The Stuff (1985)

Posted on August 4, 2013 at 10:09 am by Jeff Kuykendall

“Are you eatin’ it, or is it eatin’ you?” asks a cynical Michael Moriarty at the end of Larry Cohen’s The Stuff (1985), and that’s the plot in a conveniently-packaged cardboard carton. For his thirteenth directorial effort, Cohen, the man behind It’s Alive (1974), God Told Me To (1976), and Q: The Winged Serpent (1982), once again proved he could deliver on an absurd but irresistible premise. What if a new kind of food swept the nation, ubiquitous, filling up the aisles in grocery stores, franchising out like Krispy Kreme or TCBY at their zeniths, clogging the airwaves with flashy commercials replete with Abe Vigoda and breakdancing? What if the white, gloopy product was so addictively delicious that as soon as you taste it, you can’t stop eating it? And even though its packaging boasts that it contains no artificial ingredients, not even the distributor knows where it comes from or what it is. Thus its name: The Stuff. As its commercial jingle goes, “Enough is Never Enough” – an appealing slogan, but one that doesn’t exactly deny Moriarty’s more blunt statement. Are you eating it, or…?

A fashion shoot for a Stuff ad campaign.

Moriarty, who starred in Q and has periodically reunited with Cohen over the years, plays David “Mo” Rutherford, an industrial saboteur hired by an ice cream manufacturer to investigate The Stuff, which is wreaking havoc on the dessert industry. One exec justifies their hiring of a spy with a resigned “I suppose we do have to keep the world safe for ice cream.” The cocky, Southern-fried, smooth-talking Rutherford, an ex-FBI agent, finds some unusual allies in his quest: Nicole (Andrea Marcovicci, The Hand), an advertising whiz who branded The Stuff and falls for Rutherford’s quirky charms; Charlie Hobbs (Saturday Night Live‘s Garrett Morris), founder of the Chocolate Chip Charlie chain (a thinly-disguised parody of Famous Amos Cookies); Colonel Spears, an unhinged right-wing militant who has no trouble believing their conspiracy theories (Paul Sorvino, channeling Sterling Hayden’s Jack D. Ripper from Dr. Strangelove); and a young suburban pre-teen named Jason (Scott Bloom), who suspects The Stuff is nefarious after witnessing it moving around inside his fridge, and watches as his family gets taken over, Body Snatchers-style. As they become more insistent that he be a good boy and eat The Stuff, he finds himself taking extreme measures, such as substituting shaving cream and wincingly swallowing it down; and going on a rampage at the local grocery store to destroy its aisles and aisles of Stuff cartons.

Mo Rutherford (Michael Moriarty) and Nicole (Andrea Marcovicci) discover the source of The Stuff.

So what’s so nasty about The Stuff? The gloop has a life of its own, bubbling, frothing, and shooting at its victims, in one scene lifting a man off the ground and pinning him against the wall and ceiling. Apparently it doesn’t digest very well: those who consume it eventually find themselves controlled like puppets, and when it leaves their bodies – via a gaping, unnaturally-wide mouth, “It sort of – vacates the premises when it’s through,” as Chocolate Chip Charlie puts it. The bodies are left as dry, empty husks. The only antidote seems to be fire, which Nicole learns when The Stuff covers Mo’s face, suffocating him, and she decides to just light his face on fire to burn it off. For a low-budget New World production, The Stuff delivers some inventive special effects: in certain shots the goo seems to be defying gravity as it pours forth in all directions, evidently achieved by creating sets tilted at extreme angles. Interestingly, among those who worked on the film are two icons of stop-motion animation, Jim Danforth and David Allen, though the most memorable effects involve mechanical heads that expand grotesquely and explode. The true source is a fissure in the earth from which The Stuff comes bubbling up, and in the film’s money shot we witness a mining company surrounding a large white lake from which strange geysers rise slowly upward, like slimy fingers reaching into the air. Cohen does a nice job of stretching his budget to present a sense of scale for this semi-apocalyptic film, but most of this is achieved with his script that often plays like a 70’s political thriller, as Rutherford interviews key suspects (including FDA exec Danny Aiello, in a creepy scene with his Stuff-hungry dog) while evading gun-toting “Stuffies.”

