• Directed by Lloyd Kaufman
• Written by Douglas Buck, Patrick Cassidy, and Lloyd Kaufman, based on the book All I Need to Know About Filmmaking I Learned From the Toxic Avenger by Lloyd Kaufman and James Gunn
• Starring
  • Will Keenan
  • Alyce LaTourelle
  • Lloyd Kaufman
  • Trent Haaga
  • Debbie Rochon
• Produced by Michael Hertz, Lloyd Kaufman, and Elizabeth van Merkensteijn

Way back in January, as I’ve mentioned before, I made the trek to Park City largely to catch a screening of Lethal Force at TromaDance (the venue was a basement bar whose name escapes me at the moment). My friend Don and I caught a few of the shorts, including the hilarious Confetti Brothers, and enjoyed Lethal Force with an appropriately appreciative crowd. I also had several minutes to hang out with LF’s director and star Alvin Ecarma after the screening (he’s a lot shorter in person than you’d think, by the way).

Too many young actresses think that doing low-budget horror will give them a leg up in the industry.

And thanks to Alvin, I also got to meet Lloyd Kaufman, head honcho of Troma and sponsor of TromaDance. (Lloyd’s even shorter than Alvin, truth be told.) TromaDance is an interesting little festival; touted as “By the People, For the People,” it’s apparently the only festival of all of the Sundance hangers-on that charges no entry fee for filmmakers and no admission for audience members. What overhead there is is entirely supported from the sale of the DVD, The Best of TromaDance (since last year was the first one, Volume 1 is currently the only one available).

In any case, Lloyd and Alvin apparently had been having casual discussions of the possibility of distribution for Lethal Force. I whipped out my card for Lloyd so that he would know that I, too, am somebody (even if that somebody that I am is only a pissant little internet movie reviewer). He looked it over and asked me, “You have any Troma reviews on your site?”

“Well, not yet.”

“Hold on a sec.”

He trotted off, and when he came back, he pressed into my hands the aforementioned Volume 1 of The Best of TromaDance, and the boxed-set, double-disc version of Terror Firmer.

“This,” he said, “is very likely the best DVD ever made. Not the movie, mind you, but the DVD.” He proceeded to list the extras on the two discs. I didn’t tell him that I’m not a “feature geek,” that extras rarely get a second glance from me if I didn’t absolutely love the movie. (I also didn’t tell him that, at the time, I didn’t even own a DVD player. No fool, I.) Instead, I gratefully accepted them. Hey, free’s good for me.

Um… looks like you’re going to have to reach lower, girlfriend.

Why am I telling you all of this? Multiple reasons:

1. I’m never one to shirk on the personal stories in these things, am I? How much do you glean of Leonard Maltin’s or Roger Ebert’s personal lives from their reviews? Around here, I figger if you know the man, you’ll know better the significance of the reviews. (No, witty rejoinders to that are not necessary. You want to be clever, start your own damned website.)
2. Holy hell, I’ve got space to fill! I try to bring these reviews in around 1500 words or higher, but what the hell can I say about Terror Firmer? What is there to discuss?

Succinctly, Terror Firmer is shit. It’s intentional shit. It’s shit by people who love shit, who have tons of practice making shit,¹ and who believe that the thing that makes shit better is more shit, piled higher and deeper.

Lloyd Kaufman finds out that Woody Allen is also planning a remake of The Toxic Avenger.

As far plot goes, it’s pretty rudimentary and self-referential: it’s the chronicle of the production of a Troma film, directed by blind filmmaker Larry Benjamin (Lloyd Kaufman). That’s right — you wonder what Woody Allen’s been watching lately? The story roughly follows a love triangle between shy PA Jennifer (Alyce LaTourette), crass gore-makeup man Jerry (Trent Haaga), and gallant soundman Casey (Will Keenan, star of Troma’s Tromeo and Juliet). But on top of that, there’s also a mysterious femme fatale stalking members of the production and murdering them in various creative ways. (In fact, the movie opens with her first ripping a man’s leg off and beating him to death with it, then ripping a rubbery fetus from a woman’s body and playing keepaway with it.)

