“The fluorescent fluids fly fast and furiously…It gets only wilder from there.”
Katie Walsh, LA Times
Press
“Whether it’s a dig at Trump or Hillary, Disney or news media at large, this is a movie that’s angry at everyone, but wise enough to know when and where it ought to spew out its aggression. It’s right and righteous.”
Bill Arceneaux, Film Threat
“Taking the ‘ripped straight from today’s headlines’ approach, a Troma film, with its wall-to-wall hyper-surrealism, tends to skewer whatever’s happening in society at the moment. At this particular juncture in time, Kaufman’s latest, Return to Return to Nuke ‘Em High, Vol. 2 also manages to serve as a sort of exorcistic prism. Its outrageous imagery brings to light the absurdity we’re currently up against as a society dealing with all sorts of turmoil.”
Marvin Miranda, LA Weekly
“This might be Kaufman’s angriest polemic yet, and it’s consequently his looniest. Bless him and Troma for making a movie that’s so aggressively unclean. Here’s to many more years of questionable taste.”
Simon Abrams, RogerEbert.com
Typically, the enjoyment of a Troma film goes as far as your threshold for offensive and corny humor, peppered with satire and a winking self-awareness. However, RETURN TO NUKE ’EM HIGH VOLUME 1 is a triumph, going so bold with its cheese and savagery that it’s practically visionary. Of course, traditionally speaking, the film is so incoherent and over-the-top that more humorless and strait-laced audience members may decry the film as stupid or incompetent. However, Troma’s intention is directly in line with its unhinged, absurd world, and with its array of caricatures and disgusting violence, its gleeful anarchy is shockingly refreshing and true to the form
Even though it’s insane, nonsensical and silly on a fundamental level, RETURN TO NUKE ’EM HIGH VOLUME 1 is undeniably funny, brave and so unlike anything else being put out today that it practically demands respect. Kaufman has made another film in the vein of Troma’s classic output that is simultaneously juvenile and brilliant, firmly lodged in a place of sublime and subversive anarchy. It’s a tour de force of the company’s independent aesthetics in the 21st century, and for those who can appreciate a reprehensible trip into brutal violence, self-deprecating satire, gruesome FX and sexually taboo excess, it’s a welcome return indeed. For this writer, the wait for RETURN TO NUKE ’EM HIGH VOLUME 2 will not be short enough.
3.5/4
There are glee clubs, and then there are glee clubs populated by mutant Cretins. With dips into LGBT issues, bullying and contaminated food supplies, this delicious sci-fi horror comedy—currently making the festival circuit—is a follow-up to Troma B-movie classics like THE TOXIC AVENGER (1984) and CLASS OF NUKE ‘EM HIGH (1986).
The films by the fine folks at Lloyd Kaufman’s trashy Troma Entertainment require their own critical scale—consider this one half hilariously awful and half awfully hilarious.
As unlikely as it may sound, put in the plus column a whole lotta bad taste: shockingly inappropriate jokes about high-school shootings, Jerry Sandusky and George Zimmerman; a rampaging, radioactive penis that burrows into an unlucky character’s chest cavity and eats his heart. (You know, that sort of thing.) The movie hinges on a lengthy lesbian sex scene between in-on-the-joke leads Asta Paredes and Catherine Corcoran; Blue Is the Warmest Color this ain’t.