Oh, it's not the same white Cool Whip-looking dessert that starts bubbling out of the earth in the horror comedy I watched on Wednesday night, leading those who discover it to think that they can/should put it on the supermarket shelves for mass consumption. Our Stuff is a little different than that.
Early on in our marriage, when my wife and I started to establish a regular shopping list every time we went to the grocery store, she would often ask for a bubbly water with a hint of lime that she liked to drink with dinner. On one particular occasion, she could not think of what to call it so she said something like, "You know, that stuff I drink."
For whatever reason, the name stuck. Now it is shorthand between us. When she wants this bubbly water, she just says she need some Stuff.
I don't think we'd capitalize it, but it's not something I ever usually have to write out. In fact, I'm capitalizing it primarily because the horror comedy I watched on Wednesday is called The Stuff. It's from 1985 and was written and directed by Larry Cohen.
Among the movies I've watched so far in October, this is clearly the farthest to the comedy side of the horror-comedy spectrum I'm exploring. One dead giveaway is that it co-stars former Saturday Night Live comic Garrett Morris, though he disappears from the narrative for entirely too long. (In fact, you'd say that they forgot about him except that he does reappear in the final scene.) Another is that it has a number of openly absurd moments, especially involving the military in the climax, that cannot be interpreted as anything other than comedy.
From a filmmaking perspective, though, it's pretty shoddy -- poorly edited, poorly directed, and generally poorly acted, despite the presence of big names like Morris, Michael Moriarty, Danny Aiello and Paul Sorvino.
I should tell you a little more about this Stuff than what I shared in the opening of this piece.
With zero preamble -- literally from 0:00:01 on the clock, the story has started -- we see a couple of old geezers on a work site in the snow. One discovers a white substance bubbling out of the ground, and as you do, he tastes it. The other walks up and thinks he's eating snow, but instead he's eating this weird substance that no one has ever discovered, with no consideration of the fact that it could be toxic. (I think you're seeing the comedy present from the start.) Seeing, I suppose, that the first guy has not toppled over, the second one has a bite and they both immediately start dreaming of millions in their pockets.
Due to some dubious paying off of testers at the Food and Drug Administration, the product is soon flying off the supermarket shelves and filling up the refrigerators of every home in America. (There are a number of time leaps in this movie that are handled very awkwardly in the editing.) Sensing that it is losing a significant portion of the dessert market, Big Ice Cream hires Moriarty's character, Mo Rutherford, a shady former FBI agent who will try to infiltrate The Stuff and figure out what it is made of so they can make a competing project. Of course, no one knows what it is actually made of, only that it is addictive as hell ... and eventually starts having unanticipated consequences for those who consume it.
What are these consequences? Well this is where the horror comedy gets really fun. Not nearly enough times in the story, we see a character's mouth open wide beyond normal human means, as seen in the poster above, and extrude a big oozing avalanche of that marshmellowy foam, often destroying the body on the way out. We first see this with a dog who is fed The Stuff. Why this doesn't seem to happen more often, and only on certain people/animals, is never really explained. Given the success of this product, we'd expect it to affect millions of people, but (spoiler alert) the final death toll is only reported in the thousands.
The slipshod way this film is thrown together is part of the fun. We can tell that everyone is on the joke, but I still think the script and the execution of this material could have been better. (I was going to say "tighter," but the movie is only 87 minutes long, so I guess that's pretty tight.) I had to demerit the film for its poor filmmaking, so I gave it only 2.5 stars on Letterboxd. I did have fun with it though.
And indeed, it was great to see the practical effects used during the film's too-few real horror scenes where the effects of The Stuff on the body are depicted. Between this and last Friday's Society, I'm more than making up for missing out on the practical effects in Peter Jackson's Dead Alive, which I don't expect to be able to find this month.
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