poolandrews Review of The Stuff

The Stuff (1985)

Another inventive fun little horror film from Larry Cohen.

[7/10 · 8 November 2004]

The film opens on a dark night with an employee of a mine discovering a white substance bubbling up from a hole in the ground. He dips his fingers in it and tastes a bit, and then tastes some more. A fellow work colleague walks over, tastes some and is also immediately addicted to the stuff! They decide to market it and sell it as some kind of desert. A young boy Jason (Scott Bloom) can't sleep, he gets up and goes downstairs for something to eat. As he opens the fridge he sees a carton of the stuff on it's side with the lid off, and next to it is a dollop of the stuff but he is shocked to see it's moving on it's own, like it's alive! The executives at Amalgamated dairies are upset because this stuff is blowing their ice cream sales out of the water. Nobody seems to know how it's made or what's in it, but people are queueing up to buy it. They decide to hire ex FBI David Rutherford (Micheal Moriarty) to obtain the secret of the stuff by any means necessary. First of all he targets Nicole Kendall (Andrea Marcovicci) the person who designed the highly successful ad campaign for the stuff, from her agency in New York. Together they begin to discover that the stuff is a deadly living organism that takes over peoples bodies and minds. They trace the factory where the stuff is supposedly made, but they find out it's pumped into trucks straight from the ground. However, the people responsible for the stuff want to keep where their big money earning desert comes from a secret. And are prepared to kill to do so. Directed by Larry Cohen I liked it, but I didn't think it was as good as one of his earlier horror's Q-the Winged Serpent (1982). I don't really think he had the budget to do the ambitious story the way he wanted. The stuff is supposed to be taking over America, tens of millions of people, yet we see none of this, just New York and a few small towns. Also, there is only one factory producing the stuff? Even though the whole of America is addicted to it? Could one small factory produce enough to cover the whole of America? One radio broadcast is enough to turn the whole of America against the stuff? Having said that the film is still extremely enjoyable, and the script by Cohen is very good, with an interesting central premise, some sharp social satire, and remains entertaining even during it's slower moments. But there are problems, it's never properly explained why the stuff is taking over people or what it has to gain by doing so, and the character of Col. Malcolm Grommit Spears played by Paul Sorvino and his troops are a little over the top and silly. The film doesn't really contain much violence or gore and some of the effects aren't that great, especially the effects of the factory blowing up at the end, obviously just models, once again the budget probably didn't help. But the scene toward the end when a character vomits up a load of the stuff, and his head splits open is quite gross. There are some creepy moments in there too, I liked the sequence where Jason is trapped in the back of a tanker which is slowly being filled with the stuff, it slowly moves towards him with no apparent way out. All in all a great little horror film that is consistently entertaining and certainly worth a watch.