Are you eating it or is it eating you?
"Just can't get enough... of the Stuff!"
— Commercial jingle for the Stuff
The Stuff is a 1985 Horror Comedy directed, written, and executive produced by Larry Cohen. The titular Stuff is a living, mind-controlling, parasitic organism with a highly addicting taste, which forces those who eat it to consume as much of it as they can. Once they do so, it hollows out its victims by eating them from the inside, turning their bodies into extremely fragile puppets. Originally discovered and sampled by a pair of watchmen at a railyard, the Stuff quickly becomes a nationwide craze, with stores, eateries, advertisments, and factories devoted to marketing it and shipping it out. The head honchos of the ice cream industry, incensed that the Stuff's runaway success has been cutting into their profits, hire David "Mo" Rutherford (Michael Moriarty), a former FBI agent and industrial saboteur, to do some spying. David slowly uncovers that the Stuff's producers have a lot of secrets, and that numerous people have moved to a single Virginia town to produce it.
At the same time, in an almost completely unrelated plot, a kid named Jason (Scott Bloom) sees the Stuff moving in his family's refrigerator and flat-out refuses to eat it, despite the increasingly-creepy demands to do so from his family. He captures David's attention when a news story reports on his rampage through a local grocery store to try and destroy the Stuff, prompting David to induct him onto his side after the Stuff brainwashes his family. Also joining David are "Chocolate Chip" Charlie Hobbs (played by Saturday Night Live veteran Garrett Morris), a former junk food mogul and martial artist who wants revenge after the Stuff bought out his company, and Nicole Kendall (Andrea Marcovicci), a commercial director who runs the Stuff's advertising campaign and is originally unaware about its nature, who ultimately becomes David's love interest. After discovering a plot to export the parasitic Stuff to the world, David and his partners end up recruiting Malcom Gromett Spears (Paul Sorvino), a retired Army Colonel who runs his own personal militia, to help them storm the Stuff factory and shut down production, then move to a local radio station owned by the Colonel to reveal the true nature of the Stuff to the world.
The movie is something of a satire about consumerism, given that the world needs to be saved from a mind-controlling parasite sold as a dessert being shipped out by a corrupt junk food empire.
"Are you troping it? Or is it troping you?"
- Alien Blood: People who've been assimilated by the Stuff (dubbed "Stuffies") bleed white.
- Analogy Backfire: During the heroes' raid on the Stuff factory:Colonel Spears: The American army has never lost a war!
Jason: What about The Vietnam War, sir?
Colonel Spears: We lost that war at home, son. - Angry Guard Dog: Inverted with Mr. Vickers' dog, which immediately takes to the visiting David while Vickers is terrified of it. It's made funny by the fact that the dog's "anger" is supplied by dubbed growling and barking (from the wrong breed of dog) and the camera cutting out its clearly wagging tail as much as possible.
- Anti-Climax: Near the end of the film, David, Jason, Nicole, and Spears manage to take over a radio station to broadcast their warning about the dangers of the Stuff. After a brief cut to a burning Stuff billboard, we then cut to Nicole on a news broadcast, talking directly to the camera about how everyone immediately believed the warning, having the Stuff outlawed and destroyed soon after. It was apparently just as easy to drive people away from the Stuff as it was to drive them TO it.
- Anti-Hero: David is an industrial spy acknowledged by the narrative as having done some rather unscrupulous things, but when he realizes just what the Stuff is and what its company intends to do with it, he doesn't hesitate to put himself in harm's way to save the world.
- Asshole Victim: Jason's family, who bully him and mistreat him even before they taste the Stuff. It's subverted because Jason still laments their deaths in a couple of later scenes.
- Assimilation Plot: What the Stuff wants, and Fletcher and the other heads of its company are all too willing to assist it for profit.
- Attack of the Killer Whatever: Marshmallow cream, by all appearances.
- Bittersweet Ending: With Col. Spears' help, David and co. manage to broadcast the truth about Stuff's harmful effects, getting people to turn against the product and destroy it. However, despite these successful attempts to stop distribution, the film ends with the implication that the Stuff can't fully be stopped, as several people who are still addicted to it have been smuggling and selling it on the black market.
