A once-respected psychiatrist (Heather Graham) watches her life plummet into a nightmare of hysteria and carnage in ’80s-influenced, erotic body-hopping horror Suitable Flesh. It’s an expert pastiche, writes Matt Glasby.
Suitable Flesh
For a revered writer who died in 1937, HP Lovecraft’s works took quite some time to reach the screen. Indeed, beyond the odd outlier such as 1970’s The Dunwich Horror, it wasn’t until Stuart Gordon’s Re-Animator (1985) and From Beyond (1986) that he even began to get his movie dues.
Today, with the likes of TV’s Lovecraft Country and the Nic Cage-starring Color Out of Space, it’s a different matter. But for this erotic, body-hopping horror, director Joe Lynch (perhaps still best known for 2007’s Wrong Turn 2: Dead End) returns not to the source, but to Gordon’s outrageous, top-of-the-VHS-shop-shelf excesses.
Based on Lovecraft’s 1933 short story The Thing on the Doorstep, it reteams Gordon contributors such as writer Dennis Paoli, producer Brian Yuzna and actor/producer Barbara Crampton to create a real family affair—depending how fucked-up your family is.
At the Miskatonic Medical School in Arkham, Massachusetts (a nod to one of Lovecraft’s regular settings), we meet psychiatrist Dr Dani Upton (Crampton) who’s admitting a new patient—and former colleague—Elizabeth Derby (Heather Graham) after some unspecified act of extreme violence. “OK, tell me from the beginning,” she instructs, and we wind back to see happened.
Derby is a psychiatrist, and content in her “suitable life”, until she meets Asa (Judah Lewis), a traumatised young man who appears to be suffering from dissociative identity disorder. At least that would explain why he fears the malign influence of his father Ephraim (Bruce Davison), has a dramatic seizure in Derby’s office, then begins speaking like someone else entirely. “You shouldn’t believe any young cunt when he starts talking crazy,” he tells Derby. Well, quite.
Soon she’s visiting his home to have feverish clothes-on sex as a synthy saxophone plays, kicking off a twisted tale of transference as Ephraim tries each new body on for size.
Though she proved herself adept at both as far back as Paul Thomas Anderson’s Boogie Nights (1997), Graham can’t quite mine the full tragicomic potential of Derby’s situation. Still, she’s clearly having plenty of Cage-style fun when, possessed by Ephraim, she gives herself the once-over and declares, “This is a magnificent body!” or vamps to the cops, “I’m just dandy. Brandy?” No wonder husband Edward (Jonathan Schaeach) looks like all his Christmases have come at once.
From the rotating title cards, which speak of a world careering out of control, to the canted angles and iris wipes, the film seems to take place in an overheated B-movie universe where anything can happen. Indeed, the real transference isn’t between Lynch and Lovecraft, but Lynch and Gordon.
Among several memorable gore scenes, a standout comes when Asa cuts off Ephraim’s head, only for his eyes to open and blood to pour out of his mouth as he pleads, “Help me!” “Too much?” asks Asa, pretty much looking straight to camera.
But Gordon went quite a lot further—remember what happened to Dr Hill’s severed head in Re-Animator?—and perhaps Lynch could have done too. What we’re left with is an expert pastiche: gory, horny and gleefully OTT.
