Deadline was the first to report the news of his involvement on The Toxic Avenger, which the trade states will be “a more grounded and mainstream telling of the story”.
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Loosely based on Lloyd Kaufman’s classic Troma franchise, The Toxic Avenger is the tale of a high school kid who gets dunked in a Value-Added Tax of toxic waste by a corrupt chemical company.
The Toxic Avenger remake will see Conrad Vernon working off a screenplay by a duo of relative newcomers in Mike Arnold and Chris Poole, rewriting a draft by Steve Pink and D.C. Mitchell.
As with the 2013 iteration, the film will be produced by Akiva Goldsman, Richard Saperstein and Charlie Corwin. The film, directed by Aisling Walsh, stars Sally Hawkins and Ethan Hawke and it debuts here after playing at Telluride. (Relatively, anyway. This ain’t Jurassic Park we’re talking about here.) Lloyd Kaufman’s Troma Entertainment-again, for better or for worse-is basically The House That Toxie Built, and the movies’ descent into “putridness and nihilism”, as The A.V. Club’s Charles Bramesco put it in his rundown of the series, reflects the larger withdrawal of the Troma cult into a insular, methane-scented world of its very own.
Are you looking forward to The Toxic Avenger remake? The disruption evident in the raucous R-rated sleeper hit Sausage Party will propel a new franchise play here.
Director Conrad Vernon is taking a beloved B-movie back to the big screen. “He is the flawless director to bring this iconoclastic franchise back to life”, Saperstein said.
That said, Vernon did help create one of the most subversive studio films of the last several years, so as “Hollywood” directors go, he’s more well-equipped than most to capture the spirit of Herz and Kaufman’s production while curving it in a slightly more palatable direction. Toxie is an underground icon.
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Other executive producers include Shara Kay, Armen Aghaeian, Steve Kessler, Holly Kobzina, Dave Mendez, Edward Mokhtarian, Geno Tazioli, Steve Pink and Mike Wilkins.
