INTRO: Did you ever hear about the time the American James Bond teamed up with a homegrown militia to take down the Stuffies? Those people whose minds had been warped by a dangerous dessert that came seeping through the ground like bubbling crude? Our heroes faced down evil corporations and floods of sentient marshmallow fluff to save the world from a junk food apocalypse. If you haven’t heard this story, then strap in, because we’re about to tell you all about The Stuff. That’s the name of both the deadly dessert and the movie that was made about it, which might be the Best Horror Movie You Never Saw.
CREATORS / CAST:: Over a writing and directing career that lasted more than sixty years, Larry Cohen told us some incredible stories. Stories about a Maniac Cop. Stories about Black Caesar, who dealt with Hell Up in Harlem. With the It’s Alive trilogy, he even told us multiple stories about killer babies. Which were amusingly absurd at times, but also effectively creepy when Cohen wanted them to be. Since he was a filmmaker who made killer baby movies work, it should come as no surprise that he was also able to make a great horror movie about a deadly ice cream substitute.
Cohen was often praised for his dedication to crafting interesting characters, no matter what sort of story he was writing. So even when he was making a goofball movie about a tasty treat that causes horrific side effects, he was able to draw in a strong cast. For The Stuff, he re-teamed with his Q: The Winged Serpent star Michael Moriarty, casting him as an FBI agent turned industrial spy named David Rutherford. Although most viewers will be left thinking of the character as Mo. People call him Mo because whenever they give him money, he always wants mo’. As the story begins, The Stuff has become an overnight sensation in the United States. It’s delicious, has zero calories, no artificial ingredients. Why wouldn’t it become popular? Its sales are leaving ice cream, yogurt, cookies, everything else in the dust. So representatives of the ice cream industry hire Mo to find out what The Stuff is made of so they can try to replicate it. And beat it at its own game.
Mo’s investigation brings him into contact with advertising agency executive Nicole, who named The Stuff and has put together an incredible ad campaign for it. Once you watch this movie, you’ll never be able to get the jingle for The Stuff out of your mind. Nicole is played by Andrea Marcovicci, who had done a lot of serious, dramatic work in her career and saw The Stuff as a chance to be silly and have a good time. Mo is basically portrayed like an American version of Roger Moore era James Bond, so of course Nicole falls for him immediately and helps him investigate her employer. Mo also crosses paths with a guy called Chocolate Chip Charlie, played by Saturday Night Live’s Garrett Morris. Charlie was the owner of this story’s stand-in for the Famous Amos cookie brand… until the executives behind The Stuff bought out his company and tossed him. So he has a grudge against The Stuff, and so does a young boy named Jason, played by Scott Bloom. Jason is one of the first people in America to realize that The Stuff isn’t the healthy treat everyone thinks it is. This stuff, which looks like marshmallow fluff, is actually sentient. A living organism. It can move on its own, and Jason sees it doing just that inside his family’s fridge. Once someone has consumed enough of it, they become Stuffies; The Stuff takes over their minds and bodies. It makes them do its bidding until they’re used up and The Stuff has to ditch their crumbling corpses.
The Stuff isn’t manufactured. Whatever it is, it seeps up out of the ground, is siphoned into trucks and shipped off to consumers without any sort of processing. Realizing that The Stuff could be an apocalyptic threat if it’s not dealt with, Mo seeks the help of right wing militia leader Colonel Malcolm Grommett Spears, played by Paul Sorvino. Who operates out of a castle in the American countryside. Convincing Spears that The Stuff is the work of Communists, Mo gains the support of him and his soldiers. They back him up for an assault on The Stuff headquarters.
Along the way, Danny Aiello shows up as Mr. Vickers of the FDA. Vickers thinks The Stuff is such a great product, he even feeds it to his dog. That turns out to be a terrible idea. Aiello’s appearance is brief, so he gets a guest star credit, which always seems weird to see on a movie instead of a TV show. Patrick O’Neal plays Stuff distributor Fletcher, and Alexander Scourby, in his final role, is Evans, a representative of the ice cream industry. Cohen regular James Dixon has a role as a troublesome Postman. Abe Vigoda, Brooke Adams, Laurene Landon, Tammy Grimes, and Jason Evers appear in commercials for The Stuff. So does Clara Peller, who had just asked “Where’s the beef?” in a popular Wendy’s commercial the year before The Stuff was released. In this movie, she asks, “Where’s The Stuff?” Cohen also gave Eric Bogosian, who had just starred in his film Special Effects, a cameo as a supermarket clerk. And Mira Sorvino, Paul’s daughter, a future Oscar winner, makes her screen debut as a factory worker. But good luck trying to spot her. Mira was visiting her father on set one day, and he and Cohen decided to stick her in front of the camera.
