There is a particular kind of review that Troma exists to make impossible, and Rise of the Super Tromettes is a proud member of that category. You cannot hold this film to the standards you would apply to a normal movie, because it is not trying to be one, and pretending otherwise would be a category error roughly on the level of complaining that a demolition derby lacks narrative subtlety. So let me tell you what this actually is: a gleefully filthy, aggressively low budget, proudly feminist superhero splatter comedy set in Tromaville, directed by and starring Mercedes the Muse, narrated by Lloyd Kaufman, and dripping with the green slime that has been the house brand for over fifty years. The Rise of the Super Tromettes Blu-ray from Troma and MVD is exactly what its target audience wants and precisely nothing that anyone outside that audience will tolerate. I mean all of that as description, not insult.
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The brass tacks
Label: Troma Entertainment / MVD Entertainment Group. Film: Rise of the Super Tromettes. Year: 2025. Director and Writer: Mercedes the Muse. Starring: Elizabeth D’Ambrosio, Mercedes the Muse, Knotty Peach, Jade Theriault, Bob Wright, Layla Kaufman. Narrator: Lloyd Kaufman. Runtime: 93 minutes. Rating: Unrated. Aspect Ratio: 1.78:1 anamorphic. Video: 1080p. Audio: Dolby Digital 2.0 Stereo. Subtitles: English. Region: A. Discs: Single BD. Release Date: July 14, 2026.
A Tromette of the Month Gets Her Own Movie
To understand why Rise of the Super Tromettes exists, you have to understand a small piece of internet history. Back in the dial up era, the Troma website ran a recurring feature in which an edgy, counterculture young woman was crowned Tromette of the month, a bit of scrappy web ephemera that became a genuine part of the studio’s identity. Rise of the Super Tromettes takes that decades old bit of branding and asks the obvious question no one had bothered to ask: what if the Tromettes got to be the heroes of their own film rather than window dressing in someone else’s? That premise is either delightful or exhausting depending on your relationship to Troma, and if you are reading a review of it at all, you probably already know which.
The plot, such as it is, concerns a mysterious virus infecting the men of Tromaville. D.D., a science obsessed young woman played by Elizabeth D’Ambrosio, and Mercy, played by director Mercedes the Muse, stumble onto the horrifying truth: the infected men are sprouting vicious, tentacled alien parasites from a particularly vulnerable region of the male anatomy, and the infection spreads through exactly the kind of situations you are now imagining. Realizing that the men of the city have been turned into monsters, the two women band together with a crew of local vigilantes, including Hypergirl played by Knotty Peach and Tekno played by Jade Theriault, and form the Super Tromettes, a vinyl clad female fighting force dedicated to purging Tromaville of its parasitic male infestation.
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If that logline made you laugh, this movie is for you. If it made you wince, it is not, and no amount of critical framing on my part is going to change that. Rise of the Super Tromettes is a film with an extremely specific frequency, and it broadcasts on it without apology. The complete cast and credits are on the film’s IMDb page for anyone who wants the full roster of Tromaville’s newest defenders.
Mercedes the Muse and the New Troma
The most interesting thing about Rise of the Super Tromettes, and the thing that lifts it above being a simple exercise in shock, is the person behind the camera. Mercedes the Muse has become one of the more compelling figures in the current Troma orbit, a filmmaker who grew up worshipping the studio and now makes films from inside its aesthetic rather than merely imitating it from the outside. This is not her first trip to Tromaville. Her earlier feature Divide and Conquer established her as a genuine inheritor of the Troma tradition, and readers who want the fuller picture of her development as a filmmaker can find our coverage of Divide and Conquer, which laid out the case for her as a real successor rather than a novelty.
What distinguishes Mercedes the Muse from the countless filmmakers who have tried and failed to counterfeit the Troma style is that she understands the assignment on a molecular level. The Troma aesthetic has never been about incompetence, whatever its detractors claim. It is about turning poverty into style, about making the seams visible on purpose, about the specific anarchic joy of a group of friends making something outrageous with no money and no permission. When she stages a gag where a man is hit over the head with a television, she uses a TV that has already been gutted so there is no glass to clean up and no prop to replace, and simply adds the smash on the soundtrack. That is not a shortcut. That is the entire philosophy of Troma compressed into a single joke, the constraint becoming the punchline.