The Stuff "vacates the premises."

As for the satire, it’s naturally woven into the narrative and the imagery. When a Stuff restaurant is destroyed, Cohen frames the shot so we can see the McDonald’s planted right next door. The grocery store where young Jason goes berserk is contaminated everywhere by Stuff products and Stuff advertising. The commercials, integral to our understanding of how pervasive the product’s reach has become, are convincingly enthusiastic and over-the-top (typical of 80’s TV ads, anyway), and Cohen even squeezes in a “Where’s the Beef?” nod (“Where’s the Stuff?”). Decades after the film’s release, in a post-globalization world with greater sensitivity and alarm about what’s lurking on our grocery store shelves, The Stuff seems even more relevant. (I see little Jason, attacking his supermarket with a baseball bat, as a budding Michael Pollan. Eat local!) The film’s great fun, but it would be a mistake to single it out as completely unique among 80’s horror films. It arrived at a time when slasher films were beginning to overstay their welcome, and directors who grew up on 50’s and 60’s horror and science fiction started to pay overt homage to their inspirations. Just as The Stuff owes much to The Blob (1958) and Invasion of the Body Snatchers (1956), Cohen was not alone in looking backward. Tom Holland’s superb, nostalgic Fright Night was released the same year. John Landis had given us his spin on The Wolf Man with An American Werewolf in London (1981); Tobe Hooper paid tribute to Hammer with Lifeforce (1985), and would soon be remaking Invaders from Mars (1986); David Cronenberg would remake The Fly (1986); and even The Blob would be revived (in 1988). As for its satirical intentions, The Stuff compares well to John Carpenter’s They Live (1988), and bears a striking resemblance to the much-loathed (at the time), greatly underrated Halloween III: Season of the Witch (1982), with its similar characters investigating another sinister commercial plot, this one involving Halloween masks. But I’d much rather rewatch ads pitching the foamy, evidently-delicious The Stuff than the deliberately-maddening “Silver Shamrock” campaign featured in Tommy Lee Wallace’s film. I can’t get enough of The Stuff.

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Bug (1975)

Posted on August 2, 2013 at 1:00 am by Jeff Kuykendall

Midnight Only is a proud participant in The William Castle Blogathon: Scaring the Pants Off America (July 29th-August 2nd, 2013), presented by The Last Drive In and Goregirl’s Dungeon.

The times were catching up with William Castle, in more ways that one. His unusual horror film Shanks (1974), starring Marcel Marceau, failed at the box office with no help from an unenthusiastic Paramount; in declining health, he decided to take a step back from directing. His next film would be a retreat to the audience-pleasing exploitation that made his name. Alas, released the same month was Jaws (1975), a film that was to cinema the kind of seismic event depicted onscreen in the opening minutes of what would be Castle’s last effort, Bug (1975). Castle’s film made its money back, but naturally it was eclipsed in the wake of Spielberg. Some adapted quickly. Bug‘s French-American director, Jeannot Szwarc – who was using the film to graduate from television gigs like Night Gallery and Marcus Welby, M.D. – would land Jaws 2 (1978). Bug‘s star, Bradford Dillman (The Way We Were), would move on to the best of the Jaws knock-offs, Joe Dante’s Piranha (1978). As for Castle, he prepared the story of a haunted apartment complex for MGM, to be called 2000 Lakeview Drive (“An Address of Extinction”), but the project fell apart. He died of a heart attack on May 31, 1977 – closing the door on a golden era of schlock films and good-natured hucksterism.

Professor Jim Parmiter (Bradford Dillman) communicates with a squirrel during a classroom demonstration.

