“You know how often it’s easier to believe lies than the truth?”
“The Stuff” was first discovered by a worker at an oil refinery in Alaska. He finds a strange white substance bubbling up from the Earth. He and another worker taste it and find that it is sweet and delicious like a dessert. The strange substance is marketed and distributed throughout the country. The product is called “The Stuff”. People begin to get addicted to it. Other companies are envious when market share of the tasty treat hurts all other dessert and snack products.
David “Mo” Rutherford (Michael Moriarty) is a former FBI agent. He is currently hiring himself out as an industrial saboteur. He is hired by a competing dessert company to find out what The Stuff is made out of and why people want it so bad. He sweet talks Nichole (Andrea Marcovicci) the woman hired to market The Stuff to find out whatever he can about the product. While he’s charming her, she’s charming him. They team up to infiltrate the company that produces the treat.
Rutherford finds out that The Stuff is highly addictive and is an actual living thing. The person who eats it is eventually overcome by the parasitic organisms inside the living substance. It takes over the brain of whoever eats it turning them into zombiesque creatures that will do whatever the organism wants.
Jason (Scott Bloom) is a boy who discovers that The Stuff is alive. He tries to warn his parents and brother but they have already been taken over by The Stuff. When he vandalizes a grocery store’s supply of The Stuff his crime is reported in the paper. Rutherford sees the article and believes the boy’s claims, having seen them himself. Rutherford rescues Jason and takes him and Nichole with him to Midland, Georgia, the place where The Stuff currently seems to be coming from. Rutherford also enlists the aid of a wacko, US Army Colonel Malcolm Spears (Paul Sorvino), to try to destroy the operation distributing The Stuff.
“The Stuff” was released in 1985 and was directed by Larry Cohen. It is not exactly a horror film but more like a satirical science fiction comedy with some horror aspects. The mislabeling of the film as just a horror movie is probably its downfall. People looking for something like “The Blob” 1958 or the intensely gross “The Thing” 1982 may be disappointed.
Michael Moriarty as, the good ol’ boy, David “Mo” Rutherford is much toned down from his “Q, The Winged Serpent” character Jimmie Quinn and that’s a good thing. In The Stuff he is sharp yet disarming. I liked him in “The Stuff” a lot more than I did in “Q”, which is also a Larry Cohen film.
The motel scene where a man is attacked and pinned to the wall and ceiling is the same special effects room used in “A Nightmare On Elm Street” 1984.
Some of the props used to represent The Stuff included Häagen Däzs ice-cream and yogurt. For a scene where volumes of Stuff was needed Cohen used props and special effects such as fire-extinguishing foam, a foam made of blended fish bones that stunk and superimposed images and animation.