“Are you eating it, or is it eating you?”
Writer/director Larry Cohen created a product so insidious, so convincingly sinister that you can half-expect to find it in the frozen food aisle.
That’s the real genius behind The Stuff. It’s not just another B-movie about killer slime, which is already a great pitch – it’s a full-blown cultural takedown, wrapped in the same glossy, hyper-sanitized marketing that kept ‘80s consumers blissfully spooning down the next fad foodstuff. “Enough is never enough of The Stuff!” – is an exactly the type of casually hypnotic jingle you’d hear on prime time wedged between Be a Pepper and Coke and a Smile.
But Cohen is doing more than making fun of advertising – he’s blow-torching the entire concept of consumer loyalty. The Stuff spreads because people can’t get enough of it. They become walking brand ambassadors, mindless and smiling, always edging towards their their next fix. It’s a very 80s take on Invasion of the Body Snatchers, and it makes perfect sense that the only people who can stop it are a sleazy corporate saboteur (Michael Moriarty, in all his laid-back, off-kilter glory), an ad exec (my old job), a conspiracy para-militia, and a kid who was savvy enough to question what his family was eating before it turned them into vacant pod people.
And then there’s the brilliantly gooey body horror – that stretching face, the hollowed-out bodies, The Stuff slithering up a wall like some unholy mix of The Blob and an exploding McDonald’s soft serve machine. Cohen wants to turn heads… and a few stomachs, to paraphrase Blackadder. Not every effect holds up, but they’re still unsettling in a way that only cheap bladder-filled latex effects can be.
Like any great cult film, The Stuff sticks to your gut. Because in the end, it’s much more than a movie about a killer dessert… It’s a movie about the way we let some brands consume us, one purchase at a time, and perhaps more pointantly, how the right amount of marketing buzz can make us ignore what’s rotting us from the inside. -Pop