The Stuff ★★★★☆

This review contains spoilers.

A great movie of the sort to watch with friends while making fun of it. Many problems play off each other in a such a way that I find it difficult to decide where to start with it.

A lot of this movie was clearly written with certain set pieces in mind without much thought as to how to get from A to B. It feels like after a certain amount of time in a given location a character will declare what might as well be “well we got all the special effects shots we wanted here done, let’s go to [next location]” with the flimsiest of justifications.

It’s hard to dwell on this in the moment though because it will jump to the next scene the moment someone finishes speaking without so much as an establishing shot to give some breathing room. In at least one case it seemed like it happened mid-sentence.

Almost as jarring as the editing is the acting, which feels unpractised to the point of giving the impression that there is a lot of ad libbing happening. That the actors are expecting to hear the director yell “cut” before realising that the scene is continuing as a single shot and they need to keep it going.

Characters are just baffling in other ways too. Mo’ and Chocolate Chip Charlie talk about going after “it” before they actually see The Stuff move and then barely react to punching people and seeing their faces slough off to reveal that they are hollow inside. They then split up and Charlie proceeds to then disappear from the movie for an hour. Mo’, meanwhile, sees a newspaper article about a boy knocking cartons of Stuff over at a supermarket and with possibly the most grim and serious line delivery he gives in the entire movie declares that he needs to meet this child.

Everyone being so off-kilter perhaps adds to the tension that they might be being affected by the titular substance. I kept expecting reveals of a character having been taken over that just don’t arrive. Certainly it feels like it should be happening when characters are shouting not to let it touch them as if a single drop would be fatal while repeatedly getting it all over their faces. There’s a scene where Andrea Marcovicci’s character is meant to be pretending to eat The Stuff that includes a wonderful shot of her grimacing and cringing with white fluff dangling off of her lips, apparently having been unable to resist the temptation on set to see what the prop actually tastes like and realising that it’s awful.

The special effects are, at least, consistently entertaining, though not consistent in any other regard. The threat The Stuff poses is completely arbitrary moment to moment with it being utterly passive for extended periods while suddenly lunging at our heroes or gushing forth in tidal waves as soon as an escape route opens for them.

In the end though, the looming and arbitrary threat of the The Stuff is no match for an openly racist conspiracy theorist radio host with his own private militia.