And crucially, Rise of the Super Tromettes comes from within the tradition rather than trying to franchise it from outside. There is a real heart to it, a genuine affection for Tromaville and its half century of grotesque social satire, and a feminist perspective that feels like an authentic evolution of the Troma formula rather than a marketing bolt on. Mercedes the Muse proves, as she did before, that the Troma sensibility can grow and change without losing the go for broke spirit that made the studio culturally significant in the first place.
Fifty Years of Green Slime
It is worth stepping back to explain what tradition Rise of the Super Tromettes is actually plugging into, because the film makes almost no sense without it and near total sense with it. Troma Entertainment was founded in 1974 by Lloyd Kaufman and Michael Herz, which makes it, by a wide margin, the longest running independent film studio in North America. For over fifty years it has operated on a simple and stubborn principle: make the movies nobody else will make, distribute the films nobody else will touch, and never, ever apologize. The studio’s history is documented on the Troma Entertainment Wikipedia page, but the numbers only tell part of the story.
The studio’s defining creation, The Toxic Avenger, arrived in 1984 as a cheap horror comedy about a bullied weakling transformed into a mutant hero, and after a slow start it caught fire as a midnight movie and became a genuine cult phenomenon, spawning sequels, a children’s cartoon, a stage musical, and eventually a star studded Hollywood remake. Around Toxie grew a whole mythology of Tromaville, the fictional New Jersey town where atomic accidents, mutant high schools, and assorted grotesqueries play out as a sludge covered mirror of American society. Poultrygeist, Tromeo and Juliet, Class of Nuke ‘Em High, and dozens more built out a body of work that treated bad taste as a legitimate mode of social commentary.
That last point is the one outsiders consistently miss, and it is the key to taking a film like Rise of the Super Tromettes seriously even while laughing at it. Troma’s grossness has always had a target. Beneath the slime and the nudity and the exploding heads runs a consistent strain of satire aimed at corporate greed, institutional hypocrisy, and the various forms of exploitation that polite society renders invisible. Kaufman’s films offend on the surface in order to point at the much larger offenses underneath, and the studio’s willingness to be disgusting is inseparable from its willingness to be political. Rise of the Super Tromettes sits squarely in that lineage, taking the raw material of male anxiety and turning it into a literal parasitic infection that a team of women has to purge, which is about as Troma a metaphor as anyone has constructed in years. Whether it fully earns the metaphor is debatable. That it is reaching for one is not.
The Anarchic Comic Book Look
Visually, Rise of the Super Tromettes is a fascinating study in resourcefulness, and it is where the film is most purely enjoyable even for skeptics. Rather than attempting to imitate the sterilized digital effects of a modern studio blockbuster, which would be both impossible and beside the point, Mercedes the Muse leans all the way into the film’s limitations and turns them into an aesthetic. The result is a dazzling, deliberately crude mixture of live action chaos and short animated interludes that give the whole thing the energy of a living comic book, panels and all.
The special effects are proudly, defiantly practical. This is a film that runs on green slime, fake blood, and rubber prosthetics, the same toolkit Troma has been deploying since the Toxic Avenger first mopped up Tromaville in 1984, and there is a real tactile pleasure to watching effects that were physically built and physically destroyed in front of a camera. A large amount of the film’s charge comes from the visible artistry of its cheapness, the sense that everything you are seeing was made by hand by people who were clearly having the time of their lives.
The green screen work, shot outdoors to avoid the cost of a lighting rig, is exactly as rough as you would expect and exactly as charming as it needs to be. The animation is crude in the way underground comics are crude, which is to say expressively rather than incompetently. None of this looks expensive, and all of it looks intentional. There is a version of this film made with real money that would be far worse, because the money would sand off precisely the handmade quality that makes it work at all.
Where It Falls Flat
I promised honesty, and Rise of the Super Tromettes has real problems even on its own terms, the kind that separate a great Troma film from a merely decent one.
The biggest issue is that the movie occasionally strains too hard. There is a difference between the effortless anarchy of the classic Kaufman films and the sense, which surfaces here more than once, of a movie consciously trying to hit Troma beats, checking the boxes of transgression rather than transgressing naturally. When it flows, it flows. When it strains, you can feel the effort, and effort is the one thing the best Troma films never betray. The result lands well enough overall, but it is a more uneven ride than the studio’s high water marks.
