Let’s clear up a common misconception. Unlike The Blob, ‘The Stuff’ doesn’t eat you. You Eat It … and then it eats you!  Larry Cohen takes a page from Professor Quatermass for this satirical slap at blind consumerism and unregulated commerce, in a thriller packed with ooky glob-monsters and people hollowed out like Halloween pumpkins. It’s the smart side of ’80s Sci-fi: Cohen finds the genre perfect for transmitting his anti-establishment themes. Arrow’s 4K package contains an early version of the film in HD, that’s a half-hour longer.

The Stuff 4K
4K Ultra HD
Arrow Video
1985 / Color / 1:85 widescreen / 87 min. / Street Date July 22, 2025 / Available from Arrow Video / 49.95
Starring Michael Moriarty, Andrea Marcovicci, Garrett Morris, Paul Sorvino, Scott Bloom, Danny Aiello, Patrick O’Neal, Alexander Scourby, Harry Bellaver, Rutanya Alda, Brooke Adams, Laurene Landon, Tammy Grimes, Abe Vigoda, Clara Peller, Patrick Dempsey, Mira Sorvino, Eric Bogosian.
Cinematography Paul Glickman
Makeup Effects Ed French, Michael Maddi, Steve Neill, Kim Robinson, Rick Stratton, Craig Lyman
Editor Armond Lebowitz
Original Music Anthony Guefen
Produced by Paul Kurta
Written and Directed by Larry Cohen

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.

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.

Arrow Video’s 4K Ultra HD of The Stuff would at first seem to be a 4K upgrade of a restoration done two years ago, but only released in Blu-ray. Arrow’s text explains that this disc is actually a new 4K restoration. The company’s HD release from 2016 had one extended making-of documentary, and the 2023 Blu added a commentary with Larry Cohen and Darren Bousman. Disc producer Michael Mackenzie outfits this new Limited Edition 2-disc 4K set with a wide assortment of extras. There is no parallel Blu-ray encoding of the new restoration, as is the drill now with several companies.

The new 4K disc improves on the previous transfers most through the added impact of 4K’s HDR with the wider range of contrast. TAs noted before, Cohen managed to give his modestly-budgeted show an expensive look, now augmented with the more attractive format. One sequence sees Mo, Nicole and Jason traveling by Lear Jet. Cohen gets in some good action with those large tanker trucks transporting our favorite chilled dessert.

The first 4K disc carries most of the video extras as well. That original making-of documentary is here, with interview input from the late director Cohen, his producer Paul Kurta, Andrea Marcovicci, effects expert Steve Neill and critic Kim Newman. Also present is the older commentary with Cohen. The newer video extras feature an interview piece with Cohen and Paul Kurta, taken from previously unseen outtakes for the 2017 documentary King Cohen. Also present is Calum Waddell’s feature-length documentary on NYC’s 42nd Street grindhouses, that gathers interviews from scores of directors, including Cohen.

The second Blu-ray disc carries an item of special interest for Cohen fans, a pre-release feature cut of The Stuff that’s quite different. It is 119 minutes in duration, 32 minutes longer than the final theatrical version. The image is pretty clean, although it can’t compare with the main feature’s 4K scan. Even if it’s slower and out of shape, it is something we’ll want to study … just to see the choices made to bring the movie down to a commercial length.

An older insert booklet has been replaced with a 30-page pamphlet. It pairs Joel Harley’s older essay (Enough is Never Enough: Food, Cult Horror) with another by Daniel Burnett (Flavor of the Month: Consumerism and Reagan’s America).

Reviewed by Glenn Erickson

The Stuff
4K Ultra HD rates:
Movie: Very Good +
Video: Excellent
Sound: Excellent Original lossless English 1.0 mono audio
Supplements:
4K Disc 1:
New audio commentary by writers and critics David Flint and Adrian Smith
Archival audio commentary by writer/director Larry Cohen
Can’t Get Enough of The Stuff: Making Larry Cohen’s Classic Creature Feature, a documentary featuring Larry Cohen, producer Paul Kurta, actress Andrea Marcovicci, mechanical makeup effects artist Steve Neill and critic Kim Newman
New featurette Enough is Never Enough featuring interviews with Larry Cohen and producer Paul Kurta
Feature-length documentary 42nd Street Memories: The Rise and Fall of America’s Most Notorious Street
Trailers and TV spots, Image gallery
HD Blu-ray disc 2:
HD presentation of a Pre-Release version of The Stuff, with additional footage and different music, remastered by Arrow Films
Illustrated collector’s booklet featuring writing on the film by Joel Harley and a new essay by Daniel Burnett.
Deaf and Hearing-impaired Friendly? YES; Subtitles: English (feature only)
Packaging: One 4K Ultra HD in Keep case
Reviewed: July 4, 2025
(7353stuf)

^*  I was once a regular visitor to the effects shop Dreamquest, where I saw some of the excellent miniatures, and a screening of the successful miniature shot of a gush of Stuff smashing through a brick wall. Ted Rae may have engineered part of that; the miniature concrete blocks are beautifully detailed. It’s too bad that a weak optical composite to add live action people harms the shot. Another gag made possible by a rotating room just looks like what it is — it’s spectacular, but obvious. At least Larry Cohen planned for his effects properly this time out. The elaborate stop-motion in Q The Winged Serpent had to be concocted almost completely in post production, with very little money.

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