Film · 1984 · Films · 1980s
The Toxic Avenger
Scored from 165 calibrated IMDb reviewers, each re-centered on their own rating baseline before the title is ranked. Cohort: Films · 1980s (3,141 peers).
Summary
In the town of Tromaville, New Jersey, a bullied, scrawny health-club janitor named Melvin is humiliated by a gang of cruel pranksters and falls into a vat of toxic waste. The accident transforms him into a hideously deformed but superhumanly strong creature who becomes a mop-wielding vigilante, hunting down corrupt criminals terrorizing his town and finding romance with a kind blind woman.
Released in 1984, The Toxic Avenger is an action, comedy and horror film. Inside comedy it is classed as Dark Comedy.
The calibrated figure is built from 165 reviewers whose rating history varies enough to place their own average. A broader pool of 165 reviewers with two or more reviews feeds the raw-average track instead. The cohort it is ranked inside is 1980s films — 3,141 of them.
How the score was built
We compare the reviewers of this title against every other title those same people reviewed. Each review is scored relative to the reviewer's own baseline — a 7/10 from a hard grader sits well above their average, while a 7/10 from a generous grader sits below theirs. Every reviewer then counts the same, so the result is a calibrated consensus rather than a raw average.
- Global percentile
- Where The Toxic Avenger lands against every title we rank.
- In-cohort percentile
- The same comparison narrowed to its cohort — titles of the same format released in the same decade. A 1970s film is judged against 1970s films, not against last year's streaming series. Ranked against Films · 1980s (3,141 titles).
- AI-adjusted percentile
- The same reviewer-normalized score, corrected for how much confidence the sample supports: thin samples are pulled toward the corpus average. Each title keeps the share n / (n + 53) of its measured distance from the average, where n is its calibrated-reviewer count, and the result is ranked on the same scale as the global percentile.53 is the median sample size across everything we rank. Here n is 165.
Cohort: Films · 1980s
