Body-swap movies are rarely as demonic as Suitable meat (now streaming on Hulu), a bold adaptation of the great asshole H.P. Lovecraft’s Cthulhu mythos story, “The Thing on the Doorstep.” As you may know about Lovecraft, his work dealt with terrible cosmic evil, and here it manifests itself in a quasi-erotic tale of demonic possession, but it’s not necessarily like all those other demonic possession movies with Catholic exorcists and foaming at the mouth and worn-out Christ-power-forcing-you crap. No, Lovecraft’s work was deeper and more complex, and here director Joe Lynch (Point blank, Violence) guiding Heather Graham and “scream queen” Barbara Crampton through the weirdness, to rather lackluster effect.
SUITABLE MEATSTREAM IT OR SKIP IT?
The essence: Camera in the body bag! We unzip it and look at the doctor and the coroner. “It’s impossible to tell it’s a person,” is the summary. Oh my God. But these two… they’ve seen it all before. The doctor is Daniella Upton (Barbara Crampton), and she’s interested in what happened to this poor corpse. She heads to the local padded cell to visit Elizabeth Derby (Heather Graham). They’re old friends, fellow psychiatrists. No one expected Elizabeth to be the one who was crazy in the head, and that’s what makes her flashback so damn interesting: it was a normal day of therapy for patients until… knock Knock knockElizabeth opens her office door and there’s Asa (Judah Lewis). He’s read her famous tome on out-of-body experiences and thinks she can help him with a crazy situation involving his father and all of a sudden he starts convulsing and having seizures and when he’s done, it’s like he’s a totally different person. He gropes her aggressively. down there and she fires him, but not before giving him her personal number, because if there’s one thing that surpasses sexual assault, it’s the potential to turn the abuser into a major case study.
Elizabeth returns home to her husband Edward (Johnathon Schaech), who gives off loser vibes, and when they play hide-and-seek later that night, the guy’s noticeable lack of sexual charisma confirms his loser status. What helps her get through the lackluster sexual situation is imagining young Asa as her partner. You do what you gotta do to get over it, right? The next day, her concern for Asa’s well-being (read: pretty sure she wants to jump his bones) brings her home, where she meets his father (Bruce Davison), who acts strangely and eccentrically in all sorts of disturbing ways, including but not limited to threatening her with a knife and cutting her up a little bit and, as she runs off, he lays the knife down on a book full of Cthulhu drawings and the pages soak up his blood. Now, if I’ve learned anything from death metal lyrics, it’s that this development isn’t good for anyone. And if that is indeed the “Necronomicon” that is absorbing your plasma well, let it be known that it makes “The Lesser Key of Solomon” look like “The Monster at the End of This Book”.
You’d think Elizabeth, being in her right mind, would be able to shrug off all this weirdness at this point, but nooooo, she has to be obsessed with either helping or studying Asa, or sleeping with him, which happens during another weird encounter with the guy and his father. Interestingly, there’s a moment where Asa verbally casts out some sort of nasty enchantment, and if I’m not mistaken, he temporarily swaps brains with Elizabeth, or did he just transfer some sort of malignant entity into her skull? The next day, she tries to piece it all together. Was it all a hallucination or something? Did Asa drug her? [something really hideous that wasnât the sex or the mind-transference; NO SPOILERS, yâknow] Did it really happen? It doesn’t make any mundane sense, the key word here being “mundane.” But suffice it to say that Elizabeth doesn’t end up in the asylum just for committing adultery. Oh no. It’s much more complicated than that.
What movies will it remind you of? Crampton is a credited producer here, and it makes sense: she made a name for herself as a horror icon with two Lovecraft-derived cult classics from the ’80s, Resuscitator and From beyondBoth deserve to be reviewed and share a scriptwriter with Suitable meat by Dennis Paoli.
Performance worth watching: Graham has been flying under the radar for a while, but Suitable meat finds her capable of carrying a tonally complicated film that is fully committed to its crazy, sexy, scary, trashy vibe.
Memorable dialogue: Elizabeth, clearly She is not quite herselfShe offers her husband and the policemen a drink: “Me? I’m a good person. Cognac?”
Sex and skin: Lots of stuff! Semi-explicit sex, topless, some butts.
Our opinion: Suitable meat It’s a pretty big nut job, and there’s a nagging feeling that it could have been even crazier, and therefore more memorable. But vestiges of it linger in your brain for a while, especially the psych-sexy stuff and the super-gross practical effects, all the prosthetics and the reddish-black corn syrup splattered and smeared here and there. Tone-wise, Lynch veers off course with satire and exaggeration, landing in a provocative, surreal neo-sleaze form that’s part late-night cable soap opera, part ’80s horror movie.
The possession plot demands multifaceted performances from several cast members, none more inspired to open their eyes and smile disconcertingly than Graham; her work here is at once earnest, funny, and disturbing. Where the acting is consistently believable, it feels like Lynch left a few points in the field, whether due to the limits of budget or imagination. It only flirts with the psychosexual components of Elizabeth’s motivations, and its sometimes overt Sam Raimi-isms don’t land with the punch that will send horror fans into fits of “gotta rewind that part”-style glee. But it’s gory and passionate and weird enough to raise an eyebrow or two on occasion, and satisfying enough as a sleazy throwback thrill delivery mechanism.
Our calling: PASS IT ON. Suitable meat It’s more than a little entertaining for fans of devilish strangeness.
John Serba is a freelance writer and film critic based in Grand Rapids, Michigan.
