS at slumber parties, it is their madeleine. The script works in as many callbacks as possible: spooky mannequins under plastic sheeting, tacky parade floats with giant fiberglass clams, Hewitt hollering her memorable line: “What are you waiting for?” (And there’s a big cameo that deserves to be a surprise.) The gags feel klutzier when they aim for 21st century humor — say, Hewitt sipping tea from a mug that reads “tears of the patriarchy.”

This latest cast was all born around the time of the ’90s massacre and are oblivious to the murder spree yet to come. Callow Teddy even makes fun of the name on one of the dead kids’ graves: “Barry Cox,” he snorts. Powerful land developers like Teddy’s dad (Billy Campbell) also buried information about the previous attacks. The forces of real estate and the local police department have invested heavily in transforming this blue-collar fishing hamlet into a tony beach resort. Even before bodies get strung up on the pier like sharks, you’re thinking that the writers must have also dug out their VHS tapes of “Jaws.”

Pragmatic, good-hearted Ava is the film’s moral center, the one disgusted enough to realize that she, her friends and Southport’s leadership are all cretins. Chase Sui Wonders has been strong in everything I’ve seen her in — I’m watching her career with curiosity — even if here, she mostly expresses her foul mood by changing her wardrobe from slime green to black. Ava’s ex Milo seems like a role that should amount to more than it does. All there is to know about him is that he’s alleged to work in politics and he and Ava have zero heat.

But we come to love Ava’s BFF Danica, who prances into obvious death traps wearing flimsy silver mules. She’s a walking cupcake — in this genre, a disposable-seeming treat — yet the way Madelyn Cline plays her is fabulous. This bohemian is as shallow as they come, fretting that the stress is giving her alopecia and suggesting her professional empath for guidance. (Danica also has a life coach, an energy healer and a psychic.) With her soft cheeks and tearful, raspy baby voice, it’s shocking how much we get attached to her. Gratefully, Robinson clearly loves her characters too and makes their screen time count rather than treating them like grindhouse fodder, that kind of violent vaudeville where you can’t wait for the hook to drag someone off screaming.

The film’s strongest move is that it encourages us to like (and laugh at) our victims. Nearly all of them — Milo excepted — are interesting, especially a true crime podcaster named Tyler (Gabbriette Bechtel, a scenery-chewing delight) who calls Southport’s cover-up a case of “gentrifi-slay-tion.” When this ghoulish fangirl escorts Ava to a historic murder scene and starts to unbutton her top, you’re convinced that she finds all this bloodshed a turn-on. Another target, played by a fratty Joshua Orpin, tries to bribe the killer with crypto.

Let’s be frank: None of these characters, past or present, would have grown up to be rocket scientists. The original got through its gore scenes with grim brutishness, like it was embarrassed that they had to be done. Written by Kevin Williamson, the talent behind the clever slasher “Scream” and the earnest romance “Dawson’s Creek,” it couldn’t quite capture the best elements of both. Robinson has more fun playing executioner. Each death is given a satisfying buildup; she’s a skilled hook-tease. One muscular kid who’s been pumping up to defend himself lets out an excited war whoop when it’s finally time to fight for his life.

The score, camerawork and editing are simply fine. They’re not trying to pull focus from the dialogue, which is genuinely funny. (My favorite design choice was the clodding sound of the killer’s boots when they come tromping in for the coup de grâce.) But the plotting barely keeps pace. Characters wander away for bizarre stretches of time. Just when I thought things were losing steam, someone got menaced in an actual steam room.

Robinson is more interested in pranking us with psych-outs than sinister scares. She’s under palpable pressure to execute a twist, so several scenes feel like a magician flipping over the wrong card to distract you from the right one tucked in their sleeve. You don’t quite buy the big reveal. Yet quibbling would seem as tweedy as arguing that the film is peddling both nostalgia and anemoia — a longing for an era one never knew firsthand. This recycled trash is no treasure, but I’m betting the majority of this redo’s audience will be young enough to find ’90s-style schlock adorably quaint.