The Stuff

Joe Dante just circulated a new  The Quietus article on the maverick director Larry Cohen, who has been gone five years but still seems to be among us. A prolific TV writer, Cohen began directing in the 1970s, and packed his scripts with content deemed conventionally unacceptable. His films voice contrary opinions about organized religion, the medical profession, the F.B.I., the police, etc.. His exploitative stories give us killer babies, Aztec monsters, and a hermaphrodite alien horror that turns out to be God. He communicates his messages with admirable clarity, even when the context ought to be total bad taste.

Larry Cohen takes the prize for minor league independent stamina and endurance. 

If Larry Cohen couldn’t have made movies, he’d have been out picketing something. 1985’s The Stuff is his frontal assault on consumerism and unregulated industry. Every week brings a report of some food or drug recall. Accidents happen but the profit motive blurs the boundaries between good faith and reckless endangerment; who knows what will happen if the Federal Government abolishes industry regulation altogether?  In one sense Cohen’s  It’s Alive feels like a sidesways comment on Thalidomide — the horrors of that drug are worse than what Cohen imagined. This later thriller is at least partly a tongue-in-cheek comedy.

The Sci-fi horror conspiracy thriller The Stuff proposes that a popular yogurt-like dessert has been packaged, marketed and sold to Americans without anybody finding out that it’s (a) addictive, (b) makes you into a Pod Person-like minion of the Stuff Consciousness, and (c) kills you the moment your usefulness is finished. Our leading character is the corporate dirty tricks specialist Mo Rutherford (Michael Moriarty of Cohen’s  Q The Winged Serpent). A rival corporation hires him to steal the formula for The Stuff. Looking for a way in, Mo discovers that most of the original developers of the product, scientists and marketers, are dead or missing. Everybody at the FDA who should know about it is dead as well. On the road, Mo meets ‘Chocolate Chip’ Charlie Hobbs (Garrett Morris), a cookie franchise entrepreneur whose empire was bought out from under him by the corporation behind The Stuff. Mo enlists the aid of advertising whiz Nicole (Andrea Marcovicci), who helped sell The Stuff to the world with sex-oriented tag lines like, “Enough is never enough.” Nicole has no idea where The Stuff came from.

An ongoing sidebar story gives us young Jason (Scott Bloom), a kid convinced that his family’s fridge packed with containers of The Stuff is bad news. Jason swears he’s seen the white substance move of its own will, yet his parents and brother gobbit it up night and day. They pressure Jason to eat it too, but he rebels and destroys large displays of the product in his local supermarket. Meanwhile, nationwide demand for The Stuff is so great that stores can’t get enough of it. Mo and Nicole trace the distribution network to a single location in the South … and discover that the truth is much more horrible than they thought.

Larry Cohen is in fast and efficient storytelling form in what was to be his last important feature. The makers of The Stuff get to keep its contents as a proprietary secret, just as the Coca-Cola Company protects its own formula. Mo’s investigation follows the pattern familiar from conspiracy-oriented 1950s Sci-fi movies. The proven fact is that businesses of all sizes routinely sidestep environmental laws. Car companies lie about emissions and mileage, tobacco companies use additives to make their cigarettes more addictive, and oil companies make economic contingency plans to mitigate the business damage of massive oil spills. When caught, they then spend millions on public image repair, and lobby for less regulation.

The Stuff may be Sci-fi about a blob monster that eats you from within, but it is also a focused satire on the unsustainability of a consumer culture geared to profits. The satire isn’t as sharp and accurate as, say,  Network, as the fact that Americans will eat any mystery food put before them is not big news. Yet the movie communicates its point well — who would sit through a docu about evil food additives?

I give Cohen’s achievement in The Stuff a B+. His filmmaking skill is better than ever, but his script stretches for one parody too many. Paul Sorvino enters in the last act to lead a paranoid private army, an unwelcome lampoon of armed right-wing loonies. Real militia are out there, and they are neither harmless nor amusing. We don’t fault Sorvino’s commander Malcolm Grommet Spears, though … the fine actor nails the role.

The other somewhat weak link are the special effects, which are outrageous and gross, but seldom as compelling/convincing as they need to be. Various rubber faces look like Halloween masks. The sight of people vomiting white goop doesn’t do much for us either. The giant Garrett Morris head is just too cartoonish, as are most of the “I didn’t think a person could open their mouth that wide” effects seemingly inspired by John Carpenter’s  The Thing.

