The Stuff (1985) is a new dessert food that is sweeping the nation, and leads the ice cream companies to hire an industrial spy (Michael Moriarty) to uncover just what it's made of. It turns out its all natural ingredients come in the form of a living organism which is actually doing the consuming.
Larry Cohen has made a number of offbeat, satirical, genre movies from It's Alive (1974) to Q (1972), all of them wildly inventive and wildly uneven. The Stuff is no exception. I first saw this in a New York City movie theater during the middle of a hurricane, and really enjoyed it. I even own a prop carton of The Stuff from the movie. Tonight is the first time that I've seen it in over thirty years. It's a bit dated now, and it's low budget really shows, but it's satire of consumerism still hits home, and while the tone of the film wobbled too much on the side of comedy and not enough on horror, it was still entertaining. Michael Moriarty gives an outstanding, inspired, and oddball performance in this movie which makes it worth seeing for that alone.
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