It was okay to love them as a kid, but once your cinematic adolescence arrived, you’d gladly trade your Toxie treasure for a far more meaningful fright film experience. For many, Troma was becoming the Mad Magazine of moviemaking. Fans started complaining over recycled content, uninspired approaches, and the lack of any real significant social value. Though the company had ridden the Avenger‘s coattails (and receipts) through a couple of sequels, and had found financially beneficial homes for a myriad of languishing, unknown films, the late ’80s and early ’90s had not been the company’s most inventive time. No one expected the newly minted Tromeo and Juliet to be any different. The formula for each film was strategically similar – find an outrageous situation, pile on the blood and female breasts, and deliver a clever combination of old fashioned exploitation and new fangled VCR fodder.
Utilizing the still in its infancy home theater marketplace to widen the fanbase, Troma was soon turning out product with provocative names like The Class of Nuke ‘Em High, Troma’s War, and Sgt. But with 1985’s The Toxic Avenger, Kaufman created a character that instantly connected with everyone, including outsider audiences. Thanks to Kaufman, its spokesman, president, and guiding creative force, the company had grown from the maker of mindless sex farces ( The First Turn On, Squeeze Play) and distributor of genre/horror oriented fare ( Mother’s Day) to a recognized industry icon. Over the previous 25 years, Troma had developed a myopic reputation as a gross-out gore enterprise. Besides, Kaufman long a proponent of cinema as art, saw the subject as a perfect realization of all his lofty ambitions – and he was right. As a notion, turning Romeo and Juliet into a punk rock pierced body part projection of the Manhattan Independent Film Company’s aesthetic, seemed quite normal. Heck, West Side Story had done it in the ’50s, and it was and still is considered a classic.
TROMEO AND JULIET UPDATE
So when Troma chief Lloyd Kaufman pegged employee James Gunn to update the playwright’s classic tale of star crossed lovers, it wasn’t something wholly novel. Even as far back as their first staged productions, directors and theater companies have been meddling with the Masters’ hollowed words and characters. Filmmakers had been updating Shakespeare since the Bard’s plays first appeared.
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