The best effects shots show the blob-like Stuff oozing through convincing miniature settings.  ^*  Other excellent illusions make it look as if the Stuff has ‘hollowed out’ the people that have eaten it. That process isn’t fully explained. The Stuff itself is just various white substances that aren’t very interesting. Although better than the soapsuds monster in the vintage Sci-fi thriller  The Unknown Terror, the creamy white goop doesn’t really inspire fear or revulsion.

Michael Moriarty is fun to watch doing his Southern swagger as Mo Rutherford, with his jokey intro explaining that the ‘Mo’ means, “more money.”  Mo has so much fun intimidating and insulting the corporate suits that overpay him, that we wonder if Cohen was channeling his experience as a Hollywood writer-for-hire. Even though Moriarty proves to be a good guy, at least until the next crooked job offer comes along, he’s not very likeable. Not helping is Andrea Marcovicci’s advertising consultant, who is bright and attractive but not used particularly well. . We never get a good reason why Nicole is tagging along. Because she’s charmed by Mo Rutherford, we have little respect for her.

The real star of the show is Scott Bloom as the altruistic young Jason. Bloom communicates levels of doubt about that white gook in the refrigerator. With his parents transformed into zombies, Jason endures the same nightmare as David MacLean in  Invaders from Mars. The Invaders  remake could have used a child actor as skilled as Bloom.

The supporting cast is packed with well-known names, but in tiny, forgettable parts: Rutanya Alda, Laurene Landon, Tammy Grimes, Alexander Scourby, Harry Bellaver, Clara Peller, Patrick Dempsey, Mira Sorvino, Eric Bogosian. Elsewhere Cohen’s casting is hit & miss. We can tell that Danny Aiello, Patrick O’Neal and others have been hired for very limited scenes. Garrett Morris is directed to play as if the show is a very broad comedy. Audiences surely approved of cameos by the likes of Brooke Adams and the late Abe Vigoda; but nowadays one must explain the relevance of  Clara Peller and her line, “Where’s the Stuff?” which stands in for “Where’s the Beef?”

The story is of course derivative, and Larry Cohen references several Sci-fi classics. Jason’s family hs been converted into brainless consumers, happy-faced kin of the Pod People of Don Siegel’s  Invasion of the Body Snatchers. Cohen’s story arc with the military closely follows Nigel Kneale and Val Guest’s superb  Quatermass 2 . The conspiracy of The Stuff has indeed infiltrated both government and industry. Like Professor Quatermass, Mo Rutherford disguises himself as a zombie worker to infiltrate, and then attack a giant industrial plant. The setup is identical to the Hammer film, where the cover story is that the plant is manufacturing synthetic food. Conspiracy-savvy viewers need no further prompting.

(Important spoiler)  Jimmy Sangster’s  X The Unknown comes into play as well, when it is revealed that the Stuff isn’t manufactured at all, but collected from an underground source. It came up out of the earth on its own, and is ready to eat. In one of his interview bites, Cohen explains that The Stuff is more or less identical to X The Unknown’s radioactive glop, a living entity from deep below. It has chosen this time to protect Mother Earth by wiping out mankind. Starting with the first guy (Harry Bellaver) who tasted it, the subterranean intelligence has been possessing everybody who eats it, and perhaps changing their physical insides too.

An amorphous substance that invades people and transforms their consciousness?  That sounds like Philip K. Dick’s mind-bending book  The Three Stigmata of Palmer Eldritch.  Is each drop of The Stuff an independent alien creature, as in Carpenter’s The Thing?  Or is it a communal-intelligence monster with a trillion tiny units, as in Quatermass 2?

Cohen has always made use of a wicked sense of humor, but The Stuff’s broad satire is a departure from his usual straightforward approach. We see clever TV spots for The Stuff that incorporate jingles and dancing. Cohen even gets a stab in against the War on Drugs … the profit motive is so central to human behavior, that black marketers will continue its distribution on a smaller scale. Two years later,  Edward Neumeier and Michael Miner would make the media news interface an important window to a dystopian future, pushing Sci-fi satire to a higher level of topical relevance.