BACKGROUND: The idea of making a movie about a mind-altering, monstrous dessert may seem odd, but Cohen only had to observe the world around him to be inspired. This story, a satire of consumerism and corporate greed, occurred to him after he had read several newspaper articles about products being recalled. As he told Starlog Magazine, “We’ve all read about the Food and Drug Administration recalling something which ended up poisoning people, or killing their children, or causing women to get cancer or to become infertile. And we’ve also read about automobile manufacturers recalling cars for structural faults which caused people to be injured. So, it is very common for the public to be endangered by mass-produced products. Companies are in too much of a hurry to get their products onto the market.”
He was also fascinated by the amount of junk food the public consumes. And continues to consume, even though we know the damage it can do to our health. So he came up with the most unhealthy dessert possible. To bring his vision of The Stuff to the screen, he secured a budget of one-point-seven million dollars and a distribution deal with New World Pictures. The budget was so tight that the crew was given a five dollar limit on their lunches, but Cohen had enough money to make his movie.
The filmmaker and New World ran into a disagreement at the casting stage – he wanted to cast a then-unknown Arsenio Hall as Chocolate Chip Charlie, while New World insisted that he cast the more familiar Garrett Morris. But for the most part, the company left Cohen alone and let him do his thing. Production on The Stuff lasted from August into September of 1984, and seems to have gone rather smoothly… Although additional photography was required when Cohen thought of a new ending for the movie after he had edited together a rough cut. That’s the scene where Fletcher and Evans get their comeuppance, being forced to eat a large amount of The Stuff themselves.
Of course, the most complicated part of making The Stuff was figuring out how to bring this Stuff to life on screen. Multiple methods were used to portray The Stuff on screen, depending on the scene and what was required of the substance. Special effects artists Steve Neill and Rick Stratton made The Stuff on location, while stop-motion animator David Allen was hired to create scenes where The Stuff moves on its own. Sadly, moments that Allen animated involving “Baby Stuff” and “Walking Stuff” didn’t make it into the finished film. Plastic, rubber, slime, ice cream, yogurt, shaving cream, and mashed potatoes dusted with baking flour were all used for The Stuff at different points. When actors had to eat The Stuff, it was a mixture of yogurt, tofutti, and whipped cream. Cohen said that most of the cast put on weight during the production because they had to keep eating The Stuff. Marcovicci wasn’t happy when she had to eat it, because this sort of thing was not on her diet. But even more than the tasty Stuff, she hated it when The Stuff was played by firefighter’s foam. That’s because the foam was made out of fish guts, so it was disgusting to be around and didn’t smell very good.
A company called Effects Associated was hired for the shots of exploding factory buildings. Cohen thought the result was underwhelming, so he paid them half the amount they were asking for. This led to a lawsuit that was decided in Cohen’s favor, because he and Effects Associated hadn’t made a copyright agreement regarding the use of the shots. Effects Associated was free to use the footage of exploding factory buildings for other projects, it wasn’t exclusive to The Stuff.
The factory building explosions weren’t the only unsatisfactory things Cohen dealt with. He was aware on set that some scenes weren’t working. There was one where Mo and Nicole hook up at a hotel that so obviously wasn’t necessary, Cohen went home early that day. He left cinematographer Paul Glickman with Moriarty and Marcovicci to finish shooting the doomed scene on their own. That scene actually did end up in the first cut Cohen showed to New World Pictures. But then it and several others were cut because the distributor was disappointed with the movie he delivered to them. New World was expecting The Stuff to be a straightforward monster movie, something nasty and horrific. They didn’t know what to do with the movie Cohen had actually made, full of satire and humor. A movie that goes for laughs more often than it goes for scares. The one way they could see to make it more marketable was to make sure it was shorter and more fast-paced. Cohen described his own cut of the movie as more dense and sophisticated than the cut New World released. But he also admitted that some of the scenes he cut out while speeding up the pace for the distributor were extraneous. While it hurt to cut out some of the moments, there were funny scenes he wanted to keep and wasn’t able to, he also thought it was a wise decision to cut some of the scenes he had originally included. The final cut of the movie ended up being about thirty minutes shorter than Cohen’s director’s cut.
