The Substance

 

The Substance

2024

Director- Coralie Fargeat

Cast-Demi Moore, Margaret Qualley, Dennis Quaid

            Demi Moore plays Elizabeth Sparkle, a Hollywood star who was once all the rave but now finds herself becoming irrelevant the older she gets. These feelings are intensified by her boss (Dennis Quaid) who only sees value in someone young and pretty.

            Elizabeth finds out about an underground medical procedure that will supposedly create a younger, hotter, perfect version of herself, but with some vague stipulations. The procedure creates Sue, a young sexy girl with a near perfect body. The stipulation is that Sue and Elizabeth can’t exist together and their continued existence requires them to voluntarily relinquish control to each other in a seven day cycle.

            The movie is a kind of feminist Jekyll and Hyde but rather than focusing on the psychological implications of good and evil, it is a body horror focusing on the self-loathing that can come with decrepitude, especially for someone that has derived much of their self-worth from attractiveness.

            Pretty early in the film, you’ll notice the copious amounts of nudity and in your face sexuality, especially with Sue. But its not gratuitous. The overt, almost candy coated, sensuality is juxtaposed against images of increasing decay, creating a powerful effect on the viewer. Good horror is supposed to conjure up strong feelings and The Substance does that. It elicits arousal and revulsion in tandem.

           If you’re not familiar with “body horror”, the genre focuses on our relationship with our bodies; the biological, physical space that we occupy. The horror, rather than coming from an external source like a serial killer or a monster, comes from the loss of control of our own biology. Made famous by the films of David Cronenberg and Frank Henenlotter in the 1980s, the genre often uses mutation, mutilation or infection as the mechanism of horror. Our fears of disease and our fascination with botched plastic surgeries are real world examples of body horror at work in our lives.

Most body horror involves one or a few fantastic elements inserted into an otherwise mundane world. The Substance uses an unrealistic scenario to highlight our very real obsession with youth and beauty, as well as the extent that people are willing to go to hold onto them, even if only for a little while longer.

            It’s a very small-scale movie, basically a two woman show, creating a more intimate knowledge of the characters. Having said that, if you get the chance to see it on a big screen, I’d encourage it. The movie is very much visually oriented, getting much of its power from the images rather than the narrative. Fans of body horror will find a lot to like about The Substance. Even if you’re not familiar with that genre, the film will still create a lasting impression that will stick with you long after you’ve finished watching.

Suitable Flesh

 

Suitable Flesh

2023

Director- Joe Lynch

Cast- Heather Graham, Barbara Crampton, Bruce Davidson, Judah Lewis, Johnathon Schaech

            Suitable Flesh is a loose adaptation of H.P. Lovecraft’s story “The Thing on the Doorstep.” I say “loose” because, if you are familiar with Lovecraft, then you know that his stuff doesn’t exactly lend itself to easy cinematic adaptation. First off, most of his work is nearly a hundred years old and even in the 1930s his writing style was archaic, seeming like something from a century earlier. Furthermore, his stories often don’t present themselves in a sequential style needed for a movie. The stories don’t have lots of characters with dialogue that move a plot along but rather rely on a narrator’s description of events. The biggest reason that they don’t adapt well to film is that movies are a visual medium and Lovecraft relies on ideas that are inherently unfathomable, unimaginable or otherwise indescribable.

            That said, Lovecraft’s ideas are fertile grounds for endless exploration and have found their way into hundreds of films either as cinematic adaptations or just as inspirations. The Color Out of Space alone has been adapted to the screen at least four different times.

            Having said all that, The Thing on the Doorstep is a bit more adaptation friendly as it doesn’t involve interdimensional beings or cosmos spanning deities like some of Lovecraft’s other stories. Without spoiling it too bad, the themes of The Thing on the Doorstep are 1) mind control and 2) swapped genders, both of which are psychological concepts and can be expressed without special effects.

            Interestingly, the idea of gender swapping probably seems a lot less shocking now (if its even shocking at all now) than it would have been in the 1930s. On the other hand, having your gender swapped involuntarily and repeatedly would probably be pretty horrific, which leads us to another common Lovecraft theme; insanity. The characters in his stories seem to be constantly on the verge of losing their minds as each fresh new horror is loosed upon them.

            Suitable Flesh puts us even closer to insanity with its choice of characters. Heather Graham is a psychiatrist who encounters a young man who she believes to be schizophrenic (Judah Lewis the young protagonist from The Babysitter). She doesn’t exactly practice a good work/ life balance and thoughts of her young patient become an obsession coupled with sexual fantasies. Her confidant is her best friend and fellow psychiatrist played by Barbara Crampton (with her own list of Lovecraft credits including Re-Animator and From Beyond). Bruce Davidson (Lords of Salem) turns in a small but memorable supporting performance as her young patient’s father. Since a central theme is mind control, all the actors get to try on different personalities and at times the audience may not be sure of the motivations of the characters which lends itself to the fear of impending insanity.

