HOT PRESS 10/9/24: Scared S#!tless at Screamfest, and The Toxic Avenger #1

Things are about to get squishy.

Braving the gauntlet of tentpole events, off-the-radar releases, and a non-stop avalanche of movies, TV, comics, and other stuff that's bad for you is DoomRocket's HOT PRESS. This week, I kick off our ScreamFest ‘24 coverage with Vivieno Caldinelli’s Scared Shitless and review AHOY Comics’ The Toxic Avenger #1.

With all the horror junk I’ve been watching and reading since October kicked off, I’ve been enjoying life quite a bit more than usual. Junk is good for perspective and even better for the soul; that’s what I think. 

This is not to say that I don’t go for the schlockier stuff every other month of the year, but October swings those narrow doors wide open for everyone and makes me feel like I’m indulging alongside my friends and colleagues — everyone, really. It makes me feel like we’re all a part of a ridiculous throbbing mass of people drinking deep the excesses of our culture, like, I don’t know, Brian Yuzna’s Society. (Because we live in one, etc.)

Screamfest, Los Angeles’s premiere horror movie festival (23 years strong since 2001), kicked off this week, and I’m happy to report I was given press access to some of its selections. I’ll be covering Screamfest a little more comprehensively next week, where I hope to catch Ick (starring Brandon Routh!) among several other titles. For now, I have thoughts and feelings on Scared Shitless, a horror movie with a title so perfect and obvious and ripe for the plucking I’m stunned it hadn’t been swiped up for another movie eons ago. (I guess “shitless” is okay for titles now? Our permissive, hedonistic march to oblivion continues apace! All right!)

Those seeking a squirmy, gross-out goof this Halloween can do worse than Vivieno Caldinelli's Scared Shitless, a Troma-tinged yuck-a-thon that stars The Walking Dead's Steven Ogg and Daniel Doheny as a father/son plumbing team who battle a bioengineered floater terrorizing an apartment building somewhere in Toronto. 

Let's dig a bit deeper into this viscous goop: following the death of his mother, Sonny (Doheny) develops an incapacitating germ phobia to the degree he's gulping off-brand Pepto like it was strawberry milk. Don (Ogg) thinks it's high time to bring his boy into the family business and cajoles Sonny into taking a late-night plumbing call. Meanwhile, a mad scientist (played by The Kids in the Hall's Mark McKinney) has lost his dangerous pet experiment, Project X, down a toilet where it's free to chomp its victims from the most inconvenient angles.  

Naturally, McKinney's character happens to live in the apartment complex Don and Sonny are called to. It's managed by Patricia (Chelsea Clark), who has dramatic, plot-convenient reasons to keep the monster's rampage a secret for a time. So, as Sonny and Don explore the pipes of Patricia's freaky tenants (truly, hanky-panky knows no age in Scared Shitless), what begins as a night of simple clogs soon careens into a series of chunky terror. I'm stunned no one said, "We're gonna need a bigger plunger" at any point. Restraint!

As monster movie set-ups go, Scared Shitless is obvious, though I appreciate Caldinelli and screenwriter Brandon Cohen (who expands on the horror short of the same name) for attempting to drape some passable character drama over this parade of easy toilet gags. Bothering with Sonny's tummy troubles as a personal issue to overcome, coupled with his shared grief with Don, shows initiative and base-level respect for the audience, though had they bypassed all of it to focus more on the movie's laudable death-gags, I probably would have had more fun with it. If nothing else, the melodrama gives Ogg and Doheny something to do besides grapple with slippery props made to resemble various human anatomy. Scared Shitless punches slightly above its weight. I respect that. 

When I said "Troma-tinged" before, I meant it. Caldinelli shares Troma's zeal for homemade sicko gore but lacks its unsustainable Lloyd Kaufman energy. (In fact, I'd call the editing drowsy.) And while he makes up for this deficit with ambitious, if not necessarily inventive, monster kills, his execution is wonky. One scene that stands out features an overweight fellow going to town on his toilet while leafing through a copy of Pinocchio. (Why Pinocchio, you might ask? Not worth the energy.) Just moments before, we see Project X wriggling its way through the building's plumbing, so we know this guy's tush is in for a bad time. 

Caldinelli slowly pushes the camera in on this odious bathroom scene (with all the requisite farts, dribbles, and drops you might expect to hear). His attention should be inside the bowl, but he holds off from the reveal until the very last moment — so when he finally cuts to what's happening in this ceramic cavern, the sudden shot of the man's dangling bits with Project X going in for a chomp quickly comes and goes with little suspense. The repulsion is the set-up, and the cut to Ogg devouring a Matzoh ball is the punchline. It works in concept but in execution?

Where's the build? Why is the payoff made so easy for us? Now, I realize this is insane to dwell on, but I felt Caldinelli missed a trick by not toying with our expectations just a bit or rubbing our noses in the yuck even more than he did. Scared Shitless is goof-off material, no question about it, but horror movie fun shouldn't come at the expense of genuine shocks. What makes us want to experience Scared Shitless again? The poop jokes?

4 / 10

ScreamFest screens Scared Shitless at the TCL Chinese 6 Theatre on Saturday, October 12. 

Directed by Vivieno Caldinelli.
Written by Brandon Cohen.
Starring Steven Ogg, Daniel Doheny, Chelsea Clark, Mark McKinney, and Julian Richings.
Cinematography by Rudolf Blahacek.
Produced by Lewis Spring.