- Black Dude Dies First: Charlie doesn't technically "die" until he shows up at the end of the film, but he's the only member of David's team to end up getting turned into a Stuffie, and it's implied this happened fairly early on in the film, after he and David split up.
- Blob Monster: The Stuff, though it prefers to hide itself in its human hosts.
- Body Horror: The Stuff tends to hollow out its victims by eating their innards. It's also fond of massively distorting their bodies when it emerges from them.
- Brand X: Oddly, the titular monster.
- The Cameo: The parody commercials feature a few cameos, but the most notable is seen when David and Nicole are spending the night in a booby-trapped motel near the Stuff factory, where Abe Vigoda and Clara Peller demand to be served some in a fancy restaurant, complete with Clara altering her usual catchphrase in asking.
- Catchphrase: David has one when he introduces his nickname of "Mo":"You know why they call me 'Mo'? Because whenever they give me money, I always want mo'."
- Cold-Blooded Torture: David and Jason force the heads of the company that willingly sold the Stuff to eat several pints of it at gunpoint, after which the cops will show up.
- Corrupt Corporate Executive: With the exception of Charlie, all of the junk food executives. Fletcher in particular knew that the Stuff was dangerous and was smart enough not to eat it himself, but he was still fine with distributing it to the rest of the world. The denouement reveals that even after the Stuff was stopped, he's planning on starting it all over again by selling "The Taste", ice cream laced with 12% of the Stuff, supposedly a "safe amount" to make people crave more of it without having their bodies taken over.
- Delicious Distraction: At one point, David manages to stop a Dirty Cop from arresting him for stealing a tanker truck from the Stuff factory by pointing out a really large amount of spilled Stuff on the road. The cop bends over to eat some, allowing David to knock him out.
- Easily Thwarted Alien Invasion: Just as easily as it was for the Stuff to reach huge levels of popularity, all it takes for people to turn against it is for the heroes to take over a radio station and tell them on air that the Stuff is evil.
- The '80s: The parody commercials for the Stuff are nothing short of amazing; the hair, the music, everything.
- Eldritch Abomination: The Stuff, a weird, mind-controlling Blob Monster that originates from the center of the Earth. Its addicting taste drives people to eat more and more of it, turning them into mindless, white-bleeding husks.
- The End... Or Is It?: While the heroes manage to prove that the Stuff is detrimental to humans and prevent it from being rebranded, that doesn't stop unscrupulous characters from selling it on the black market.
- Even Evil Has Standards: Colonel Spears is a racist sex fiend and a Blood Knight who admits that he enjoys the sight of blood. However, even he gets grossed out by the Stuff oozing out of its hosts.
- Fashion Show: A commercial shoot for the Stuff that Nicole directs features fashion models wearing swimsuits and fur coats strutting down a catwalk as they hold containers of the Stuff.
- The Fourth Wall Will Not Protect You: The ads for the movie famously treated the Stuff as an actual product available in the real world.
- Functional Genre Savvy: The characters figure out that they're in a movie about parasitic, zombie-making, mind-controlling slime rather quickly, and with a minimum of obvious evidence.
- Going Fur a Swim: In the above-mentioned commercial shoot, the models wear full-length fur coats over swimsuits, fitting the "sexy and glamorous" style of advertising.
- Honking Arriving Car: Inverted from the driver's point of view. Upon his arrival in Stader, Virginia, David honks his horn to get the attention of a gas station attendant, who is indoors. The attendant comes out to fill his tank, and leaving David free to ask him questions about the area.
- How They Treat the Help: Colonel Spears orders his men to give generous tips to the cab drivers that take them and David's group to the radio station, as well as to get back receipts.
- I Can't Believe It's Not Heroin!: The Stuff's parallels to drugs like cocaine are pretty blatant. It's an addictive white substance that causes people to lose weight and gain energy, but also adversely impacts their behavior and can potentially kill them.
- Ice-Cream Koan: "Well, everybody has to eat shaving cream once in a while." Said to Jason by David after the former feigns eating the Stuff by eating shaving cream, and throws up in David's backseat.
