The Stuff

Wow, somebody needed a release!

The moment he thinks it's a communist plot, Spears has no problems whatsoever sending a battalion of heavily armed soldiers to a civilian food processing plant with the intention of shooting every employee on sight, which is precisely what they do. Unfortunately, before the slaughter can get too far, all of the employees gather together and die. The soldiers find their bodies devoid of Stuff. Now, Mo should know from experience that that means there's a huge blob of sentient Stuff somewhere nearby, but he neglects to bring that up. Jason and Nicole go off on their own and naturally are immediately attacked by the blob in question. Anyone who was surprised please line up in single file for execution. Jason and Nicole manage to escape by what comes down to opening a door and walking through it, but believe me, it seems a lot more complicated when you see them do it. Well no, it seems like they have to open a door and walk through it, they just take a longass time to do it. Outside, the silos full of the Stuff burst open and a huge wave of the Stuff explodes through a factory wall. The whole lot of it basically just sits there, so Spears makes the brilliant executive decision to leave it. Okay, whatever.

Yup.

Spears, Nicole, Mo, and Jason fly to Atlanta where Spears owns a radio station that they can use to broadcast a warning about the dangers of the Stuff to, well, to the radio listening audience in the greater Atlanta area, I suppose. But hey, that's a start. It doesn't really help the folks back in Stader, VA, or wherever the hell Jason's from, but at least the South will rise again. Nicole gets to work on the report that Spears is going to issue to the public. She wants to condemn herself from helping to make the Stuff so popular, but Mo forbids it. Just then, who should show up at the station but Chocolate Chip Charlie! How he knew to come to this particular radio station in Atlanta, Georgia after parting ways with Mo in Virginia is a mystery to me, but hell, so is how this movie ever got a green light to begin with. In between explaining how his hands are lethal weapons to random passers-by, Charlie says that he wants to speak, too, since his company was stolen from him. Spears reluctantly agrees, but he's wary, because he associates "colored" (his word, not mine) people with communists. Of course. The Soviet Union was chock full of black folk. Nicole and Charlie go off to prepare his remarks, but their brainstorming session is cut short when Charlie's head splits in half and a giant blob of Stuff spurts out. In retrospect, "brainstorming" was a great choice of words. Man, I'm on a roll today! Nicole is too shocked by the incredibly obvious phoniness of Charlie's exploding head to do anything, but luckily Mo is able to break through the glass into the room and electrocute the Stuff with a severed wire, resulting in even worse special effects that snap Nicole back to her senses.

Yeah, the world is save, that's great, Nicole. Now get off my damn screen!

The shot that we cut to after Mo rescues Nicole from the burning Stuff takes the whole semen metaphor and basically shoves it down our throats. The face that Nicole makes as Mo smears the last bits of the Stuff around on her cheeks is such a clear post-bukkake shot, I guarantee you that somewhere a Japanese man just ejaculated from reading this. Don't believe me? Observe. I mean, dear lord. There are no two ways about it. The woman has spooge on her face, and she loves it. That's that. After she is sufficiently cleaned off, Spears, Mo, and Nicole make their radio broadcast. No time to mourn the death of the black man, I suppose. Nicole then narrates the end, because it's that crappy of a movie. Basically, everyone in the world somehow hears this radio address and immediately believes every word of it. They have no problem giving up the dessert treat that they've all become addicted to, and they destroy all traces of the Stuff that they can find. Yippee hooray, happy ending.

But it's not quite over. Larry Cohen still had one or two more pushes to go before he pinched off this bowel movement of a film. Mo returns to the office of the Head of Stuff and finds that the Lead Ice Cream Executive has teamed up with him to market "the Taste," a new product that contains twelve percent Stuff. The two executives claim it's enough Stuff to taste great, but not enough to control people's minds or make them explode. So what's the problem? The problem is that this movie is only eighty minutes, and that's just not enough, dammit! So Mo calls in Jason, who enters with the last known case of the Stuff. Mo pulls out a gun and forces the two executives to eat every last bit of it until the police arrive outside. Sure eating the Stuff could only perpetuate the cycle of evil, but hey, who cares about silly little things like that? There's a lesson to be learned here! When you've got a gun, you can do anything you want! It warms my heart. Oh wait, no I think that's a coronary.

And then - and I swear this is one hundred percent true - we cut to a dark street corner where a couple suspicious-looking guys unload a few boxes from the back of a van. Inside the boxes are containers of the Stuff. One of the gangsters takes a taste and nods to his compatriots. Oh yeah, it's pure. And that is the end.

Well, this movie is crap. Now that I've got that out of the way, let me take a moment to acknowledge it's high points. For one thing, the actors don't do such a bad job. Michael Moriarty is rather charismatic as Mo, and Scott Bloom is one of the least infuriating child actors I've ever seen. All of the various executives play their roles well, to boot. The sound quality is also very good. No clipping issues, although a few lines here and there are too soft to be understood. The music is horrible though, even for the Eighties. That damn Stuff theme song keeps going through my head in an endless loop of agony. Since I've already transitioned into the weak points of "The Stuff," I really, really hate Larry Cohen. Someone needs to tell him that not every single idea automatically needs to be turned into a script. That would save us all a lot more 'Maniac Cop" sequels. The direction of the shots that were actually in the movie was generally fine, but as the director and writer of this fiasco, you'd think Larry would have been a little more judicious about which scenes to cut. There are at least a half dozen points in the movie where a new scene begins and I feel like I just missed something vital, such as, you know, plot. The overall idea for this movie is tripe. My guess is that the idea came to him in a dream where he saw white goop swallowing people and thought to himself, "Wow, that was pretty homoerotic. I'd better try to pass it off as some sort of alien mind-control goo. If people buy it, no one will think I'm gay." Sorry Larry, no one's buying it. You've got a semen obsession. Do us all a favor and work it out in therapy, not on film.

– Ben "Greasnin" Platt