All of which is an excuse for sex ‘n’ grossout gags that come so quickly they practically overlap. Wanna hear a few?

• Starlet Christine (Debbie Rochon, having fun playing an uncharacteristic bubble-head) has sex with just about every man on the crew, despite her snarly boyfriend’s (Mario Diaz) best efforts. One tryst takes place against the sink in the men’s room — until Larry enters and, unwittingly, manages to piss all over them.
• The femme fatale tracks down the soundman at a frat party, sodomizes him with a funnel, and dumps cocaine in the wrong end (then claws his brain from his skull and liberally breads it with coke).
• Sex with Toxie. (Not just sex, mind you — though that would be enough on its own. No, sex that gives his partner her sight back along with her orgasm.)
• Pickle sex.

“This year, for Halloween, I’m going as a Dali print!”

• Casey’s fawning admiration of Steven Spielberg, right down to Hook and 1941.
• Ron Jeremy as a born-again Christian singing “Amazing Grace.”
• Plunger violation. (The police have quotas, you know.)
• Death by diarrhea. (“This is definitely not chocolate pudding.”)
• Life-affirming rape.
• A fat naked man, his head covered in dental alginate and wrapped in plaster bandages, running amuck on the very public streets of New York City.
• A crucified ventriloquist’s dummy with its operator’s severed hand still in it.
• Plus more sex jokes, breast jokes, vomit jokes, poop jokes, mucus jokes, fart jokes, and a running gag/major plot point about hemaphroditism.

Troma’s philosophy has always been, “Nothing exceeds like excess.” And there are movies in which excess succeeds better than restraint (which is why the unrated Dead Alive is funnier than the R-rated cut). But here, piling on every single random idea that ever characterized the sick humor of a Troma film, the clever ideas easily get obscured and buried under everything else. It’s almost a juvenile mindset — the same one that would heap an ice-cream sundae with five flavors of ice cream, chocolate syrup, strawberries, jelly beans, butterscotch, chocolate chips, coconut, licorice bits, peanuts, marshmallow sauce, crushed Butterfinger bars, potato chips, white chocolate pretzels, mandarin oranges, gummi worms, whipped cream, Oreos, and those little silver candy balls. There’s a point at which too much really is too much, and anything additional detracts instead of adding. And Terror Firmer passed that point about three exits back.

Early test footage for The Hulk has proven sadly disappointing.

Of course, a movie like this is as critic-proof, in its own way, as Star Wars Episode Z: Attack of the Happy-Meal Merchandise. People don’t watch Troma flicks for production values or artistic pretensions (though damned if Kaufman et al don’t throw in sermonettes on the artistic value of indie film at every turn); I’m tempted to say that, by and large, people don’t “watch” something like this at all. Its main use is probably as background entertainment at aparty of like-minded individuals, where every once in a while everyone can point and gibber at the on-screen antics.

And speaking of overkill… A making-of documentary on a movie about a movie production? Ew boy…

[Just over 1000 words. Not too bad, I guess.]

A Notable Quotable:

“Terror Firmer’s gonna have more bullet hits than any movie in film history, except perhaps Sam Peckinpah’s Wild Bunch — but we’re going to have exploding breasts, and that’s far more historically significant!”

- Larry Benjamin

Some Notable Totables:

(for the unrated director’s cut, not counting any re-inserted deleted scenes, alternate endings, or whatever)

• body count: 21
• breasts: 18 (counting only the real ones — or, at least, the ones covered with real skin, as opposed to foam latex)
• explosions: 2
• ominous thunderstorms: 0
• actors who’ve appeared on Star Trek: 0

1. Once again, keep your punchlines to yourself.[back]