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The Stuff: Limited Edition
[Blu-ray 4K]
Blu-ray ALL - America - Arrow Films Review written by and copyright: Eric Cotenas (12th July 2025). |
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The Film
 A new all-natural sweet treat known as "The Stuff" has managed to get passed through the FDA and sweep the country seemingly overnight, with the mysterious company buying out the "Chocolate Chip Charlie" empire and on their way to driving out other ice cream and frozen yogurt companies out of business. Unable to analyze the ingredients, rival executive Evans (The Big Heat's Alexander Scourby) hires disgraced FBI agent turned industrial spy David "Mo" Rutherford (Pale Rider's Michael Moriarty) to carry out his own investigation and sabotage of the company. When looking into the FDA, he discovers that everyone who approved it have resigned and taken long vacations with the exception of Vickers (Moonstruck's Danny Aiello) who seems to have been bought off with a lifetime supply of "The Stuff" and is unnaturally afraid of his own dog. Discovering that the project was tested in Stader, Virginia, Mo travels there and discovers it to be a ghost town. He runs into "Chocolate Chip Charlie" (Saturday Night Live's Garrett Morris) who is also carrying out his own investigation after his own family voted him off the board and sold his company, and they discover that most of the residents have taken jobs at "The Stuff" headquarters in Midland, Georgia and those who remain have been taken over by the blob-like substance ("Are you eating it or is it eating you?"). Suburban teenager Jason (Smokin' Aces' Scott Bloom) has also discovered the "toxic" qualities of "The Stuff" which has taken over his family (Diner's Colette Blonigan, Arachnophobia's Robert Frank Telfer, and Bloom's real-life brother Brian Bloom from Once Upon a Time in America). After hearing about Jason's widely-reported freak out in a grocery store in which he attempted to destroy all of their stock of "The Stuff", Mo goes to visit him and only just rescues him from his addicted family. Together with Nicole (The Hand's Andrea Marcovici), the Madison Avenue advertising executive who spearheaded the ad campaign for "The Stuff" –– they head to Midland, Georgia to investigate the plant with the help of right-wing militia leader Colonel Malcolm Grommett Spears (Cruising's Paul Sorvino) and his army. Blessed with poster art that was simultaneously silly and unsettling, New World's The Stuff turned out not to be a cheesy Troma-esque schlockfest but a delightfully funny and satirical horror film along the lines of director Larry Cohen's Q: The Winged Serpent. It is somewhat difficult to tell how much of the disjointed pace can be blamed on New World cuts or Cohen's rough-and-ready approach, but the film moves along fast enough to forgive the various contrivances that place Mo in the right spot at the right time. The Stuff skewers health food crazes – it technically is all-natural – big business, the military, and advertising, with The Stuff's spokespersons including Laurene Landon (Maniac Cop 2), Tony winner Tammy Grimes (Can't Stop the Music), Barney Miller's Abe Vigoda, and even Clara "Where's the Beef" Peller (as well as a surprise appearance by Shock Waves' Brooke Adams for the patient). The cinematography of Paul Glickman (Dracula vs Frankenstein) is deliberately bright and artificial to match the TV commercials, although it has the effect of exposing the rough edges of the visual effects work of stop-motion artist David Allen (Puppet Master) and matte artist Jim Danforth (Prince of Darkness). The effects of Steve Neill (Fright Night), Rick Stratton (Spellbinder), and Ed French (Blood Rage) are both gruesome and amusing (Sorvino's military man says of one corpse hemorrhaging The Stuff "I kinda like the sight of blood, but this is disgusting"). Moriarty is at his eccentric sing-song best with throwaway lines like "Everybody has to eat shaving cream once in a while" while the charming Marcovici tries to keep up with him (perhaps even managing to disarm him temporarily with a comment about the disguise he dons to infiltrate The Stuff mining plant), and Bloom's performance can be forgiven taking his age into account in addition to having to riff off of Moriarty. The supporting cast includes turns from Patrick O'Neal (Silent Night, Bloody Night) as the treat's insidious distributor who is aware of the effect it has on consumers although he does not eat it himself, along with a small turn by Robocop's Adrianne Sachs and uncredited early appearances from Sorvino's daughter Mira Sorvino (Mimic), Patrick Dempsey (Can't Buy Me Love), and Eric Bogosian whose first lead would be in Cohen's Special Effects.  