In print, farcical film gets some more mileage

The Toxic Avenger

The Novel

Lloyd Kaufman and Adam Jahnke

Thunder’s Mouth Press: 274 pp., $13.95 paper

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“THIS is not a novelization,” Lloyd Kaufman and Adam Jahnke blandly declare on the second page of this novelization. Yes, they’re being facetious, for this denial echoes “This is not a pipe,” which Rene Magritte famously printed underneath his painting of a pipe. No, Kaufman and Jahnke aren’t surrealists. But it’s clear they would appreciate the attribution. In fact it’s obvious they would appreciate anything good or bad that might be said about Troma Entertainment and its most-promulgated movie production, “The Toxic Avenger,” which the authors describe as “the story of a poor, pathetic dork who gets dumped into a vat of toxic goo and transforms into a hideously deformed creature of superhuman size and strength.”

I first stumbled across Troma in 1982 when I was assigned to review “Waitress!,” a comedy comprising a series of shapeless gags that were less tasteless than they were inept. It was an early Troma offering, but the hallmarks of the company’s “style” were clearly in evidence: bottom-of-the-barrel production values, slipshod performances (and direction to match), all conveyed with an air of aggressively presumed cleverness. It didn’t play very many venues, and neither have any of Troma’s other subsequent releases.

But the company has found a relatively lucrative niche in the direct-to-video market, bolstered by advertising and promotional tools, of which this book is the latest example.

Why would anyone choose to novelize a film made more than 20 years ago? Well might you ask, especially when the results produce such deathless prose as: “The door to the woman’s locker room creaked open just enough to allow a single eyeball access to the world outside. The eyeball scanned the corridor, looking for the slightest sign of life. The spa appeared to be as deserted as an Osama Bin Ladin rally at Ground Zero.”

But that in turn leads to a consideration of the entire novelization phenomenon, which Kaufman and Jahnke semi-sagely observe began as a clever form of motion picture advertising. Films derived from no literary source whatsoever were provided with one -- ex post facto -- via paperback “originals” that were seen at newsstands and book kiosks everywhere.

What’s most interesting about this branch of publishing is the inventive way that many have found to exploit it. Novelist Paul Monette, for instance, found novelizations a good way to supplement his income toward the creation of more serious work. Writing novelizations also provided him with the opportunity for stylistic exercises of more than passing interest. As a result, Monette’s novelization of “Nosferatu” (Werner Herzog’s remake of the F.W. Murnau silent classic) is every bit as interesting as “Taking Care of Mrs. Carroll.” Similarly, writer-director Samuel Fuller found that novelizations were a great way to try out screenplay ideas -- thus “Star of India” shows what a big-budget Fuller-directed adventure film might have been like.

More important, until its recent reconstruction, Fuller’s novelization of “The Big Red One” was the best envisioning of the World War II epic he wrote and directed. And on a more esoteric level, there’s the recently published “Fan-Tan,” the novelization of one of Donald Cammell and Marlon Brando’s planned but never made movies -- its cheeky bizarreness on the page showing precisely why it never got to the screen.

“The Toxic Avenger” did make it to the screen, as has such Troma detritus as “Tromeo and Juliet,” “Surf Nazis Must Die” and “Poultrygeist: Attack of the Chicken Zombies.” One’s toleration for such things was best described by the Onion critic Keith Phipps as “too self-consciously parodic to be good kitsch, and too gross to be all that fun. Someone had to pick up the exploitation film torch; it’s just a shame that it wasn’t a production company with a little more wit.”

Phipps may of course be thinking of New World Pictures and its major-domo producer-director Roger Corman, who helped jump-start the careers of Francis Ford Coppola, Martin Scorsese, Jonathan Demme, Jonathan Kaplan, Paul Bartel and Joe Dante. But Corman was a means to an end, whereas Troma is a dead-end unto itself, though this novelization was undertaken to show what “The Toxic Avenger” might have been had Kaufman and Jahnke had the money.

These days the real challenge confronting Troma is New Line Cinema’s “Snakes on a Plane,” a forthcoming Samuel L. Jackson vehicle that has become a “cult classic” prior to release via a cleverly manufactured product reel on the Internet. Obviously, Kaufman and Jahnke can fight back by creating a movie vehicle for Internet queen Paris Hilton. Now that would be toxic.

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David Ehrenstein is the author of several books, including “Open Secret: Gay Hollywood 1928-2000” and “Film: The Front Line 1984.”