There is also a specific tonal wrinkle worth naming for prospective buyers. The film carries an anti vaccine streak running through its virus premise that reads less like era satire and more like a sincerely held position, and depending on your sensibilities that will either pass unnoticed in the general chaos or pull you out of the fun entirely. I flag it not to litigate it but because a buyer deserves to know it is there, woven into the plot rather than glancing.
And then there is the narration. Lloyd Kaufman himself provides the voiceover, which should be a highlight, and instead it is one of the film’s small disappointments. The man is normally a bottomless well of manic energy, and here he sounds oddly lethargic, going through the motions in a way that deflates rather than energizes the sequences he introduces. It is a minor thing, but when you are counting on Uncle Lloyd for a jolt and he arrives at half power, you notice.
None of these flaws are fatal to the enterprise, and none of them will matter to the hardcore Tromaholic. But they are the difference between a film I can call essential and one I can only call a solid, spirited entry in a very specific tradition.
Shot on a Shoestring, Presented in High Definition
To the disc, with a note of transparency first: I am assessing this presentation from the confirmed technical specifications and the release information rather than a frame by frame screening of my own copy, so read my read as informed rather than eyewitness.
Troma presents Rise of the Super Tromettes in 1080p at a 1.78:1 anamorphic ratio, and the honest verdict is that the film looks exactly like what it is, which is precisely correct. This is a shoestring production shot on small consumer grade cameras, and no Blu-ray transfer in the world is going to make it resemble a studio release, nor should it. What the high definition presentation does deliver is a clean, stable rendering of the film’s deliberately grimy aesthetic, with the signature Troma green glow coming through vividly and the gross out set pieces rendered in all their goopy glory.
The point of a Blu-ray for a film like this is not pristine reference quality. It is faithful reproduction of the intended look, and on that measure the disc succeeds. The practical effects benefit from the added clarity, letting you appreciate the handmade artistry of the slime and prosthetics, and the animated segments hold up cleanly. For a movie made this cheaply, presented this honestly, there is nothing to complain about and a fair amount to enjoy. It is what it is, proudly, and the transfer respects that.
Two Channels of Freakish Sound
Audio arrives as Dolby Digital 2.0 stereo, and here again the correct expectation is modest fidelity to a modest source rather than an immersive showcase. This is not a lossless track, and it is not a surround mix, both of which are entirely appropriate for a two channel guerrilla production of this kind. What the track delivers is clean, clear reproduction of the film’s dialogue, its various freakish sound effects, and the wet squelches and smashes that carry so much of the comedy.
For a film where a running visual gag depends on a sound effect standing in for an effect the production could not afford, clarity matters more than channel count, and the stereo mix serves that need well enough. English subtitles are included, which is a genuine plus for accessibility and for catching dialogue that occasionally competes with the general mayhem. Would a lossless track have been nice? Sure. Is its absence a real problem on a film assembled like this one? Not remotely. The audio does its job.
It is worth setting expectations honestly here, because buyers upgrading from a streaming rental or a self released digital copy should know what the jump does and does not get them. The Blu-ray will not transform how the film sounds, since there is only so much a 2.0 stereo mix pulled from a shoestring shoot can offer, but it does give you a clean, permanent, uncompressed source free of the streaming compression artifacts that tend to smear exactly the kind of chaotic, effects heavy soundscape this film trades in. For a movie this reliant on the timing of a squelch or a smash, having the audio locked to disc rather than at the mercy of a streaming bitrate is a modest but real benefit.
From the Vaults: Uncle Lloyd, a Mini-Doc, and a Toxic Tour
The supplements on the Rise of the Super Tromettes Blu-ray are where Troma reliably overdelivers relative to the budget, and this release is no exception. The extras are short but genuinely fun, and they collectively do a better job of selling the film’s handmade charm than the film itself sometimes manages.
The headline is a brand new introduction featuring Mercedes the Muse and Lloyd Kaufman, the sort of thing Troma has been putting on its discs for decades and which fans specifically buy these releases to get. There is also an original intro by Kaufman running just under a minute, with Uncle Lloyd freaking out in front of the Super Tromettes in the traditional manner. The most substantive piece is a Rise of the Super Tromettes mini documentary running a little over four minutes, which is a genuinely charming look at how you make a feature film with a tiny camera and a crew of freaky friends, including a peek at how the worm creatures were achieved and the outdoor green screen trick.
