Man, I almost wasn’t ready to move on after that craziness…
But move on we must, sliding in to our penultimate Nightmare Fuel offering, a return to director Larry Cohen’s oeuvre (which also includes last year’s entry It’s Alive (well, he’s credited with writing the remake of the film he directed decades prior), and a few things we’ll be seeing next year, hint hint) with The Stuff.
I just love that poster, don’t you?
Anyway, the story revolves around the newest food craze sweeping the country (and soon the world!), The Stuff. Discovered strangely bubbling from underneath the ground, it’s quickly seized upon by business moguls, who market The Stuff as sweet and filling and possessing no calories. One can imagine why this Stuff would spread like wildfire in the US, yeah? Hired to figure out what The Stuff is and what makes it so damned addictive, an industrial saboteur learns the shocking truth: The Stuff is, in actuality, a living organism that feeds off of its apparent human predators from the inside, able to use their hosts as essentially zombie slaves until there’s nothing left within. So, just slightly better than the food at Arby’s (at least this stuff has zero calories!). The saboteur teams up with an advertising executive (who in the ‘80s wasn’t working in advertising?) and a little boy, the latter of which had already determined The Stuff’s sinister nature, to get to the core of the distribution operation and rid the world of The Stuff before humanity suffers a grim fate.
Cohen wastes exactly no time in getting things going and establishing the clear, overarching theme of the film: corporate greed is killing us by stuffing junk food down our throats and manipulating us with glossy ad campaigns. It’s in no way subtle, but it’s a commentary that has plenty of merit. Just as in real life, the film goes to great lengths to show just how doggedly corporate interests will latch onto a successful and popular product and squeeze every last red cent from the populace’s collective coffers, even if said product is actually detrimental to our health. On the other side of that token, the populace is more than happy to cooperate in these efforts, ‘cause we just like shit that tastes good (especially if there are no calories involved), and we don’t care if we’re being taken advantage of by corporate fat-cats that only want to bilk us out of our hard-earned clams, nor if said fat-cats are uninterested in the damage they cause in the process of said bilking. And then, once we get it in our thick skulls (mine included, don’t you worry none there) that a given brand or product is good, we’re more than happy to follow it around, zombie-like, and defend its existence from any would-be assailants. Dammit, the Chipotle is just too damn delicious! I can’t help myself!
Everything about the film seems to work very well, from the acting to the awesome range of visual effects (once you see that Pinscher open wide as though firing its laser, you’ll be just as hooked as I was) that may just have you questioning yourself when you go to take another bite of ice cream or yogurt or what-have-you. The commentary is spot-on, the story flows quickly and naturally through its constituent events, and it’s just a general good time. Definitely give The Stuff a try, ‘cause, hey, it actually is zero calories! What’s there to lose?
Allusions of Grandeur 