Now New World had to figure out how to sell The Stuff. They decided to promote the film as if it were the movie they had expected it to be. Not the movie it actually was. The ads and trailers ignored the satirical element and tried to sell it as a conventional horror movie. New World first scheduled The Stuff for a March 1985 release, but delayed it a few months and ultimately gave it a limited release in the United States beginning in June of ‘85. Information on how it did at the box office isn’t readily available at this point, but it is known that The Stuff wasn’t a hit. Cohen felt New World hurt the film’s chances by not focusing on the humor in the advertising. And he also said that it was dealt a blow by Mother Nature herself. A hurricane hit New York the same day The Stuff was released there. Newspapers weren’t delivered that day – so the public didn’t get to see that critics had given the movie positive reviews.
Cohen had a friend in advertising who had created the Stuff containers for the movie. During filming, Cohen was planning to do some tie-in marketing and sell The Stuff nationally in those containers. Of course, this version of The Stuff would have just been regular ice cream, not a substance that would turn people into Stuffies. The idea was to see how much of The Stuff they could sell before consumers realized it was just a movie promotion. But that plan seems to have been abandoned by the time The Stuff was released.
The Stuff wasn’t a box office smash, but it did develop a cult following over the years as viewers caught up with it on VHS, DVD, and Blu-ray. Its appreciative audience includes Rupert Grint of the Harry Potter franchise, who lists it as one of his top five favorite movies. Grint told Rotten Tomatoes, “I’m a big B-movie fan, and for me this ticks every B-movie box. It must be the most original idea for a monster, an evil mass-produced dessert. It’s got the strangest characters I’ve ever seen in a film, which makes it a forever favorite of mine.”
WHAT MAKES IT GREAT: The movie definitely has some bizarre characters. The concept of a killer dessert is already an unusual set-up, but a lot of filmmakers could have done something interesting with the idea. None of them would have made a movie that’s anything like The Stuff, though. Only Larry Cohen would have thought to make a couple of the stars an American James Bond and a militia leader who is bummed because nobody likes him. Even Cohen himself couldn’t describe The Stuff as any particular established genre. It wasn’t fully horror, it wasn’t fully comedy. It was its own thing. A Larry Cohen Movie. Some viewers will be put off by the tone and the characters, while others love it because of how unique it is. It’s a joy to watch Mo Rutherford make his way through the film, unearthing the mysteries of The Stuff. Moriarty gives such an awesome performance as this character, it almost makes you wish he and Cohen had made a whole series of Mo Rutherford movies. He didn’t need to mess with The Stuff again, but it would have been fun to see him go on other adventures. And eliminate other strange threats.
Cohen assembled an excellent supporting cast for Moriarty to work with, and put them in some very memorable scenes with The Stuff itself.
BEST SCENE(S): One of the most memorable scenes in the movie is the first one, in which an elderly mine worker is the first to discover The Stuff. He sees this white substance bubbling out of the snowy ground… and his first instinct is to stick his finger in it and give it a taste. And it’s a good thing this guy will eat whatever he finds on the ground. We would have been missing out if he didn’t, because we have him to thank for the whole movie that follows. Entertaining scenes like the one where Jason busts up the many Stuff displays in a supermarket. Or where Vickers is attacked by his Stuffy dog. And where Chocolate Chip Charlie’s mouth opens wide to let Stuff spew out.
Among the many great scenes involving The Stuff is one set in a motel room, where The Stuff comes pouring out of Mo and Nicole’s bed. Shooting this scene required a revolving set. And luckily, a revolving set had recently been built for another horror production. Just weeks before Cohen used this set to show a flood of The Stuff defying gravity, Wes Craven was using the revolving room to film scenes for A Nightmare on Elm Street.
PARTING SHOT: Cohen was able to achieve a fast and fun pace for The Stuff when he whittled down the running time for New World Pictures. But the movie goes so quickly, you can tell it’s jumping over transitional moments and leaving out some information. It feels a bit wild and scattered. So it’s interesting to hear that fans might have the chance to see the director’s cut someday. The nonprofit arthouse organization Denver Film recently found that a 35 millimeter print in the possession of the Academy of Motion Pictures Arts and Sciences is the director’s cut. Those thirty minutes Cohen removed in 1985 are in that print. So hopefully someone will be releasing that soon.
In the meantime, the theatrical cut of The Stuff remains highly entertaining. Some fans have been enjoying the film for more than thirty-five years now, while more are discovering it all the time. It’s worth checking out if you haven’t seen it. We’ll give Larry Cohen himself the final word on this one. To anyone who decides to watch The Stuff, Cohen promised, “You will be involved with the characters and the story. You will genuinely care whether or not these people get out of danger. You will believe in the danger and accept the threat as being real. You will be scared. And at the same time, you will laugh like hell.”
A couple previous episodes of the Best Horror Movie You Never Saw series can be seen below. To see more, and to check out some of our other shows, head over to the JoBlo Horror Originals YouTube channel – and subscribe while you’re there!
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