- Impossibly Delicious Food: Played for Horror with the Stuff.
- It Came from the Fridge: Not quite, as the Stuff was evil before it got there, but the scene early in the movie where Jason opens the fridge and finds the Stuff inside moving around invokes it.
- It's Personal: Jason holds a grudge against the Stuff for taking over/killing his family, even talking to it when they're both stuck in a tanker truck.
- Just Desserts: The film's denouement has David forcing Fletcher and his partner to eat dozens of pints of the Stuff at gunpoint.
- Kill It with Fire: One of the best ways to kill the Stuff is by setting it on fire; kerosene and electrical both work.
- Lawyer-Friendly Cameo: "Chocolate Chip" Charlie bears a strong resemblance to Wally Amos
, creator of Famous Amos Cookies. - Made of Plasticine: "Stuffies" are shown to break apart rather easily when punched.
- May Contain Evil: The Stuff, an addictive, zombie-making parasite that's shipped out as a popular dessert all over the country.
- Meat Puppet: The Stuff hollows out its victims by eating their innards, and can leave their hollow shells lying around when it's done with them or needs a quick escape.
- Men of Sherwood: Colonel Spears and his Right-Wing Militia Fanatic group, who are recruited in David's crusade against the Stuff, hijacking a radio station where they're able to expose the sinister nature of the substance. They do their job successfully and only lose two men.
- Mining for Cookies: Deconstructed. The Stuff is an amorphous Puppeteer Parasite from the center of the Earth that resembles whipped cream and is addictively delicious. Production involves nothing more than pumping it up like oil and putting it in tubs to be shipped into stores.
- Nicknaming the Enemy: David starts calling the Stuff-addicted zombies "Stuffies" ("Stuff-Maniacs" in the Latin American Spanish translation) pretty quickly.
- No Celebrities Were Harmed: "Chocolate Chip" Charlie resembles real-life cookie magnate Wally Amos, as described above.
- Obfuscating Stupidity: David plays up being a goofy bumpkin to hide his competence when on the job, helped by his strong Southern accent.Ice Cream Executive: Well, it seems you're not as dumb as you appear to be.
David: No one is as dumb as I appear to be. - Only Sane Man: Jason is the only member of his family to refuse eating the Stuff, all because he saw it moving in the fridge.
- Politically Incorrect Hero: Colonel Spears has an obvious beef with black people, and the film doesn't gloss over it during his interactions with Charlie, which is striking given the otherwise light tone. Granted, it seems to be less in the traditional racial animus and more in his perception that all black people are liberal communists.
- Pretty in Mink: The furs worn by the fashion models Nicole is shooting, used to give the Stuff an image of class and glamor.
- Puppeteer Parasite: The Stuff initially focuses on getting people to devour more of it. When it reaches critical mass, it takes over the victim's body and moves on to forced recruitment, organized distribution, and plain aggression against anyone not infected.
- Right-Wing Militia Fanatic: The Colonel is probably a parody, as his first reaction upon being told about the Stuff and its onslaught is to blame it on a Communist plot.
- Sealed Evil in a Can: The Stuff apparently bubbles up from the center of the Earth. When it's discovered, it's commercially sold in ice cream tubs.
- Sex Sells: Nicole's commercial shoot has models wearing swimsuits under their fur coats.
- Skewed Priorities: Col. Spears interrupts his men's charge through the streets of Atlanta to get to the radio station by insisting that they pay and tip the cabbies who drove them, as well as to get receipts.
- Sniff Sniff Nom: The movie starts with Harry, a random watchman at a railyard, stumbling upon the Stuff as it bubbles up from the ground. For some reason, his first reaction is to taste it, and his finding it tasty is what eventually kickstarts its mass commercialization.
- The Unintelligible: David slips into this at times, as his strong Southern accent and tendency to mumble make a good chunk of his dialogue incomprehensible.
- Wham Line: David's final line describes the film succinctly:David: Are you eating it? Or is it eating you?
- Your Head A-Splode: The ultimate fate of Charlie when the Stuff evacuates his body. It's even worse than it sounds, since it happens SLOWLY.
Enough is never enough.
