Larry Cohen serves up some killer gelato in The Stuff
Having spent an entire week away from the flood-drenched wasteland of downtown Calgary I returned home to the welcome sight of my undamaged apartment. The sight as I say was welcome but the smell was not as seven days without electricity had turned my refrigerator into a lair of stink-demons. It’s really a pity that I used up my “killer fridge” topic a few weeks ago because it’s grotesquely relevant now.
Surely there is some other movie about horrors that wait for us behind the magnet-adorned door of a normal-looking refrigerator? Indeed there is. Many in fact but this week we’ll be looking at cult director Larry Cohen’s The Stuff (1985) an oddball corporate satire/horror film about killer yogurt. It’s pretty bad but it’s also kind of fascinating.
So there’s this creamy white goo that seeps up out of the ground. It tastes delicious so a company puts it into little containers and markets it as a trendy new low-calorie dessert treat. The Stuff (for that is the name that the goo is marketed under) becomes a sensation outselling all other varieties of snack foods. Little do the consumers realize that The Stuff is a malevolent living organism that gradually takes over the minds of the people who eat it eventually eroding the human host from within and bursting out of the victim’s skin like a butterfly emerging from a chrysalis.
Wait wait wait… back up for a minute. If this stuff just bubbles up out of the earth then how do we know it’s delicious? Well some guy just sees it on the ground sticks his hands into it and tastes it. Mmmmm! Then he offers it to his buddies and after about two seconds of understandable hesitation they try it and agree that they’ve found something special. The next thing you know it’s being advertised on TV. That’s insane! “Hey look a jizzy oil slick!” Munch munch… .“Wow that is delish! Get that heavy earth-moving equipment over here — we’re gonna put Ben & Jerry’s out of business!”
Meanwhile one brave little boy named Jason (Scott Bloom) doesn’t want to eat The Stuff because he peeked in the fridge late one night and saw it moving. But nobody will believe him! The only one who can help Jason save the day is Mo Rutherford (Michael Moriarty) the heroic corporate saboteur!
Yes this film has a corporate saboteur as the protagonist. Rival snack food companies hire Mo to get to the bottom of this “Stuff” business before it hurts cookie sales any more than it already has. Jason and Mo team up against the evil dessert which in some scenes manifests itself as a gigantic shapeless monster that grabs people’s faces sticks them to walls or erupts out of their throats.
The FDA proves to be in cahoots with the food industry and is perfectly willing to sacrifice millions of lives in order to turn a profit. In the end once it has been proven conclusively that The Stuff is an alien parasite they just change the name and reduce the Stuff content in their product to 12 per cent figuring that will keep its addictive properties without being too dangerous. Writer-director Larry Cohen was angered by the corruption he saw in the food industry and made The Stuff as a wobbly semi-coherent indictment of America’s failure to keep its own products safe for public consumption. The result may be a dumb movie but it’s a dumb movie with a message.
Now if you’ll excuse me I’ve got some Stuff-like substance to scrape out of my refrigerator.
