2/10/09: The Stuff (1985)
In case you can’t read the copy on the poster above, here it is:
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.Now let’s talk about buyer’s remorse.
Everybody’s been sold on The Stuff. It’s a fabulous new dessert that tastes good and is good for you. You can buy it in grocery stores, or at Stuff stands that are doing booming business at 2:30 in the morning. The ice-cream industry is awfully nervous, and they hire industrial spy Mo Rutherford (Michael Moriarty) to find out what the FDA was actually approving when The Stuff was okayed on the fast track.
Rutherford will eventually figure out that he’s in writer/director Larry Cohen’s clever take on
Invasion of the Body Snatchers. All those people are consuming a tasty treat that eventually consumes their minds and guts, while leaving them as hollow folks who solely exist to talk about how everybody should be eating more Stuff. One of the first to figure this out is a kid named Jason, who catches The Stuff writhing around in the family fridge late at night.
It won’t be long before Jason’s family is trying to force-feed him The Stuff, while telling him there’s nothing wrong with his dessert being alive. Lots of food is made up of things like bacteria. “They’re good for us,” explains his dad. “They kill the bad things inside us.”
There are still sad Leftists who insist that the original
Invasion of the Body Snatchers was an attack on McCarthyism. Thankfully, the film’s director soundly disproved that theory. There may have been some good liberal takes on the story since then, but nothing memorable.
The Stuff avoids what could have been some lazy pandering in this retelling. The main consumers never end up as stereotypes. Cohen also manages to be his usual daring self when it comes to plotting an exploitation film. We watched
The Stuff in theaters on its initial release, when it was already shocking to see Rutherford relying on a local militia to save the day.
At this point in the film, Rutherford has gone down South—played in the film by upstate New York. He’s hooked up with Jason and found the main Stuff factory. Now he needs to shut it down. Fortunately, they’re near the rural castle keep of Colonel Malcolm Spears (played by a drawling Paul Sorvino).
Rutherford has never met Spears, but—as the former FBI agent explains to the freelance military man—he “once worked for a man named Hoover.” That was back when Rutherford bugged the apartment that Spears was keeping for a “17-year-old black chick.” But that’s cool. Rutherford needs Spears now. As he explains, America needs Spears:
You were worried about the Commies putting fluoride in our water system? Now, you know, there’s a thing going on that’s a lot worse. Americans are being poisoned faster and quicker than you can imagine. The FBI, you know, they always worried about Commies getting those deep cover agents and putting them in high positions in American industry, and they’d acquire a corporation, right, and then they’d establish themselves and work from the inside, and get into our insides…Spears interrupts him: “Sounds like one of my radio speeches a year ago last Thanksgiving.”
Spears’ men do an excellent job of raiding the factory, while the soundtrack plays a variation of the
A-Team theme. Spears also finds time to bond with Jason. The budding friendship includes this charming exchange, after Jason suggests that the Stuff employees may not be armed:
“It doesn’t matter if they are armed. There’s no match for the American boy. We have never lost a war.”
“What about ’Nam, sir?”
“We lost that war at home, sonny.”
Jason will be a steely-eyed warrior by the end of the film. Spears keeps looking good, too. He’s happy to hit on Rutherford’s love interest. (“We won’t worry about that, son,” he assures a protesting Mo. “You’ll probably be a casualty.”) He’s a good businessman who owns some Atlanta radio stations. That’ll help to get the word out to his fellow countrymen. Spears also respects his fellow capitalists. He insults a taxi driver who’s slow to load his men into a convoy of cabs, but Spears makes sure the cabbies get a 10% tip. (“Get a receipt,” he orders his troops.)
There’s one creepy moment where Spears doesn’t trust a black guy. That would be cookie magnate “Chocolate Chip” Charlie W. Hobbs, who’s been helping Rutherford look into The Stuff. Even then, that expected moment doesn’t go as expected.
We should note that
The Stuff is a lot more fun than it is polished. Like many of his films, Cohen made this one on the cheap. That’s particularly regretful when the film tries to become a special-effects extravaganza. This is one of those drive-in classics that really could stand a big-budget remake—except that nobody would be brave enough to make the film that Larry Cohen made in 1985.
Make it your own: There used to be some cheap public-domain copies of
The Stuff floating around, but Anchor Bay did a fine job with a
legitimate DVD release—including a fun Larry Cohen commentary. You’ll learn that Mira Sorvino is one of the dead bodies at the Stuff factory, and that Colonel Spears represents the “outermost lunatic fringe.” It’s also good to know that Mo Rutherford is a variation on Rip Torn’s character in
The Private Files of J. Edgar Hoover.
