Kaufman might cheerfully admit that he's obsessed to the point of mania with making low-budget, high-yield movies and keeping Troma Entertainment, his tiny and fiercely independent studio, afloat. But like all true maniacs, he gets a lot done. You could argue, for instance, that he's among the most successful and influential independent filmmakers of our era. The films he personally directed or co-directed (with business partner Michael Herz, who still shares an office with Kaufman) include "Tromeo & Juliet," "Sgt. Kabukiman NYPD," "Class of Nuke 'Em High" and all three installments of Troma's trademark Toxic Avenger series.

Without the distinctive Kaufman blend of sex, violence and high-spirited horror-comedy -- or, as one critic has defined the formula, blood, beasts and breasts -- nibbling at the outer edges of the culture for a generation or more, we might have had no "Beavis and Butt-head," no "South Park," no "There's Something About Mary." OK, so maybe those were not works of art to rival Proust and Kurosawa, and indeed many viewers might have been grateful not to have had them, but you get my point.

Kaufman's most important creation, however, is not his movies, as memorable as some of them are. (No one who has seen the head-crushing scene in the first Toxic Avenger film will ever forget it. "It was just a melon in a wig," Kaufman says with innocent glee.) It is Troma. When Kaufman and Herz, who first met as undergraduates at Yale, started the company in 1974, low-budget production houses were everywhere. Companies like Troma cranked out softcore sex and grade-B horror for drive-ins, inner-city grind houses and single-screen theaters in small towns. Now these venues are gone, along with the small towns themselves and most of the old inner cities, and Troma is virtually alone on this cultural landscape.

As we've all heard ad nauseam, any kid with a digital video camera and a few thousand bucks can make a movie. Getting it seen by anyone outside your immediate family is another matter, unless you have the right connections in what Kaufman calls the "devil-worshiping international conglomerates" that control almost all film and video distribution around the world. Say what you like about Troma's movies (and some of them truly suck), the company has proved to be endlessly resourceful in getting them to audiences without surrendering its independence.

Troma now produces theatrical cuts of its movies with more gore and goo than ever, because the handful of urban art houses that still show them on the big screen like it that way and don't care about Motion Picture Association of America ratings. Then the films are recut to get an R rating so the video or DVD can legally be sold or rented to teenagers. (Unrated "director's cut" versions are also available, of course.) Home video, and especially the burgeoning DVD format with its outtakes, cast interviews, director's commentary and other extras, is where Kaufman and Herz get their money back. And with production costs of $500,000 or less per movie, it's realistic to assume that most of them make a tidy profit.

But Troma has done more than peddle an ever-expanding library of 700-odd trash-culture films. (Maybe you caught "Chopper Chicks in Zombie Town" one night on cable. But what about "Demented Death Farm Massacre" or "Nymphoid Barbarian in Dinosaur Hell"?) In an era when "independent" studios are owned by Disney (Miramax) and Time Warner (New Line), Kaufman and Herz used their Toxic Avenger breakthrough with disaffected loser audiences the world over to build their brand, as Madison Avenue people say. Troma has become its own culture, its own modest but well-fortified empire. Throughout the rabbit warren of offices in Hell's Kitchen, the staff of 50 or so -- nearly all young and nearly all dressed in late skate-punk style -- isn't just running a movie studio. They produce comic books, animations for Troma's various Web sites, episodes for Troma's show on British TV, posters and packaging, DVDs and videotapes. (Troma even markets a modest library of early Hollywood thrillers, horror films and westerns on DVD.)

In person, Kaufman is an irascible, slightly pop-eyed presence with scrub-brush hair who's capable, at virtually the same moment, of poking fun at himself while letting you know he really does see himself as a misunderstood artist. He likes to say the word "cinema" in a sort of fake-sophisticated accent that suggests Mr. Peabody, the bespectacled dog who delivered history lectures during "The Bullwinkle Show." He looks his age, which is 55, but seems to have the boundless energy of a teenager. For all his crusty charm, he's reputed to be difficult to work for -- the long hours and low pay at Troma mean constant turnover -- and I can well believe it.

I met him just after the prestigious Anthology Film Archives in New York held a Troma retrospective in December, but before he headed off to Park City, Utah, in January to host TromaDance, Troma's alternative to the much-mocked excesses of the Sundance Film Festival. This weekend he will finally unveil the long-awaited sequel "Citizen Toxie: The Toxic Avenger Part 4." It features '80s teen star Corey Feldman along with cameos by Hugh Hefner and Screw publisher Al Goldstein and some usual Troma nonsense (a dwarf playing God, good and evil versions of superheroes Toxic Avenger and Sgt. Kabukiman, etc.).

Kaufman's magnum opus to date, 1999's "Terror Firmer," is also newly available on DVD. He stars in it himself as a blind independent filmmaker (talk about potent symbolism) whose low-rent horror movie is disrupted by a hermaphrodite serial killer versed in "the ancient and secret art of pickling." As always, the comedy is pitched somewhere between Benny Hill and Luis Buñuel. There are several extended bodily-fluid scenes so disgusting they will repel anybody -- most notably the aftermath to the discussion about whether white chocolate goes with fish -- but Kaufman's notoriously sloppy filmmaking has almost become professional.

You never see certain scenes referred to in the movie-within-a-movie in "Terror Firmer," such as the "life-affirming rape scene" or the "projectile decapitation by colostomy bag scene." You do, however, see the scene that could stand as Kaufman's testament. A scabrous punk kid with a bad attitude, his legs broken off above the knees, lies dying in a pool of blood. Reaching out to his fellow filmmakers, he turns sincere for the first and last time, crying out, "Don't give up the fight for truly independent cinema!"

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