More Gore! Editing Toxic Avenger to Be Weird/Sweet/Gross
"Turn the knob up past 11, get to 12, get to 13."
Editor Brett W. Bachman is having a ridiculously great 2025, splattering theaters with five feature films, but perhaps most gleeful is the long-delayed, much-anticipated reimagining of The Toxic Avenger. For an editor who has built a career out of wrangling scripted chaos into coherence—whether that chaos is an operatic Mike Flanagan series or a midnight movie fever dream—Toxic Avenger might be the purest distillation yet of his ethos, one summarized by director Macon Blair’s directive to keep it “weird, sweet, and gross.”
That trifecta became Bachman’s North Star in the cutting room. He approached the material with the same earnestness he would a straight-faced family drama, making sure the Peter Dinklage-Jacob Tremblay father-son storyline stayed grounded at the heart of the film. Around that emotional core, he layered slapstick, splatter, and surrealism, treating moments of gore like punchlines. “We’d build tension through the drama and then release it with a geyser of blood, or a sudden arm rip, or a mask reveal,” he says. “Those moments play like jokes, like pressure valves.”
But Toxic Avenger almost didn’t make it out of the lab. In a film landscape where entire projects are disappearing into vaults (Batgirl, Coyote vs. Acme), Bachman admits he was anxious. The movie was proudly niche, an ode to Troma weirdos and VHS freaks, and he worried it might get stranded. The eventual pickup by Cineverse was a relief: “They got it. They knew the tone, the language, the audience. They knew how to sell this thing. It felt like the right home.”
If there was ever pressure to tone down the gore, Bachman and Blair responded the opposite way: by amping it up. Test audiences didn’t want restraint; they wanted excess. “We kept hearing: more viscera, more splatter. Turn the knob up past 11, get to 12, get to 13,” Bachman says. “And so we had to keep reimagining, how can we make things even more outlandish and more bombastic?”
Somehow, they did. Practical effects were bolstered with CGI geysers of blood, absurdly exaggerated to land with the same precision as a perfectly timed pratfall. The film is gory, yes, but also uproariously funny, thanks in no small part to Bachman’s timing in the edit bay and a cast willing to go feral—Kevin Bacon, in particular, delivers what might be the loosest, most joyous performance of his career as the corrupt mayor.
And while Bachman’s year also includes Companion, the horror-romcom Heart Eyes, and the upcoming Rabbit Trap and Shelby Oaks, it’s Toxic Avenger that feels like the purest expression of his sensibilities. It’s proudly dumb, deeply sincere, and exploding with grotesque creativity: a movie made for pizza and beer hangs among audiences who, like Bachman, believe that gore can be as joyous as laughter.
In 2025, when so many films fight for the chance to simply exist, Bachman has found himself at the center of a moment where horror-comedy is not only surviving but thriving. And with Toxic Avenger, he’s delivered the kind of film that audiences don’t just watch—they howl through.
Brett W. Bachman, ACE, is an editor whose credits include Fall of the House of Usher, Pig, and Mandy.