Toxic waste was all over the place in 1980s movies, from low-budget horror to big-budget superhero flicks. We take a look at why…
It’s one of 1980s genre cinema’s most unforgettable scenes: that of cold-blooded thug Emil Antonowsky (Paul McCrane) having driven into a silo of toxic waste, emerges from a lake of roiling ooze, his skin melting from his bones. A few cuts later, and Emil has made an unfortunate overlap with the bumper of a 6000 SUX saloon, sending his liquified body splattering all over the car’s bonnet and his head tumbling over the roof.
Between them, those mischievous imps, director Paul Verhoeven and effects artist Rob Bottin, created one of the decade’s most blackly comic and oddly convincing moments of gore. And, let’s face it, 1987’s RoboCop wasn’t exactly short of scenes of extreme violence: even for the 1980s, a period in which everything felt grotesque or over the top in one way or another, RoboCop was witheringly violent.
What RoboCop did have in common with a lot of 1980s films, though, was the presence of toxic waste. Right before Emil clumsily crashes his van, you can even see the sign helpfully emblazoned across the silo: TOXIC WASTE, all in capital letters. As well as Reagonomics, shoulder pads and big, daft action movies, the 1980s was, curiously, a decade of goo, ooze and toxic waste.
Bottin was undoubtedly one factor behind some of this. In 1982, he helped John Carpenter bring The Thing to life, which was perhaps one of the most graphic films to emerge from a major Hollywood studio that decade. Bottin and Carpenter’s shape-shifting alien didn’t just assume its victims’ identities – it did so in the most slippery, gooey way imaginable. In a making-of documentary about the film shot in the 1990s, Bottin recalled how he created the moment where a character’s head (based on actor Charlie Hallahan) stretches off his body, revealing a borderline indescribable mix of green veins and alien sinew.
“We didn’t really know how to make that stuff,” Bottin recalled, “so we just started melting plastic and getting bubblegum and making this crazy concoction that I’m sure was so toxic that it couldn’t be good for you… the whole time it’s giving off these fumes of paint thinner and lacquer thinner.”
Bottin’s work on The Thing would inspire other visual effects artists for the rest of the decade and beyond, whether it was the killer yogurt/commercial satire of The Stuff (1985), or the similarly icky alien morass of The Blob (1988).
The 1980s penchant for gelatinous special effects went hand-in-hand with a strangely prevalent appearance from toxic waste in various forms. The most obvious example was producer Lloyd Kaufman’s The Toxic Avenger (1984), a kind of comic book superhero horror in which a ‘98-pound weakling’ is turned into the title vigilante after a gang of psychopathic bullies throw him into a vat of chemicals.
Kaufman originally came up with the idea for The Toxic Avenger in the 1970s – a decade in which a global environmental movement first took root. Indeed, April 1970 saw millions of people march across the United States for the first ever Earth Day. More specifically, though, the late 1970s saw a particular environmental story hit the headlines across America. For decades, a canal in Niagara Falls, New York had been quietly used as a landfill by the Hooker Chemical Company – from the 1940s onwards, the company dumped tens of thousands of tonnes of toxic waste.
In the meantime, a community had built up in the same area, and by 1977, its residents had begun to complain about the appearance of black sludge and grim smells emanating from drains. Specialists were sent in to investigate, and discovered that deadly, potentially carcinogenic chemicals had leached from the unfortunately-named Love Canal into neighbouring soil and water courses.
The situation was so bad that then-president Jimmy Carter declared a state of emergency, and millions of dollars were spent either cleaning up or containing the disaster. Hundreds of people were forced to evacuate their homes in the aftermath, and the impact on the public’s consciousness was such that a TV film and a feature-length documentary were made about it. The Latter, 1979’s The Killing Ground, was nominated for an Academy Award.
It’s likely, then, that the reverberations from that incident snuck their way into writers’ subconscious. Certainly, the fictional town of Tromaville, New Jersey – the ‘toxic waste dumping capital of the world’ and setting for The Toxic Avenger – sounds like a comic book rendering of Niagara Falls, New York.
Although Kaufman doesn’t appear to have mentioned the Love Canal incident by name in interviews, he did say when talking to Vice that The Toxic Avenger was born from an early awareness of environmental issues. “When we made The Toxic Avenger,” he said, “nobody talked about the environment, but we would go camping and we’d see all that crap in the middle of the wilderness, because McDonald’s wasn’t biodegradable in those days. The environment wasn’t really a mainstream issue then.”
The Toxic Avenger’s success was such that it prompted Kaufman’s company, Troma Entertainment, to change direction entirely – away from the sex comedies that had marked out its previous output and towards the gorier, more horror-infused fare for which it would become famous.