The 4K disc in this set features the theatrical cut while the second includes a major find in the film's original pre-release version (118:49 versus the theatrical 86:30) not as a workprint but as a fully cut and mixed version. The abrupt cuts in the theatrical version are revealed here to have definitely truncated scenes that were presumably locked in editing and mixing with some shortened openings, closings, or chunks from the middle to get to the end of scenes faster. Among the trimmed material are bits from the first lab scene discussing the ability of corporations to conceal secret formulas from the FDA – citing Coca-Cola's syrup – and Mo getting a rundown on Nicole, a significant chunk of Nicole's introductory scene including a conversation about getting Barbra Streisand to appear in The Stuff's campaign, the entirety of Mo's and Nicole's date in which he plays hardball and she seems to like it, a love scene and the morning after, the entirety of Jason's detainment at a hospital featuring a brief appearance by Rutanya Alda (Vigilante) as a psychologist and an opportunity for Brian Bloom to show off his dramatic chops doing a monologue of Poe's "The Tell-Tale Heart", and the first half of Moriarty's scene with O'Neal in which he bursts into the office and catches him with a secretary. In addition to moving some of The Stuff ads around, nearly twenty minutes have been trimmed from the first hour of the pre-release cut for the theatrical version with more scenes being slightly-shortened in the second half (Sorvino turns up at 62 minutes in the theatrical cut but at 85 minutes in the pre-release version as the result of cutting rather than scenes being moved around). A lot of additional cuts are to speed up scenes originally paced by Moriarty's delivery where he usually attempts to psychologically disarm characters, some comic bits involving Marcovicci cracking her neck, knuckles, and feet while the fate of two of the villains is milder in the pre-release version but made a little crueler by removing some ADR dialogue. The detonation of the plant that packages The Stuff is moved from the end of the raid to part of a later montage and a sequence of Black Market dealing of The Stuff as part of the addiction metaphor has been moved to the end as a surprise "It's not over" moment. The theatrical score which sounds mostly like library music from an eighties TV action movie is credited to Anthony Guefen (Deadly Eyes) but the original score by Dwight Dixon (Perfect Strangers) is synth score slathered over scenes, some of which survives in the theatrical cut. The pre-release version still feels choppy so there is possibly a better edit somewhere in between the two versions but what really seems to be the issue is that the script could have used a few more passes to better convey some of the material cut from the theatrical version. 
Video
Released theatrically and then on video by New World Pictures who imposed some cuts that result in some abrupt edits – more on that below – The Stuff came out on DVD in 2000 during Anchor Bay's heyday with an anamorphic widescreen transfer that was attractive for the time and an audio commentary by Cohen. Arrow Video released this Blu-ray/DVD combo in the UK in 2014 when the New World/Lakeshore titles were still in Image Entertainment's stranglehold stateside (their DVD was an entirely barebones affair). Arrow was able to port their Region B package over stateside in 2016. Arrow's 2160p24 HEVC 1.85:1 widescreen Dolby Vision 4K UltraHD transfer – also available concurrently in the U.K. – from the original 35mm camera negative. Like the previous HD master of the SD one, the 4K master is overall brighter, but here it works in concert with the greater delineation of color to still remain moody while revealing more shadow detail that once looked flattened out. The stop-motion animated versions of The Stuff looks more textured in close-ups but still a smoother solid mass when greater control of movement is required (the effects involving human characters taking in or expelling The Stuff look extremely rubbery but hilariously so). The new transfer reveals more so what the earlier edition did in the film's rough, patchwork shooting with the effects team having to work around footage Cohen already shot resulting in some poor bluescreen work not only in terms of outlines but also the scale of the background shots and the foreground actors as well as quick and dirty grabbed shots from guerilla location bits to oddly the dog attack scene that just seems as rushed in the shooting as in its editing. The scenes with Jason's family generally look consistent from shot to shot like an eighties sitcom, and this is also where some of the better moody lighting comes in when things get sinister.  The pre-release version on the second disc is in 1080p24 MPEG-4 AVC 1.85:1 widescreen from a 35mm print furnished by the Academy of Motion Picture Arts and Sciences that probably had little to no projection and is either spotless or has been gently cleaned up during the scanning and grading. Locked into a lower color space than the 4K and coming from a print source at least a generation removed – assuming that the original negative represented the pre-release cut before New World recut it – the image appears darker and less detailed but overall fine and the content is sufficiently interesting to overlook that it is not 4K (we presume this cut is on a second disc not because it will be dropped from the standard edition but due to space considerations on the 4K disc which features about two-and-a-half hours of 1080p video extras alongside the 2160p feature film.
Audio
The theatrical cut's mono mix is presented in clear uncompressed LPCM 2.0 while the pre-release version features an LPCM 1.0 track. The different scores and the effects are without issues but some of the production dialogue has recording issues that were mostly not rectified in post-production ADR with a couple fluctuations in levels while still remaining intelligible. Both versions feature optional English SDH subtitles which also transcribe the "infectious" jingle and commercial promos.