The good news about Bug is that it’s not exactly what you’d expect. That, and the fact that Castle – who co-wrote the screenplay with Thomas Page, adapting Page’s novel The Hephaestus Plague – gets the action moving quickly; if there was one thing Castle cared about, it was making sure no one got bored. Quite a lot is packed into the film’s 99 minutes, from that opening earthquake (which tears a church to pieces while the worshipers run screaming through the aisles) to the introduction of the film’s stars, Madagascar hissing cockroaches (!), and through the story’s multiple permutations. A giant crack opens in the earth beneath Riverside, California, and out pours smoke and a host of large cockroaches with shells “like steel” and rear antennae that, when rubbed together, can ignite flame. Surely it’s no coincidence that the film opens with images of churchgoers singing hymns and ends with images of Hell: that chasm lit by a pulsating red glow, more and more roaches swarming forth. With another low budget, Castle delivers the Apocalypse in microcosm, witnessed through the eyes of one man – university professor Jim Parmiter (Dillman) – who grows increasingly unhinged as his experiments on the roaches progress. The film’s opening half, as the “fire bugs” wreak havoc on Riverside, might lead the viewer to expect an Irwin Allen spectacle for its finale; instead, the film becomes more intimate and strange as we lock ourselves into a remote house with Parmiter and his bugs. He breeds them. He tries to communicate with them, just like he does with a squirrel earlier in the film. Eventually, they talk back, in their own way…we’re suddenly moving into the bizarre realm of Phase IV (1974).

Carrie Parmiter (Joanna Miles) discovers the danger of hairspray.

Along the way are scattered shocks, some fairly effective, all of them delightfully ludicrous. After a pet cat is killed by one of the bugs, student Gerald Metbaum (Richard Gilliland) places its mutilated corpse in a box and shows it to Parmiter in the cafeteria while the poor guy’s trying to eat his lunch. In another scene, the camera reveals one of the roaches clinging to a phone, which then rings; the woman who picks it up gets her ear burned in bright flashes before blood starts oozing out. And Parmiter’s wife (Joanna Miles) meets an unfortunate end in the Brady Bunch house (the same set, reportedly), as one of the critters sneaks into her hair and sets her head ablaze. Later, when Parmiter goes to a secluded house to breed and experiment upon the roaches, they just won’t stay in that box of his, pushing up the lid to crawl out, and developing a taste for meat – first some raw steak sitting on a plate, and then Parmiter himself, biting into his chest while he sleeps. (Why he never places a lock on that box is a mystery.) Also worth noting: the roaches’ preferred method of killing is blowing up people in cars, Mafia-style.

Parmiter discovers his new breed of roaches enjoy the taste of human flesh.

After what seems to be an anticlimax – the roaches begin to die, unable to adapt to the lower-pressure surface world – Bug kicks into a different gear. The manic-eyed Dillman, looking increasingly gaunt (and increasingly bearded), decides to revive a captured specimen in a diving helmet with a pressure gauge, cross-breeding the roach and creating a race with a stronger chance of survival. By the film’s end, he is so simpatico with the roaches that they begin spelling out words on the wall, scurrying into place and forming first his name, then the letters he calls out (“Y…Z!”), like some particularly strange episode of Sesame Street. Following the killing of the visiting Patty McCormack (the Bad Seed herself), Parmiter confronts the creatures’ latest horrifying metamorphosis – they finally have wings.

William Castle in 1975

Castle had one last irresistible gimmick in mind, in the tradition of House on Haunted Hill (1959), The Tingler (1959), 13 Ghosts (1960), and all the other films that made his name so famous: he intended to install “Roach Seats” in the theaters. Not too dissimilar to the Tingler‘s “Percepto” device, this would be a mechanism like a windshield wiper that would be installed below the seat, tickling the audience members whenever cockroaches scurried across the screen. Paramount, which was wrapping up its contract with Castle, balked at the expense. He had to settle for a more scaled-down bit of publicity: a million-dollar insurance policy on one of the film’s stars, Hercules the cockroach. It’s a shame, as the Roach Seats could have been a last, nostalgic bit of William Castle showmanship, and given the experience of watching Bug a considerable entertainment boost. His idea might be even more welcome today. With the rising interest in “4D” theaters – the audience experiencing physical effects such as moving seats, a spray of mist, blowing wind, and so on – along with the current popularity of 3D and IMAX, film as an enveloping entertainment experience is becoming the standard. The movies, it seems, are now a William Castle world.