Unrated. Features gore, bawdy stuff, and an assortment of dangly bits. 

If you're a Troma-Head from way back, you might feel disenchanted by AHOY Comics' The Toxic Avenger #1. The chaotic madhouse energy of Troma Films, founded by Michael Herz and Lloyd Kaufman (two mentions in a single newsletter — that's value!), is unique to its brand and tough to replicate. And that Tromatic energy has transmogrified over the years, much like its hulking mutant mascot has, with the four Toxic Avenger movies (among its other unsavory titles) becoming more anarchic, gnarly, and puerile as their budgets dwindled and Herz/Kaufman's hunger to create Truly Independent Cinema deepened. 

I feel AHOY is a bit too hifalutin for Troma's raunch, horror, and smut. Still, it's no surprise they set The Nib's Matt Bors and artist Fred Harper loose on a kinder, gentler, more socially proactive adaptation of Toxie. His origins as a victim of corporate greed and incompetence (and bullying) is an easily exploitable angle for a comics outfit that specializes in unabashed Message Satire like Billionaire Island (unchecked greed) and Second Coming (religious hypocrisy). Kaufman himself is notoriously anti-corporation! Yet, with the toxic splatter carnage gone and Kaufman's aggressive humor nuked for a soft-serve approach to the material, AHOY & Troma’s union will feel like a compromise to hardened fans rather than a match made in Troma Heaven. (Go ahead and look up who God is supposed to be in Toxie's universe. High Heaven crossover, that's what I say!)

As for everyone else, reading The Toxic Avenger #1 will be a pleasant enough experience for folks who enjoy AHOY titles like Bors and Ben Clarkson's Justice Warriors, which tackled policing in modern America with the chill of a torqued-up John Oliver on a Judge Dredd bender. Bors and Harper are using COVID as a springboard to introduce us to Melvin Junko and to satirize our collective experience with lockdowns and all the rampant governmental blundering and social short-sightedness that went with it. It's hard to get stoked on a new rambunctious Toxie saga when its sense of humor calls for a snort and a sneer at bitter real-life parallels.

Melvin in Bors's hands is more of a squish than his film appearances; Kaufman's monster had a heart of gold and was a hero in his native Tromaville, but he still didn't shy away from putting his trademark mop through the faces of his enemies. In this debut, Bors and Harper walk us backward from Toxie's inevitable mop-wielding Eco-Hero action to his humble origins, counting down from the good stuff to see how Melvin became this "hideously deformed creature of superhuman size and strength." Issue #2 promises a monster fight, which I sure wish this issue had, given how delightfully grody Harper's creature designs are (shades of Richard Corben blended with Steve Pugh). 

In fact, when Harper goes big, as he does in a couple energetic splash pages and a two-page spread that sees Toxie give a Hazmat heavy twin shocks of a defibrillator (about as violent as this gets), Toxic Avenger lumbers to life. There's a glimmer of Troma in these pages that attempts to echo its glory — it's more like a PG-13 Toxic Crusaders kind of situation, but if AHOY's Tromaville has to be a muted version of the original's New Jersey wasteland of hardbodies, freakazoids, goo, trash, and innards, then at least the monster action to come will be nice to look at.

Now, if you're familiar with Toxie's origin from the movies and are wondering how Bors and Harper sand down its edges, know that they do a thorough job of it. Here, Toxie's famous tutu isn't a homophobic element to the cruel prank that sent Melvin screaming into a vat of toxic waste in The Toxic Avenger (1984), but a conscious fashion choice by our hero before he befell his accident. (He gets an undercut in this version, a perplexing modern comics shorthand for "cool, misunderstood person.") Melvin isn't an off-putting horndog janitor as he was in the movies but a teenager who longs to leave Tromaville (described by him as a "boring, deindustrialized, culturally dead wasteland") at the earliest opportunity. His reasons? In the big city, one can wear a tutu in public and be unremarkable. 

The belligerent, unfocused hate that informs the horror of Toxie's story is still there if you squint — he's pursued by bullies who use drones to record the beat-downs I have to presume Mevlin has already suffered off-panel — but his persecution is due to being true to himself instead of being, well, a disgusting perv. In the movies, Melvin changes into a monster but becomes a better man. Here, Melvin's changes are skin-deep. 

This saps the character of some of his notorious power and makes Uncle Lloyd's call to visit Troma Now in the back of the issue very funny to me.  (Imagine some uninitiated person enjoying the genial rhythms of this and then watching Citizen Toxie.) Bors and Harper's Tromaville allows for a sprinkle of salty language — "I hope you fucking rot!" is about as spicy as it gets — but this iteration feels tame, safe, and, frankly, a bit hollow. In AHOY's hands, the irreverent, outright hostile social commentary of Herz/Kaufman's Tromaville is served up with an assured smugness that Toxie would obliterate in a heartbeat. 

6 / 10

The Toxic Avenger #1 is in stores now. To snag a copy, click this.

AHOY Comics / $3.99
Written by Matt Bors.
Art by Fred Harper.
Colors by Lee Loughridge.
Letters by Rob Steen.

That's all I got for this week. Read any good comics lately? See any movies? Drop your new favorites, recommendations, and questions (any at all!) in the comments or The Chat. Or, heck, just shoot me a line: jarrod@doomrocket.com.