            If your only experience with Lovecraft on film are the Stuart Gordon movies like Re-Animator and Dagon, Suitable Flesh is about as far from those as you can get. This is largely psychological-body horror for the first two-thirds of the film though the ending gets pretty brutal. Overall though, this is a low-key movie that depends more on the audience’s empathy with the protagonist than on visual scares.

            If you are hoping for a return to the gory-glory days of Brian Yuzna and Stuart Gordon, I’m afraid that Suitable Flesh may leave you wanting. On the other hand, if you are looking for a story that gets a little bit closer to Lovecraft’s intentions than most other adaptations, then you need to check this film out.

             

Re-Animator Trilogy

Re-Animator Trilogy

          This is a trilogy of films very loosely based on the story, Herbert West, Reanimator by H.P. Lovecraft. All three films star Jeffery Combs as the title character and all three were either directed or produced by Brian Yuzna.

Re-Animator

1985

Director- Stuart Gordon

Cast- Jeffrey Combs, Bruce Abbott, Barbara Crampton, David Gale, Robert Sampson, Gerry Black

           

     Herbert West (Combs) is a genius studying the mysteries of life and death. He has developed a serum that brings the dead back to life. Unfortunately, the recently revived are violent and insane. Well, can’t make an omelet without breaking some eggs, right? He has had to flee medical school in Europe after bringing someone back with disastrous results, and he ends up at good old Miskatonic University, home of the Fightin’ Shoggoths (not really).

            

     He meets up with another up and coming student, Dan Cain (Bruce Abbott). Dan is pretty straight laced and is dating the Dean’s daughter, Megan (Barbara Crampton). Dean Halsey (Sampson) seems to be an OK guy but another member of the faculty, Dr. Hill (David Gale) is a real creep. Hill is a plagiarist, ripping off other people’s ideas, and has a perverse obsession with Megan. Herbert and Hill soon butt heads and Hill makes it his mission to ruin Herbert (while also finding a way into Meg’s pants).

            

     Meanwhile, Herbert goes on about his business, conducting his experiments in reanimation. Dan finds out about it when Herbert reanimates Dan’s dead cat (which Herbert may or may not have killed in the first place). Dan and Meg are initially appropriately horrified, but like Dr. Pretorius seducing Frankenstein to the dark side, Herbert soon lures Dan in to helping him.

            

     Meanwhile, Dr. Hill has brought Dean Halsey under his spell (more about that later) and Halsey has his eye on Herbert and Dan. He interferes with an experiment, things happen, and Halsey ends up dead. No worries, right, because Herbert can just bring him back to life, which he does, but now Halsey is a gibbering idiot.

           

     

    Meg is freaked out and accurately blames Dan and Herbert.  Dr. Hill, meanwhile, has discovered Herbert’s secret and tries to steal it (he is a plagiarist after all). Well, I guess Hell hath no fury like a grad student scorned because Herbert retaliates by chopping off Hill’s head and then bringing him back to life. Herbert didn’t count on Hill’s extraordinary mental prowess, however. Not only does Hill’s decapitated head retain all of his intelligence, he can also remotely control his headless body.

         

     The rest of the movie gets more insane from there including the most memorable scene of the film where Meg is the unwilling recipient of oral sex from Hill’s decapitated head as it’s held by Hill’s headless body (you read that right). The finale of the film is a Grand Guignol of gory violence as Hill reanimates all the bodies in a morgue and sics them on Herbert and Dan.

            

     Stuart Gordon had a long and illustrates career so I hate to say that his best movie was his first because that makes the rest of his career seem anticlimactic, which it wasn’t. Actually, I think his best film was Dagon, but his best loved film, his most famous film, and the one that he will always be remembered for is Re-animator.  The film just works on so many levels.  It has a good blend of humor and gore, excellent casting, and really nice effects. It’s hard to classify this as a B movie because the production values seem so good.

            

     

     The real jewel in the crown of this film though was the casting of Jeffery Combs as Herbert West. The casting director deserves a gold star for it. This was early in Comb’s career and this was his first leading role, so it was a gutsy move to put so much of the movie in his hands, but it paid off. The film made Combs a genre star and ensured a long career that is still going. I simply can’t imagine any other actor playing that part so well.

            

     This movie was a staple of the video store era. Any video store worth its salt was going to have a copy of this film on its horror shelf. Depending on where you lived (and rented videos) you may have seen one of two versions. The most common version was “unrated” and had all of the gore that made this film legendary. However, some of you may have been unlucky enough to see the “R” version. This version had some of the gore edited out. HOWEVER, it did have extra scenes that the unrated version didn’t have. Several of the scenes show that Dr. Hill had Svengali like mental powers that he uses to dominate the wills of the other characters in the film. Another scene shows Herbert shooting up some of his reagent to keep his mind fresh so that he doesn’t have to sleep. These added scenes, while kind of slow and boring, do help the movie make more sense. It helps us understand why Hill retained his personality after re-animation and why he was so easily able to control other re-animated bodies. Luckily there is a newer version out now that contains both the gore and the extra scenes (coming in at 105 minutes as opposed to the original 86 minutes).

