Film Comment: The Stuff

The Stuff (1985) is a science-fiction/horror/comedy directed by Larry Cohen, who has given the world God Told Me To! (see the Labels below for "film comments") and the particularly disturbing killer infant film, It's Alive! (What would you do if everyone, including the police, wanted to kill your newborn son because he used his claws and fangs to massacre everyone in the hospital delivery room immediately after his birth?)

In The Stuff, a corporation begins marketing a yogurt-like dessert called The Stuff and it quickly becomes a sensation.  People love it and quickly develop a missionary-like desire to get all their family, friends, and acquaintances to eat it, even if they have to force them to do so.  Devotees of the dessert call themselves Stuffies.  A television commercial presents the the snappy jingle, "I just can't get enough of the stuff!"

Enter an industrial spy, Mo Rutherford, who's trying to discover (steal) the secret of the dessert's popularity.  He discovers that it is not manufactured at all; it is siphoned from a hole in the ground and is alive and sentient.  One boy, who allies with Rutherford, ran away from home after he saw The Stuff move in his refrigerator and his parents tried to force him to eat it.

Rutherford realizes to his horror that The Stuff is colonizing those who consume it, hollowing them out inside, making them empty.  He teams up with the young boy, a group of right-wing militiamen led by a possibly insane Colonel, and Chocolate Chip Charlie, a cookie manufacturer who has lost control of his company due to other's stock manipulations (think of Famous Amos ).  This odd conglomeration of people set out to do battle with the dessert.

This is a pointed social satire about our shallow and empty modern consumer society.  We jump on fads and trends and pursue them with gusto, even when they are clearly damaging to us.  Many of us put pressure on others to join us in our self-destructive ways.

Whatever we continually think about and do repeatedly becomes our God.