Happy Birthday, Lloyd Kaufman (and Troma Turns 50)

I debated holding this tribute for a year, when it will be producer Lloyd Kaufman’s 80th birthday, but then we saw that his baby Troma Entertainment turned 50 years old this year, and there are some other timely items to report so I opt to do it today.

I had the honor of appearing on a dais with Lloyd at Dixon Place about 15 years ago as part of a weekly series of horror conversations organized by Clay McCleod Chapman. We got to chat a bit, and as you can imagine he is both a funny guy, and a nice one. His presence there may make more immediate sense than mine did, though since then I have written lots more about about horror and comedy-horror on this blog. In my remarks I’m pretty sure I talked about the scary iconography of vaudeville magicians, and about my favorite scare as a child, the tv show Kolchak: The Night Stalker. Later I tried to interest Lloyd in a screenplay, and his unsurprising reply was, “Sure! if you get the money!” Which, fair enough.

I wish I’d told him at the time all sorts of things I’d forgotten or didn’t yet know. Such as, that my sister and I were obsessed with his early slasher film Mother’s Day (1980). We’d gotten our hands on a videotape of it somehow, and watched it a stupid amount of times. Much more on that nauseating film here. Also, I’d been good friends withSurf Reality’s Rob and Jen Prichard, who’d appeared together in The Toxic Avenger (1984), met and married. The Toxic Avenger is what put Troma on the map, as it were, and Lloyd has never stopped milking its legend for all it is worth. That film turned 40 this year; there were many commemorative screenings and events in celebration. Other friends and colleagues of mine have been in their films as well — Rev Jen Miller, and Bill Weeden among them.

Those familiar with Kaufman’s crass, low-budget cinematic oeuvre are those most apt to be shocked by his origins — how legit they are. Kaufman went to Yale, for example. His wife, Pat Swinney Kaufman has been executive director of the New York State Governor’s Office for Motion Picture and Television Development and the deputy commissioner of Empire State Development for YEARS. He started out working with John Avildsen. During the early phase of his career he worked on such mainstream movies as Joe (1970), Rocky (1976), Saturday Night Fever (1977), The Final Countdown (1980), and the less mainstream but super-respectable My Dinner with Andre (1981). But in the early ’70s he also worked in porn (!) and on exploitation films such as 1972’s Silent Night, Bloody Night, leading to the establishment of Troma Entertainment in 1974.

The name “Troma” has always been an enigma to me, so today I decided to drill down into it, if you’ll forgive a perfectly appropriate metaphor. The more accessible association is of course the word “trauma”, from the Greek τραῦμα, meaning “wound” or “damage”. But more to the point is the Greek term “tromos” (τρόμος), which means “horror”. Kaufman seems to have smashed them together in a very clever way — so clever in fact, that no one is hip to it.  Conceptually, Troma has always seemed to me to live midway between Roger Corman’s AIP (a poverty row assembly line), and the work of John Waters (which is about elevating bad taste to the level of a production value). The combo of laughs and gross-out, it’s very much like a trip to an amusement park.

Of Troma’s scores of films, some of the better knowns ones after The Toxic Avenger include Class of Nuke ‘Em High (1986), Troma’s War (1988), the many Toxic Avenger sequels and Nuke ‘Em High sequels, Tromeo and Juliet (1996), Terror Firmer (1999), Poultrygeist: Night of the Chicken Dead (2006), the 2010 Mother’s Day remake with Rebecca De Mornay,Father’s Day (2011), Shakespeare Shitstorm (2020, an adaptation of The Tempest), and the 2023 remake of The Toxic Avenger with Peter Dinklage, Kevin Bacon, and Elijah Wood.

Some of the stars and film-makers who appeared in Troma films early in their careers include Paul Sorvino, Oliver Stone, Vanna White, Kevin Costner J. J. Abrams, Vincent D’Onofrio, Marisa Tomei, Billy Bob Thornton, Samuel L. Jackson, Trey Parker and Matt Stone, and David Boreanaz.

And Kaufman himself has made many a film cameo, as he is very much a ham. Happy birthday to Lloyd, and to Toxie. I raise a glass of toxic waste to each, as well as to all the inhabitants of Tromaville, New Jersey!

Learn more about Troma Entertainment at their official website here, and their Youtube page here.