Troma’s dabblings in toxic waste continued in 1986’s Class Of Nuke ‘Em High, in which the pupils at a high school (again in Tromaville, New Jersey) fall victim to their own environmental catastrophe. A spill at a nearby nuclear power plant sees radiation seep into the local water supply, which in turn taints a marijuana plant; the effects of smoking this are spectacularly grotesque and all in the worst possible taste.
For much of the 1980s, toxic waste became almost as prevalent a plot device as nuclear radiation was in the films of the 1950s and 60s. In 1980’s Alligator, screenwriter John Sayles (yes, that John Sayles) fused longstanding urban stories of sewer alligators with environmentalist angst, as an abandoned reptile grows to freakish size after eating the contaminated remains of animals used in science experiments.
Similarly, 1984’s C.H.U.D., released mere months after The Toxic Avenger, imagined that New York’s sewers were populated by waste-mutated, flesh-eating humans (the film’s title stands for Cannibalistic Humanoid Underground Dwellers.) Mutant, also released in 1984, likewise sees the dumping of toxic waste beget monsters, as a chemical company’s output turns the residents of a small town into green-skinned, oozing zombies.
In a similar bad-taste vein to these movies, Street Trash (1987) bottled toxic waste and labelled it ‘Tenafly Viper’ – a cheap liquor that gets passed around a homeless community in New York. A film that appeared to be precision-engineered to offend as many people as possible, Street Trash’s most indelible scene was that of a melting man somehow flushing himself down the toilet.
Not every toxic waste movie of the 1980s was hell-bent on grossing out its audience, however. Directed by Graham Baker on a moderate budget, 1984’s Impulse was far more eerie and low-key. An earth tremor sees a once sealed stash of hazardous material burst open and infect a small town’s milk supply, and gradually, the populace begins to display increasingly irrational behaviour, and eventually outright aggression. Baker’s restraint and sparing use of gore make Impulse something of an outlier, but with a superb cast – including Meg Tilly and Bill Paxton – it’s perhaps one of the most underrated examples of its subgenre.
By the end of the 1980s, toxic waste had hit the mainstream. Tim Burton’s Batman (1989) saw Jack Nicholson fall into a vat of hazardous waste and emerge as The Joker. By then, Teenage Mutant Ninja Turtles, first created by Kevin Eastman and Peter Laird in 1984, had morphed from indie comic to pop-cultural phenomenon, with a hit animated series eventually giving rise to a 1990 film franchise, toys, and more besides. Like The Toxic Avenger (curiously, also released in May 1984), the franchise fuses superhero action and comedy, with its quartet of turtles turned into humanoid ninja warriors after a chance encounter with radioactive ooze.
As well as a handy plot device, toxic waste was also a by-product of the cynicism and distrust that first reared its head in the 1970s. Just as Watergate bred a generation of paranoid, conspiracy-laced movies, including The Parallax View, The Conversation and Three Days Of The Condor, toxic waste films gave voice to growing concerns about the environment and the side-effects of scientific progress. One year after the toxic chemical scandal in Niagara Falls, the Three Mile Island incident of 1979 saw millions of Americans exposed to nuclear radiation.
With all of that going on in the headlines, perhaps it’s unsurprising that so many films in the 1980s would be about human bodies devastated by chemicals of various kinds. It’s fitting, too, that a lot of these films ended with the threat still at large. Alligator concluded with a baby reptile emerging from a drain, therefore paving the way for a sequel. The monsters can be defeated, but the contamination that created them remains.
Films about contamination and deadly materials continued into the 1990s and the new millennium, from Toxic Avengers and Ninja Turtles sequels to such films as The Bay – Barry Levinson’s 2012 found footage film about flesh-eating mutant lice. This year even saw The Toxic Avenger get a reboot, directed by Macon Blair and starring Peter Dinklage as the new take on the mutant hero.
Although it’s less prevalent than it once was, then, toxic waste still trickles through modern cinema all these years later. There’s also this to consider: in 1996, young screenwriter James Gunn wrote Tromeo And Juliet – which, as it sounds, is a collision of William Shakespeare’s romance and the sex-and-gore stylings of Lloyd Kaufman’s Troma Entertainment. That film would provide a launchpad for Gunn, who went on to make the write Zack Snyder’s 2002 Dawn Of The Dead remake, direct the Guardians Of The Galaxy movies for Marvel, and is now co-chairman of DC Studios.
Which just goes to show: from gigantic alligators to zombies, ninja turtles and even filmmakers, the after-effects of toxic waste are varied and entirely unpredictable.
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