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Cat People (1942)

Posted on July 21, 2013 at 9:38 am by Jeff Kuykendall

In certain ways, the Hays Code was a boon. Beginning in 1934, all Hollywood films had to obtain content approval via the Motion Picture Production Code, but although it’s certainly eye-opening to watch many of those scandalous “Pre-Code” films, it was not the end of cinema for adults: witness Cat People (1942) from producer Val Lewton and director Jacques Tourneur, one of the most truly adult films of the 1940’s. It’s not that it is explicit. There is no on-screen sex and little violence, but without those distractions the themes flourish. With surprising maturity it portrays a marriage coming to pieces through mistrust, isolation, and – most of all – fear of intimacy. Its poster portrays Simone Simon in a blood-red dress accompanied by a panther with blood dripping from tooth and paw; above the title – chosen by RKO, not by Lewton – hovers a clock about to strike midnight, as though to imply that is what will cause this woman to transform into a deadly animal. That’s not quite accurate. Passion will enact the metamorphosis. The real subject of this horror film is the marriage bed.

Irena (Simone Simon) shows Oliver (Kent Smith) her statue of King John of Serbia, cat-impaler.

It all begins so happily, like a breezy romantic comedy with only a few ominous signs here and there. A beautiful Serbian immigrant, Irena (Simon), is sketching a panther at the zoo, and a handsome man flirts with her. That man, played by Kent Smith, is coincidentally named Oliver Reed – no relation to the better-known actor who would, almost two decades later, transform not into a cat but a wolf (The Curse of the Werewolf). After they leave, the camera follows her discarded sketch as it drifts with the leaves and finally settles against a wall: disturbingly, she has drawn the panther impaled by a sword. Irena and Oliver quickly become a couple, despite further unsettling signs. She has a statue of King John of Serbia, Jovan Nenad, impaling a cat upon his sword, and she tells a story of the 16th century figure driving out Satan-worshiping witches from the land, people who had the ability to transform themselves into cats. He buys her a cat, but it hisses and won’t go near her. He replaces it with a bird, which she finds herself pawing at in its cage, until it dies of fright. She continues to pay visits to the panther, keeping an eye on the key to its cage, poorly guarded by the zookeeper. Despite the fact that they have never kissed – Irena is unusually reticent – they are wed. Their wedding banquet at a cafe called The Belgrade is interrupted by a mysterious woman dressed entirely in black who calls Irena “my sister” in Serbian, and the bride is mortified. That night, she closes the bedroom door on her groom. “I want to be Mrs. Reed…but I want to be Mrs. Reed really. I want to be everything that name means to me, but I can’t, I can’t. Oliver, be kind, be patient. Let me have time, time to get over that feeling there’s something evil in me.”

Irena plays with her pet bird.

The easy-going Oliver, it turns out, has vast reserves of patience, but every man has his limits. Growing closer to his co-worker, the smart and sassy Alice (Jane Randolph), he begins to share his unhappiness; when she recommends that Irena see a psychiatrist, Irena feels betrayed. Oliver says that Alice is “such a good egg she can understand anything,” to which Irena responds, “There are some things a woman does not want other women to ‘understand.'” Spiraling into jealousy, but still mortified that physical intimacy with her husband might cause her to change into a beast, she begins stalking Alice. This leads to two justifiably famous sequences of suggestion, shadows, sound, and terror. In the first, Alice walks down an empty street at night while Irena follows from a distance. At first we hear Irena’s sharp footsteps quickly approaching. Then they suddenly stop. Alice glances behind her and sees the gradual bend of the sidewalk, the street lamps, and nothing else. She continues to walk. Suddenly we hear what sounds like the beginning of a panther’s growl, very close, which fuses with the squeal of a bus skidding to a halt in front of her; for a moment our senses are fooled into thinking that the screaming animal has pounced.

