“The Toxic Avenger” director explains the origin of the leaked ‘monster dong’ scene and ‘Butt Guts Unit’

Key Points

• A scene from The Toxic Avenger featuring Toxie’s “monster dong” leaked online, with a report suggesting movie theater chains are nervous to screen it.

• Director Macon Blair clarifies “it’s just one scene” and there’s “not really” a more unrated cut of the movie floating around.

• The filmmaker also explains the origins of the ‘Butt Guts Unit,’ which was responsible for adding in more raucous moments.

Somewhere out there, is there an even more unrated cut of the new Toxic Avenger movie? Does it have anything to do with a…ahem…”monster dong”?

Bloody Disgusting, paired with leaks, cracked the case wide open earlier this month. The film, a reimagining of the 1984 horror-comedy, is a raucous ride about Winston Gooze (Peter Dinklage), a down-on-his-luck janitor who’s transformed into a super-powered mutant after falling into a vat of chemicals.

According to Bloody Disgusting, only the R-rated version of the movie screened at early events such as Fantastic Fest and San Diego Comic-Con, but the true unrated version contains what has been described as a “monster dong” sequence, a snapshot of which leaked on Reddit. The outlet says the scene alone is causing some theater chains across America to get cold feet over releasing the unrated Toxic Avenger.

“If we weren’t going to release the full unrated cut, then it didn’t make sense to release the movie at all,” Bloody Disgusting founder and Cineverse’s VP of Network Strategy Tom Owen said. “Some studios fear pushing the limits. We welcome it, and by giving filmmakers true creative freedom, we ensure their work reaches audiences in its purest, most uncompromised form.”

In a new interview with Entertainment Weekly, conducted just a week out from the movie’s release in theaters, The Toxic Avenger director Macon Blair clarifies the “monster dong” does indeed exist somewhere, but “it’s just one scene” and there’s “not really” a more unrated cut of the movie that was left on the cutting room floor.

A monstrous member of the cast

During the events of the movie, Dinklage’s Winston and Taylour Paige’s J.J. Doherty are chained down in the basement of corrupt CEO Bob Garbinger’s (Kevin Bacon) mansion. Winston realizes he can use his radioactive urine to melt through their shackles and escape. So he…you know…whips it out.

“In the original version of the movie, the shot is kind of shadowy…This is getting really inside baseball, but the joke was that, after all this hemming and hawing — forgive me — Toxie was gonna have a tiny one and it was gonna be kind of obscured,” Blair explains. “Then when they were like, ‘We’re gonna put “unrated” on the poster,’ I felt like we didn’t have any cut scenes that we could add back in. So the unrated thing was a marketing consideration, but I really felt like we needed to materially change the content of the movie in some way, however we could, in order to at least nominally respect the unrated thing.”

What Blair came up with was the opposite version of this gag. Instead of a tiny dong, Toxie would have a monster dong.

“With a little bit of VFX compositing, we shot a practical element of a large Toxie member and put that one in the movie,” Blair continues. “So that was something I did on my own and just made it in my office. Then I got together with a local DP and we shot the plate, and then they did a little composite job in the movie. So it’s really just one shot. It’s funny how, I think, a frame grab or something got leaked and it has turned into [laughs] a bigger thing than it is, but it’s just one shot.”

The other scenes cut from the movie were done so for pacing, Blair says. He points to material shot with Rebecca O’Mara (Beetlejuice Beetlejuice), who played Winston’s late girlfriend. Audiences will glimpse her briefly in the final movie; however, there originally was “a dreamy flashback where they interacted and it was a really lovely scene,” Blair recalls, “but it came in the latter half of the movie and it slowed down the pace.”

The filmmaker emphasizes that nothing was cut for being “too bloody,” noting, “We didn’t really have a lot of cut scenes. We used almost everything that we shot. So there’s not really another version out there.”

Inside the Butt Guts Unit

Most of the wilder content in The Toxic Avenger, such as Toxie using his signature radioactive mop to knock half a guy’s face clean off his head, comes from something called the Butt Guts Unit. Those who wait through the end credits will see a list of 10 people who were a part of this initiative.

As Blair explains, Legendary Pictures contacted him while he was editing the movie to say they had a little more money to throw at the project. “We couldn’t do a whole other set piece or a whole other scene or a whole other character, necessarily, but we could do one day of shooting,” he recalls. So they built a series of “quick gags” that the team could capture on camera and incorporate into the edit.

As for the title of this unit itself, “It was a silly name that stuck,” Blair says.

It came from one very late night at work with his assistant editors, brainstorming what they could do with this extra day of shooting. Blair began to lay out one idea involving Toxie and the mop. “I started to tell the story. ‘And he’s gonna take his mop…’ And then one of the assistant editors cut me off and, out of nowhere, was like, ‘And pull this guy’s guts out of his butthole?!’ I was like, ‘No…Well…hmm, hmm, yes!'” Blair remembers.

At 1:30 a.m. that day, Blair then wrote the CEO of Legendary an email, in all caps. “TOXIE SHOULD PULL THIS GUY’S GUTS OUT OF HIS BUTTHOLE!”

“I spent the rest of the night feeling like she’s gonna think that we’re children and shut the whole thing down,” he says. “But she wrote back early the next morning and said, ‘Let’s line up on a VFX shop and start processing the shot.'”

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The monster dong was not part of this Butt Guts Unit, and Blair can’t really speak to the whole conversation of whether theater chains are getting cold feet over that particular scene. He acknowledges, “That might be a thing,” but clarifies, “The dong is in the movie for, like, 1.9 seconds.” Blair points out the obvious: “There are episodes of Game of Thrones that are way more brutal than this.”

To any theater chain that might hesitate to screen The Toxic Avenger, “I would say to those guys: It’s not so extreme that you can’t show it. You’re showing things way more extreme all the time by comparison,” he says. “It’s more like an Itchy and Scratchy cartoon. It’s got that stuff in it, but it’s also sort of gentle and warmhearted that I don’t think it’s going to feel traumatizing or [laughs] it’s not going to hurt people. It’s a pretty gentle, fun-hearted movie, I think.”

The Toxic Avenger is in theaters Friday, Aug. 29.

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