Larry Cohen is one of the great voices in genre cinema. As both a screenwriter, and later a director, Cohen is responsible for some of the best horror and B-movies of the ’70s and ‘80s, including Black Caesar, God Told Me To, Q: The Winged Serpent, and the It’s Alive and Maniac Cop franchises. He’s a wicked satirist and a political filmmaker, but he’s an entertainer first, and his work is always deceptively smart despite seeming silly or dopey on the surface. His 1985 horror comedy, The Stuff, fits that description perfectly.
A new dessert craze is sweeping America: it’s like ice cream, but not… it’s like yogurt, but not… it’s THE STUFF. While shoppers clear it off store shelves by the cartful, the suffering ice cream industry hires corporate spy Mo Rutherford (Michael Moriarty, a regular collaborator with Cohen) to discover the source of The Stuff and bring the company down from the inside. What Rutherford learns is far more sinister, however: The Stuff is actually an alien organism that devours those who eat it from the inside and turns them into mindless zombies. Rutherford teams up with a marketing executive (played by Andrea Marcovicci) who helped sell The Stuff to America, and together they must spread the word and save the world from The Stuff… before it’s too late.
Until Charles Band and Full Moon began cranking out their Gingerdead Man series, to the best of my knowledge The Stuff was the only “killer dessert” movie ever made. It’s how the movie distinguished itself in its early days, as audiences asked, “Can you believe someone made a killer yogurt movie?” More than 30 years later, that particular novelty has worn off, though the movie is still remembered as something singular. It’s no longer the “killer dessert” movie; it is merely The Stuff, and there are not many other movies quite like it.
Well, there are and there aren’t. The Stuff is really just a ’50s sci-fi horror film updated to the ’80s, part The Blob and part Invaders From Mars (a young boy played by Scott Bloom watches helplessly as his family becomes something sinister and unrecognizable). The slimy monster obviously owes a great deal to Irvin Yeaworth’s 1958 drive-in classic, and the arrival of military forces in the third act (led by Paul Sorvino, whose daughter Mira makes an uncredited cameo) tips us off that Cohen has been heavily influenced by ’50s sci-fi. It’s one of the movie’s best qualities, and despite the silliness of the premise (of which Cohen is fully aware), the director never lets it devolve into camp, but he doesn’t take it all that seriously, either. Like a lot of Larry Cohen movies, this one has a sense of humor about itself, but plays the material with a straight face. No one sells it better than Michael Moriarty, who starts out doing one of his usual eccentric performances before turning into a generic everyman in the second half. It’s too bad, really, because this is a movie that could use Moriarty’s brand of weirdness. At least he still gets the movie’s best line: “Everybody has to eat shaving cream once in a while.”
The Stuff runs against a wall because despite having a great idea, Cohen doesn’t do a whole lot to explore it. The extent of the movie’s thematics seems to be “consumerism in the ’80s, am-I-right?” The repetitive use of fake marketing materials is amusing (the song really is catchy), but Cohen doesn’t trust his audience to get what he’s going for and has to bring in a sledgehammer instead of a scalpel—by the time we get the cameo from the “Where’s the Beef?” lady (“Where’s The Stuff?”), Cohen is putting a hat on top of a hat. The pace starts to drag when it ought to be peppy, almost as if there’s not enough material to fit the 90-minute runtime.
On the positive side, The Stuff retains its sense of humor throughout and the gore effects work well—they’re often crude, but in a fun way that was only really possible in the ’80s. It’s unfortunate that one of the most memorable sequences (involving the fate of a significant character) has been used in reviews and marketing for years, destroying a surprise worthy of John Carpenter’s The Thing.
The transfer on Arrow’s special edition Blu-ray of The Stuff is truly impressive—so clean and vibrant that it looks like it was made this year. There are a few scenes that fluctuate in brightness, but overall the 1080p HD transfer retains a good deal of film grain and is clean and colorful. While it’s skimpier on bonus features than other Arrow releases of late, there is at least one excellent supplement that adds value to the package: a nearly hour-long retrospective documentary carried over from Arrow’s UK release of the film called “Can’t Get Enough of The Stuff”, which features comments from Cohen, producer Paul Kurta, co-star Marcovicci, effects designer Steve Neill, and prominent genre scholar and critic Kim Newman. Also included is the original trailer, playable with optional “Trailers from Hell” commentary by Darren Lynn Bousman.
The Stuff is clunky and obvious but also inspired and entertaining—in short, it’s a Larry Cohen movie. The film deserves its cult status and Arrow’s special edition Blu-ray treatment that makes it look and sound better than ever before. It may fall closer to the middle of Cohen’s filmography, but as killer dessert movies go it’s, like, top five for sure.
Movie Score: 3/5, Disc Score: 3.5/5
Theatrical trailer via PIMannix:
Patrick lives in Chicago, where he has been writing about film since 2004. A member of the Chicago Film Critics Association and the Online Film Critics Society, Patrick's writing also appears on About.com, DVDVerdict.com and fthismovie.net, the site he runs and hosts a weekly podcast.
He has been an obsessive fan of horror and genre films his entire life, watching, re-watching and studying everything from the Universal Monsters of the '30s and '40s to the modern explosion of indie horror. Some of his favorites include Dr. Jekyll & Mr. Hyde (1931), Dawn of the Dead (1978), John Carpenter's The Thing and The Funhouse. He is a lover of Tobe Hooper and his favorite Halloween film is part 4. He knows how you feel about that. He has a great wife and two cool kids, who he hopes to raise as horror nerds.
Daily Dead's Official Podcast! Daily Dead's Official Podcast!