Extras
Neither the Arrow UK or US Blu-rays carried over the Anchor Bay commentary track but this new 4K edition includes the audio commentary by writer/director Larry Cohen from 2000 in which he discusses the changes New World imposed on the film (splitting up the opening montage of "The Stuff" commercials to different spots in the film), originally casting actor Brian Bloom for the role of Jason only to have the actor suggest using his younger brother for the part, and working with Moriarty. He also talks frankly about the production challenges including losing a prop car and an entire scene to a botched (and seemingly cruel) practical joke on Moriarty involving his son as well as shooting in unplanned snow that damaged unprotected lighting equipment and generators. He also goes in detail about the execution of the film's special effects involving Allen's stop-motion, miniatures, and an entire set manually-rocked and turned upside down by a group of teamsters for a scene where an actor and a large amount of "The Stuff" has to climb the walls and ceiling. He also reveals that Peller was well-paid for a single line. New to this edition is an audio commentary by writers and critics David Flint and Adrian Smith who note that the film is pretty divisive among Cohen fans but both appear to enjoy it while pointing out its flaws including its choppy story, noting that it is a quintessentially eighties film while also remaining timely in its themes no matter how much advertising has changed in the last forty years. They also discuss the films that inspired it including "red scare" era science fiction paranoia films – particularly the ones with cost-effective "invisible" menaces using mind control – and the string of remakes of those films in the late seventies into the eighties (also noting that Cohen worked at one point on what would become Abel Ferrara's Body Snatchers, as well as relating Cohen's responses to suggestions that it was inspired by The Blob. They also discuss Cohen's casting of Moriarty against New World's wishes and the actor's difficult reputation while also revealing that it was New World who wanted Morris while Cohen wanted the then-little known Arsenio Hall along with Cohen's fondness for casting older character actors. They also discuss the nature of The Stuff and whether it qualifies as "eco horror.  Ported from the earlier edition is the retrospective "Can't Get Enough of The Stuff" (52:09) that combined interviews with Cohen, Marcovici, effects artist Neill, producer Paul Kurta (Hell on Wheels), and critic Kim Newman. Cohen's commentary on commercialism and government regulation was inspired by the fact that the early form of Coca Cola was highly addictive because it contained a small amount of cocaine, and the government providing free cigarettes to servicemen to get them addicted when the came home. Not wanting to make a preachy film, he decided to make a film about killer ice cream, but would find that the backers and distributors did not think it was horrific enough. Cohen discusses his working relationship with Moriarty and the importance of giving actors the feeling of creative input so that they become invested in their roles while Marcovici recalls the difficulty of working with Moriarty who did not stick to the script and even incorporated lines that Cohen would throw at him off-camera. She also discusses the rigors of interacting with the effects (the firefighters foam used for some incarnations of The Stuff was made from ground-up fish bone and had a terrible smell that had the performers diving into the river after shooting the climactic scene) and the pleasures of working with the other actors including Sorvino (she does confuse Bloom with his brother when she recalls seeing him later on a soap opera). Kurka recalls Cohen's speed – sending him to grab locations when inspired and changing the script to fit them – as well as his familiarity with the sixties and seventies character actors who would populate his output. The remainder of the extras are also new to this edition starting with "Enough is Never Enough" (16:44) 2025 newly-edited featurette featuring previously unseen interviews with Cohen and producer Kurta originally shot for the 2017 documentary King Cohen: The Wild World of Filmmaker Larry Cohen. Kurta discusses casting Aiello while Cohen recalls the effects for the revolving room sequence for which he hired the crew who did the sequence from A Nightmare on Elm Street and was shocked to discover that it was powered not by a motor but by multiple men hanging on one side while others pushed on the other side. 42nd Street Memories: The Rise and Fall of America's Most Notorious Street (81:45) is a documentary from 2015 previously included on Grindhouse Releasing's Blu-ray of Pieces, 88 Films' original Blu-ray edition of Anthropophagous from their line of Kickstarter-funded restorations, and the sold out German Turbine The Last House on the Left: Legacy Collection. The disc also includes the theatrical trailer (1:34), an alternate trailer (1:10) that may be a teaser, a TV spot (0:31), an Arrow trailer (1:33) created for the original Blu-ray edition, a trailer for King Cohen: The Wild World of Filmmaker Larry Cohen (2:39), and an image gallery. 
Packaging
The limited edition first pressing comes in a slipcover with a reversible sleeve featuring original and newly commissioned artwork by Chris Barnes and an illustrated collector's booklet featuring writing on the film by Joel Harley and a new essay by Daniel Burnett.
Overall
Larry Cohen fans can never get enough of The Stuff and Arrow's 4K edition delivers enough to satiate fans.
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