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THE STUFF
Rating:  ½
USA. 1985.
Director/Screenplay – Larry Cohen, Producer – Paul Kurta, Photography – Paul Glickman, Music – Anthony Guefen, Stuff Advertising Jingles – Richard Seaman, Visual Effects – David Allen, Jim Danforth Effects Associates, Jim Doyle Theatrical Engines, Dreamquest Images, Paul Gentry, John Lambert & David Stipes, Makeup Effects – Ed French, Mike Maddi, Steve Neill & Rick Stratton, Art Direction – Marlene Marta & George Stoll. Production Company – Larco/New World.
Cast:
Michael Moriarty (David ‘Moe’ Rutherford), Andrea Marcovicci (Nicole Kendall), Paul Sorvino (Colonel Malcolm Spears), Scott Bloom (Jason), Garrett Morris (Chocolate Chip Charlie W. Hobbs), Patrick O’Neal (Fletcher), Danny Aiello (Vickers)
Plot: Industrial espionage expert Moe Rutherford is hired by rival ice-cream companies to find out what the latest top-selling fast food dessert on the market known as The Stuff is. The Stuff has passed through FDA tests unchallenged but Moe soon finds that those involved have mysteriously vanished. As Moe investigates, he discovers that The Stuff is really sentient and alive and takes over the bodies of those who eat it.
Larry Cohen, one-man auteur of such films as It’s Alive (1974) and sequels and Q – The Winged Serpent (1982), is one of the most creative talents operating in the low budget field. Indeed the low-budget field is one that Cohen seems to prefer operating in, having resisted all offers to go up-market. The Stuff, one of the less popular works among Cohen’s legion of admirers, is his take on Invasion of the Body Snatchers (1956) – that is Invasion of the Body Snatchers as filtered through a satire on the fast-food franchise merchandising. And the result is a small scale but consistently excellent film.
Cohen conjures a sense of creepy paranoia, especially during the scenes where Scott Bloom’s family start smiling pleasantly at him like a perfect American tv nuclear family while insisting that he eat The Stuff. There are some unique effects with the Stuff crawling out of windows, being vomited up by people and dogs, of Michael Moriarty and Andrew Marcovicci hopping between metal tubs floating in a whole roomful of Stuff, and a wholly remarkable scene where Moriarty and Marcovicci go to sleep in a hotel room where the pillow and then the entire mattress comes alive, blasting forth Stuff. As with all of Cohen’s films there is an eccentric wit to it – Cohen, for example, has his seventh cavalry played by a right-wing militia group, and there is the wonderfully amusing image of them in camouflage gear and armed with machine-guns travelling through the streets in a cordon of taxis. The parodies of tv commercials are sharp and wittily on the ball. One of the great joys of several Cohen films was the presence of Michael Moriarty. Here Moriarty plays to the gallery with a lazy Texan accent that contains a deceptively clever brilliance. There is, as has been accused by some critics, a certain hurriedness and unfinishedness to some of the scenes as though Cohen were operating on a budget that was running out. However this is a case that has been overstated and the film is by no means a jumbled one at all.
Larry Cohen’s other genre films are:– the killer mutant baby film It’s Alive (1974), the bizarre alien messiah film Demon/God Told Me To (1977), It Lives Again/It’s Alive (1978), the werewolf comedy Full Moon High (1982), the monster movie Q – The Winged Serpent (1982), It’s Alive III: Island of the Alive (1974), A Return to Salem’s Lot (1987), the witch comedy The Wicked Stepmother (1989) and the mad scientist film The Ambulance (1990). Cohen appears to have dropped out from directing low-budget genre films from the 1990s onwards and mostly now writes screenplays. Cohen’s other genre scripts include the psycho-thriller Daddy’s Gone A-Hunting (1969), the psycho artist film Scream, Baby, Scream (1970), the deformed psycho cop film Maniac Cop (1988) and its sequels Maniac Cop II (1990) and Maniac Cop 3: Badge of Silence (1992) (all three of which Cohen also produced), the original story for Abel Ferrara’s Body Snatchers (1993) remake, the stalker film The Ex (1996), Uncle Sam (1997) about a patriotically minded undead Gulf War veteran, the hilarious psycho sperm donor film Misbegotten (1997) and the big-budget psycho-thriller Phone Booth (2002).
Copyright Richard Scheib 1993
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