Rounding out the package are a Club MRSA commercial, a mock advertisement for the film’s fictional strip club, and the Totally Toxic Tour, a delightful five and a half minute walk through Mercedes the Muse’s personal Troma memorabilia collection that doubles as a portrait of exactly the kind of lifelong obsession that produces a film like this. You will not believe how many Toxic Avenger toys exist, and watching a genuine superfan show them off is weirdly moving. The original theatrical trailer is also included. It is a modest but well curated package, and it captures the communal, do it yourself spirit that is the whole point of Troma, in the same tradition as the label’s other recent in house restorations and special editions like Shakespeare’s Shitstorm.
Who Should Storm Tromaville
If you are deciding whether the Rise of the Super Tromettes Blu-ray belongs on your shelf, here is the honest breakdown, and it is a breakdown with unusually hard edges.
Dedicated Tromaholics should buy it without a second thought. This is a genuine, in house, spiritually authentic Troma production made by one of the most promising filmmakers currently working in the tradition, and it belongs next to your Toxic Avenger and Class of Nuke ‘Em High discs. You already know if this is you, and if it is, stop reading and go order it.
Mercedes the Muse followers and fans of the new wave of Troma filmmaking will want this as further evidence that the studio’s future is in capable, anarchic hands. It pairs naturally with her earlier work and makes a strong case for her as the real thing.
Cult film collectors with catholic tastes and a high tolerance for the crude and the transgressive will find plenty to enjoy in the sheer go for broke energy of the thing, provided they go in with the right expectations about budget and polish.
Everyone else should stay far, far away, and I say that with total sincerity and zero judgment. If you do not already love Troma, this film will not convert you, and it is not designed to. It is filthy, cheap, deliberately offensive, tonally chaotic, and completely uninterested in winning over the unconverted. There is no version of this movie that works as an entry point. Rise of the Super Tromettes is a film made for a specific congregation, and it preaches beautifully to exactly that choir and to no one else.
Long Live Tromaville
Rise of the Super Tromettes is not a good movie by any conventional metric, and evaluating it by conventional metrics is a fool’s errand I have tried hard to avoid. It is uneven, it strains, its narration underdelivers, and it carries a genuine ideological streak that some viewers will find off putting. It is also made with real love, real ingenuity, and a real understanding of what makes Troma matter, and its best passages have the joyous, handmade, anything goes energy that keeps people coming back to this studio half a century on.
More than anything, it is proof that the Troma spirit is alive and evolving, that a new generation of filmmakers like Mercedes the Muse is carrying the green slime forward and finding new things to do with it. The Blu-ray presents the film exactly as it should be presented, honestly and without pretension, and stuffs the disc with the kind of affectionate extras that make physical media worth owning. For the faithful, this is an easy recommendation and a genuine delight. For everyone else, consider this the warning label you did not know you needed.
There is a preservation argument buried in here too, and it is not a small one. Microbudget films like this are among the most fragile objects in all of cinema. They are made outside every system that exists to keep movies alive, with no studio vault, no restoration budget, and no institutional interest in their survival. A film shot on consumer cameras by a crew of friends can vanish almost without a trace once its brief moment passes, which is exactly what has happened to countless regional oddities over the decades. Troma has spent fifty years being one of the only entities on earth willing to give films like this a permanent home, and that mission is the same reason the label keeps rescuing its own back catalog and the neglected obscurities it distributed, from grimy regional horror like Nightbeast onward. Buying the Rise of the Super Tromettes Blu-ray is, in a small way, a vote for the survival of a kind of filmmaking that the rest of the industry has no interest in keeping alive.
The Verdict: A proudly filthy, feminist, guerrilla superhero splatter comedy that delivers exactly what Troma fans want and absolutely nothing for anyone else. The 1080p transfer and 2.0 audio faithfully serve a deliberately shoestring production, and the extras, especially the mini documentary and the tour of Mercedes the Muse’s Troma collection, capture the communal spirit that makes the studio special. Uneven and occasionally strained, but authentic to its bones. Essential for Tromaholics, and a firm rental at most for anyone not already in the church.
Rise of the Super Tromettes is now available on Blu-ray from Troma
You can order the Rise of the Super Tromettes Blu-ray at MovieZyng, or directly from the MVD Shop, which has offered preorder discounts on the title. Buy it for the slime, the vinyl, and the increasingly rare sight of people making exactly the movie they wanted to make with no one’s permission.
