Is it a comedy? Is it a horror movie? Is it satirical criticism of rampant Eighties consumerism and fad dieting? Is it an environmental cautionary tale of Earthy revenge because people trash the planet? It is all of these things, it is Larry Cohen’s THE STUFF!
“Are you eating it or is it eating you?”
A few years after Larry Cohen (vale, god rest his schlocky soul) directed Mike Moriarty and David Carradine in the quirky, fun monster flick Q – The Winged Serpent, Mike and Larry teamed up again to deliver The Stuff. The film is a special kind of trashy and charming; with everyone involved delivering over the top performances, ridiculously effective improv and gorgeously bad (but good) special effects.
Basic premise: a tasty bacterial substance oozes from the ground and the highly addictive, sweet yogurt… stuff is quickly packaged and mass marketed to an eager, greedy public. However, it is alive, it is hungry and it is eating you from the inside out before expelling itself on the world with one mission: world domination. Or perhaps, destruction?
Anecdotes surrounding the making of the film are the stuff of legend and a comedy of Hollywood bad luck. From creative differences between Cohen and New World Pictures to Mike Moriarty frequently improvising his lines and confusing co-stars. A boat or two may have tried sinking in the middle of shooting and teamsters threatened to kill the non-union shoot; all while Cohen cheekily shot scenes in their own office building. Just a typical, seat of your pants Cohen movie making experience.
Bad luck continued to ooze and the film flopped on release, for a number of reasons. New World marketed the film as a vanilla horror movie, which it is not. The film also opened in New York during a freaking hurricane!
During production, Cohen shot a number of Stuff adverts and faux marketing material for cutting in between scenes during the movie – something Paul Verhoeven would later popularize with his in-universe media breaks during 1987’s Robocop. However, New World didn’t like this idea and forced them out of final cut. Not wasteful, Cohen had the idea that this material be used to promote the movie, which New World also hated. In an alternate universe, this could have been the earliest viral marketing campaign.
While riding on a low budget, approximately $1.7 million, the number of practical effect solutions employed by Cohen and the visual effects team is impressive. Cohen re-used the same room rotating rig that Wes Craven used to create the nightmare-inducing murder of Tina Gray in A Nightmare on Elm Street, for a scene of the stuff blasting a hapless redneck up a motel room wall and across the ceiling. Creating the various demise of “stuffies”, freaky and sinister people under the influence of killer yogurt, resulted in some spectacularly gross, stomach-churning makeup effects.
The charm of The Stuff really lives within the performances. One of the standout characters is Chocolate Chip Charlie (Garrett Morris), a slapstick buddy figure who literally falls to pieces after losing his company under the weight of Stuff popularity. The film also features unlikely appearances by Paul (and Mira) Sorvino and Danny Aiello, friendly acquaintances of Cohen who he convinced to appear in the film. Scott Bloom plays the paranoid Jason and Cohen capitalized on young Scott’s hypnotic, ethereal gaze with many close-up shots of his eyes. Mike Moriarty cannot get enough praise with what he did with his portrayal of Mo Rutherford, an ex FBI agent turned mercenary industrial espionage specialist. Mo, hired by desperate, competing confectionery company executives to discover what the stuff is and where it comes from, gets a seminal line in his opening scene while talking to an exec:
(Exec) “You’re not as dumb as you appear to be”,
(Mo) “No one is as dumb, as I appear to be”.
Or, between the lines, ‘No one is as dumb as I want them to think I am’.
The Stuff is currently streaming on Amazon Prime. If you enjoy fantastic, imaginative genre films with that authentic Eighties flair, you need to take a Friday night with some friends and booze and get a load of The Stuff. Because enough is never enough.
LUKE HARRIS