            

     Re-Animator is a film that belongs in every horror fan’s library. If you were making a list of the best 80s horror, or best horror-comedy’s, or best gore, this movie would make it somewhere into your top 10. Highly recommended.

   

Bride of the Re-Animator

1990

Director- Brian Yuzna

Cast- Jeffrey Combs, Bruce Abbott, Kathleen Kinmont, Fabiana Udenio, David Gale, Mel Stewart

            

     This movie picks up with Herbert and Dan working as battlefield medics in some banana republic. All the dead soldiers give them lots of raw material. More importantly, using tissue from a local species of iguana, Herbert has found something that he thinks will improve his reagent.

            

     Herbert and Dan make their way back to the states and get jobs as doctors in a hospital. Dan is ready to put all the bringing back the dead nonsense behind him, but Herbert is keeping his eyes on the prize. Dan has become a little fixated with one of his patients. Gloria (Kathleen Kinmont) is dying slowly from an illness and Dan experiences some doctor-patient counter transference. He sees in her his old girlfriend, Meg, whose life he couldn’t save at the end of the last film.

           

    

    Herbert’s new re-animation techniques enable him to combine parts and reanimate them in crazy new forms. This allows for some disturbing combinations like a dog with a human hand, an eyeball that walks around with fingers and other abominations. Herbert piques Dan’s interest when he reveals that he saved Meg’s heart after she died. They concoct a plan to build a Bride of Frankenstein like creature from different women using Meg’s heart as the centerpiece. Dan gets a two for one special when Gloria dies and he decides to use her head to top off the body.

            

     Dr. Hill from the first film returns to harass the pair and has his mobility restored courtesy of some bat wings sewn on to his decapitated head. He is really just a peripheral villain though. The real antagonist is Herbert and Dan’s hubris that we all know is going to get them in the end.

            

     Brian Yuzna (who produced the first film) directed this one, but there isn’t a big change in the tone. Yuzna and Stuart Gordon worked together a lot over the years. Though Yuzna’s style was very different than Gordon’s, for whatever reason, this film feels very much like the first. That may be because so much of the original cast came back. Bruce Abbott and Jeffery Combs made a great team, playing off of each other well. That combination would be missed in the third film. Bride of the Re-animator isn’t as classic and “must see” as the first, but fans of the first film will definitely want this in their collection.

Beyond Re-Animator

2003

Director- Brian Yuzna

Cast- Jeffrey Combs, Jason Barry, Elsa Pataky, Enrique Arce, Santiago Segura, Raquel Gribler, Nico Baixas, Simón Andreu

            

     The film starts with a young kid seeing his sister murdered by one of Herbert’s reanimated corpses and then watching Herbert being hauled off in the back of a patrol car. Fast forward 13 years and that kid is now a doctor. Dr. Howard Phillips (yeah that’s his name) is starting work as the medical director in a prison that has an unsavory reputation. It is run by a cruel warden (Simón Andreu) who delights in abusing his prisoners. Elsa Pataky (who you will recognize from her numerous appearances in the Fast and Furious franchise) plays Laura, a young reporter trying to do a story about the prison.

           

     It’s no coincidence that Howard is the new prison doctor. He chose that location precisely because that is where Herbert West has been incarcerated. Herbert, bereft of his laboratory and bodies, has had to take his experiments in a different direction. Using rats that he catches he has devised a technique to capture an essence, which he calls nano-plasm energy, which he thinks will cure the problem he has had with his re-animated subjects going crazy. Howard and Herbert set up a lab and start experimenting; all the while Howard is carrying on a relationship with the young reporter.

            

     

   The Yuzna style was a lot more evident in this film than in the last. It’s not so much that the gore is gorier as much as it’s sillier and more outlandish. The film was shot in Spain (just like other Yuzna productions Faust, Love of the Damned and Dagon) and there is no way to hide that. Besides the many Spanish actors there are other things (like the Euro style ambulances) that keep reminding you where they are. This is not really a bad thing, it’s just a little jarring after the American settings of the first two films.

         

 

     Fans of Spanish horror will recognize Santiago Segura as a drug addicted inmate who will do anything to get a high, including shooting up a massive dose of Herbert’s reagent. His best role was in El día de la bestia, but he also had smaller parts in Dance with the Devil, The Killer Barbies, Blade 2, Hellboy, The Last Circus and Witching and Bitching.

            

     The story really just rehashes themes from the first two films. The warden is just a Spanish version of Dr. Hill and there is the whole trying to re-animate a lost love. Unfortunately, it’s missing the chemistry of Combs and Abbott. On the plus side, there is very little CGI. The high point of the film though is Elsa Pataky who is not just hot but also provides some of the more interesting scenes after she gets reanimated.

            

     Not a great film. I certainly wouldn’t recommend it for someone new to the series. But for hardcore fans of the first two films, this is as good of a swan song as we are likely to get. Another sequel was planned, a kind of Island of Dr. Moreau story, but it never materialized and after this much time it’s unlikely that it will.