The Stuff
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DVD Cover Information
Actor: Andrea Marcovicci, Garrett Morris, Michael Moriarty, Paul Sorvino, Scott BloomBrand: Anchor
DVD: Region Code 1
Audio: English (Unknown), Dolby Digital 2.0 Mono; English (Original Language), Dolby Digital 2.0 Mono
Format: Anamorphic, Color, DVD, NTSC, Widescreen
Picture Format: 1.85:1
Running Time: 93 minutes
DVD Release Date: 2000-10-24
Audience Rating: R (Restricted)
Studio: Starz / Anchor Bay
Movie Reviews of The Stuff
Movie Review: Criminally underrated; one of the 100 best films ever made.
Summary: 5 Stars
The Stuff (Larry Cohen, 1985)
Larry Cohen has written scripts for some of the biggest films, box-office-wise, in history. He's also written some of the biggest flops. (His first screenplay for the big screen was The Return of the Magnificent Seven; his last two were Phone Booth and Cellular. You be the judge.) However, Cohen has directed far fewer films than he's written. His directing career has also been inconsistent (witness the horror that was Wicked Stepmother), but it contains some of Hollywood's most criminally overlooked gems: The It's Alive! trilogy, Q, and The Stuff. Of those five films, The Stuff is by far the best, and has had a place on my 100 Best Films of All Time list since I started it.
The title role is played by an odd yogurt, discovered bubbling up out of the ground somewhere in Antarctica in the film's opening scene. By the time we get through the title credits, it's being marketed as The Stuff, and is truly the taste sensation sweeping the nation. A cadre of ice cream executives, terrified of their businesses going under, hires industrial espionage agent and ex-FBI man Mo Rutherford (Michael Moriarty) to find out what's in The Stuff so they can duplicate it. Rutherford runs into some problems with that (for obvious reasons), so he approaches the problem from the other side, interviewing such folks as one of the members of the FDA team who approved it (Danny Aiello in a wonderful cameo), the CEO of the publicity company that created the marketing (Andrea Marcovicci, one of the reasons Oliver Stone's film The Hand is such a fine movie), and the down-and-out previous owner of a chocolate chip cookie company bought out by the makers of The Stuff, Chocolate Chip Charlie (the wonderful Garrett Morris). Meanwhile, one kid, Jason (Scott Bloom, recently of John Q, in his first film role), knows that The Stuff is more than it seems...
The potential for a ham-handed attack on capitalism is obvious here, and it's to Cohen's great credit that the socioeconomic subtext of the movie (and think about it-- how many times have you had an opportunity to discuss socioeconomic subtext in a comedy from the eighties?) is far more complex than a knee-jerk "capitalism is bad" attitude. Cohen came up with some wonderfully complex characters, put them in the situation, and then let the material speak for itself, which it does in an extremely funny way. Morris is one of the most gifted comic actors of his generation, and Moriarty is quite capable of deadpanning some laughs, too (along with his future Law and Order costar Paul Sorvino, who has a small, but wonderful, part towards the end of the film). The only real letdown is the end of the film, but then, were you expecting realism in a horror film about yogurt?
Two decades after its original release, The Stuff more than stands the test of time, and is well on its way to becoming a bona fide classic. Seek it out. You won't regret it. After all, like the movie's everpresent jingle says, you can't get enough of The Stuff. **** ½
Summary of The Stuff
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