The Other Woman, Alice Moore (Jane Randolph), is stalked on a lonely street at night.

The second moment comes when Alice decides to take a swim in an indoor pool (again, at night, and with the lights turned down). After she’s left for the locker room, we see Irena arriving at the front desk and being given directions to the pool. Alice has just changed into her swimsuit when she hears a growl and sees the shadow of something low creeping down the stairs. To escape, she plunges into the pool and swims to its center, and Tourneur’s camera moves in close as she treads water, her face just above the surface, panting for breath as feral sounds echo throughout the room, and a strange shadow moves along the wall. She screams, the lights are flipped on, and Irena is standing there, smiling with kind menace. These two moments have become textbook examples of what horror can do through implication rather than explicit expression – and they’re still terrifying. But the film, at a lean 73 minutes (to meet RKO’s requirement that Lewton’s horror films run no longer than 75), is stuffed to bursting with moments of low-budget invention. After a panther (escaped from its cage, or Irena herself?) slaughters some lambs in the zoo, a scene to which John Landis would pay homage in An American Werewolf in London (1981), the camera tracks bloody paw prints along the street as they seamlessly transform into the prints of high-heeled shoes. Scene transitions frequently use a feline theme, extending even to a close-up of a model ship’s cat-shaped figurehead. Oliver and Alice’s workspace is transformed at night into a realm of deadly shadows, assisted by the eerily-glowing lights of their desks, setting the stage for a tense stand-off with the panther. A dream sequence, weighted by fashionable Freudianism, contains scattered surreal images but also eye-catching cel animation of slinking cats. A climactic showdown between Irena’s smitten psychiatrist, Dr. Louis Judd (Tom Conway of the Falcon series), and the panther is played entirely through shadows cast against the wall, as he battles the beast like the Serbian King John, wielding a sword hidden in his cane.

Tom Conway as Dr. Louis Judd.

Tragically, Irena Dubrovna never gets to overcome her apprehension of sexual intimacy, but, as we’ve learned by the film’s climax, fears of her ethnic heritage were well-founded. What’s more surprising is that a film of 1942 is willing and able to tackle such matters at all. The film is sophisticated enough in its treatment of the touchy material that lifting the Hays Code would not have made it any more of a perfect work of art than it already is (certainly Paul Schrader’s spell-everything-out remake from forty years later could not improve upon it, though I’m probably overdue for a second viewing). Cat People became the flagship film of a short-lived horror renaissance from Lewton courtesy his contract with RKO: an exceptional and utterly unique genre franchise that lasted from 1942 through 1946. Each of his films borrows the expressionist use of lighting from the early Universal horror films while running far from any “monster mash” temptations. He was given free reign to apply the horror genre to his pet themes of mental illness, suicide, depression, and a Poe-like obsession with death – just so long as he kept the running times short and used the titles RKO supplied. (The best example of this is the second film of the series, 1943’s I Walked with a Zombie, whose sensationalistic title does not begin to suggest the poetic brilliance of the film’s content.) No wonder that in the latter half of the series Lewton would join forces with none other than Boris Karloff, who was dismayed at the direction Universal had taken. Tourneur would make a couple more films for Lewton, including the similar The Leopard Man (1943), before moving onto other projects such as the film noir classic Out of the Past (1947) and the Lewton-esque horror/noir hybrid Night of the Demon (1957). When Lewton was obliged to provide a follow-up to the very profitable Cat People, he delivered one of the most unconventional sequels ever made, Robert Wise’s The Curse of the Cat People (1944), a children’s film with fairy tale overtones. Meanwhile, Tom Conway’s Dr. Judd reappeared in the extraordinary The Seventh Victim (1943), directed by Mark Robson.

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