Directed & written by: Larry Cohen
Starring: Michael Moriarty, Andrea Marcovicci, Garrett Morris, Paul Sorvino, Scott Bloom, Danny Aiello, Patrick O’Neal
Music by: Anthony Guefen
Taglines: “Are you eating it …or is it eating you?”
“It’ll change your life forever.”
“WARNING! If you see The Stuff in stores… call the police. If you have it in your home… don’t touch it…get out. The Stuff is a product of nature… a deadly living organism. It is addictive and destructive. It can overcome your mind and take over your body… and nothing can stop it.”
“It’s smooth and creamy. It’s low calorie and delicious. And it kills. It’s The Stuff!”
“Enough Is Never Enough”
STORY
A miner comes across a strange white goop bubbling out of the ground. Naturally, his first instinct is to taste it (!) and he finds it to be incredibly tasty and addictive. Flash forward a few months, and the same white goop is being marketed as “The Stuff”. It’s incredibly successful and competing companies want the recipe. Having failed at all normal attempts to analyse it, they hire an industrial spy (Moriarty) to investigate and find out the secret behind its success, ultimately with the help of a crazed general, an advertsing director and the head of a rival company who lost his business to The Stuff.
Meanwhile, Jason is the youngest child in a fairly normal suburban family. They’ve taken up the craze for eating The Stuff, but Jason is suspicious and refuses to try it. His suspicions seem to be confirmed when he opens the fridge one night to see The Stuff crawling around outside of its container. Naturally nobody believes him, especially since his first reaction is to try to destroy a supermarket’s display of The Stuff.
Between them, the two characters come to the same realisation – The Stuff is a destructive alien force with a mind of its own. First it controls your mind, then it destroys your body…
OPINION
This is a difficult movie for me to review objectively, simply because the poster used to scare the crap out of me as a kid. I used to pass by a particular video store on the way to cub scout meetings, and they’d always have some kind of horror poster in the window. I was always fascinated by these – Day Of The Dead and A Nightmare On Elm Street 2: Freddy’s Revenge were two particular favourites of mind. But, for some reason The Stuff’s poster really got to me. The back of the video case (above, the front was the same poster that creeped me out) was no different – what the hell was happening in the bottom left? – and the trailer also terrified me.
So, when I finally got around to watching the movie many years later, the feeling was of inevitable disappointment. Instead of the journey into ultimate terror I had imagined, what we get is an uneven spoof of consumerist culture combined with a kind of melding of The Blob and Invasion Of The Body Snatchers. Had I known the name Larry Cohen as well then as I do now, I wouldn’t have been surprised, but the feeling of bitter disappointment put me off revisiting the movie until very recently.
Now that I watch it with more educated eyes, I can see a fairly typical Cohen outing. His regular lead, Michael Moriarty, plays the role with a kind of tongue-in-cheek attitude (including a terrible southern accent). The uneven script lurches between the major characters, and seems to throw in certain gore sequences almost at random. The effects are pretty good considering the time and budget, but they’re inevitable nowhere near as impressive as those for the remake of The Blob a couple of years later. Amusingly, relatively respected character actors Danny Aiello and Paul Sovino have short roles here.
Overall, not a bad movie but one that you have to approach with the right frame of mind.
TRAILERS
CENSORSHIP
There’s not really a problem with censorship as such, but there is supposedly up to 30 minutes of film including special effect sequences that ended up on the cutting room floor. Hopefully, these will surface one day, but I do wonder if the choppily edited feel that dogged the movie a little for me is due to the removal of this footage…
Rating: 
