‘AVENGER’ DIVES INTO THE MUCK

Mocked, humiliated, scorned . . . teased by brazen, bikinied hussies . . . subjected to the sadistic taunts of bronze-biceped iron pumpers . . . 98-pound Melvin the janitor (of the Tromaville, N.J., gym) is a nerd whose worm is about to turn.

Poor Melvin! This awkward, grinning spaz--beside whom the early Woody Allen was Mikhail Baryshnikov, and Mortimer Snerd was Cary Grant--is about to be dropped into a steaming, green vat of toxic waste. From it, he will emerge--flesh scalded into gray lumps, muscles bulging in clotted clumps--as the latest and ugliest of superheroes: “The Toxic Avenger” (at the Nuart for a week).

This is an odd-visaged chap. He looks like a cross between the Incredible Hulk with leprosy and a Frankenstein monster who’s just crawled out of a dumpster. His eye sockets twist askew like Picasso’s cubistic ladies in “Les Demoiselles d’Avignon.” His skin boils up like poisonous slumgullion. And he’s wearing the rotting remnants of a pink ballet tutu.

But his heart is simon-pure. Afflicted with a restless urge to punish the evil and reward the good, he wanders the streets of Tromaville, disemboweling muggers, heaving stickup men into pizza ovens, dry-cleaning white slavers and decapitating pimps.

Soon he attracts the adoring plaudits of the populace, and the heart of a lovely young girl--so blind she tries to feed him Drano sandwiches, with a garnish of Easy-Off. But he also wins the enmity of Tromaville’s establishment: the swinishly corrupt mayor, the Nazi police chief and all manner of depraved scum on the take. To these perfidious vermin, the Toxic Avenger means only one thing: the end of their profitably rotten way of life. They do what any self-respecting public officials would do. They call out the National Guard.

“The Toxic Avenger” is, obviously, a satire: of modern life and politics, of superhero comic books and four or five different kinds of trashy movies (soft-core, kung fu, revenge, car-chase crime and muckraker expose). It’s a movie that, like Melvin, dives headfirst into trash and wallows in it, coming up dripping and burbling.

The style is hard, slick and vulgar. The acting hovers between porno-broad and TV slapstick. (There’s one fine job, as the porcine Mayor Belgoody, by Pat Ryan Jr.) The violence is in the Herschell Gordon Lewis vein; the sex has the bright, smutty lust of a Russ Meyer; the humor is mostly Three Stooges by way of Mel Brooks.

The movie is almost droolingly tasteless--though, in a way, it acts as a kind of cinematic emetic, flushing out a lot of cultural poisons. Audiences of tender sensibilities should be forewarned: This is a film where the hero says to the villain, “Let’s see what kind of guts you have,” then reaches into his stomach and pulls them out.

Is it a cult movie? Apparently it is, in Manhattan. Whether Angelenos take to such relentless ridicule of physical culture is open to question. (The movie’s great sarcastic image is the gleaming gym, golden-muscled body-builders pumping away in a cloud of pollution and corruption.) “The Toxic Avenger” (MPAA-rated R) was realized on shoestrings by directors Michael Herz and Samuel Weil, writer Joe Ritter and producer-cameraman Lloyd Kaufman. And, if a lot of it is bad, it’s redeemed by two qualities: humor and audacity. The humor sometimes palls, but the audacity stays as ripe and toxic as a New Jersey dump site.