Joe Lynch directing a script by the legendary Dennis Paoli (Re-Animator and From Beyond) conjures up his own eldritch psychosexual horror by gender swapping and modernising H.P. Lovecraft’s ‘The Thing on the Doorstep.’ Produced by Brian Yuzna and Barbara Crampton, Suitable Flesh is both in line with Stuart Gordon’s cult Miskatonic works, and a creature of its own.
You might not know your Chuthlu from your shoggoths, have no idea who The Old Ones are, not know the difference between Arkham and Innesmouth – and in Suitable Flesh you don’t have to as it is a self-contained narrative, but oh what joy the film is if you do. Suitable Flesh is richer if you know old Ephraim (Bruce Davison) is pouring over a copy of ‘The Necronomicon’ and it has a wonderful meta-textual relationship to Stuart Gordon’s Re-Animator and From Beyond not the least by having Barbara Crampton appear as a lead. Suitable Flesh almost winds back time to the 80s era of Gordon’s B-movie glory. It’s outrageous, darkly funny, camp as all get out, and also filled with enough goo and gore (often coupled with softcore sex) that it has all the retro elements down pat.
The film opens in Miskatonic Hospital where Doctor Dani Upton (Barbara Crampton) peers down upon a lump of flesh barely recognisable as being once a person. “He was beautiful once,” she tells the morgue attendant who responds, “They’re all the same on the inside.” Doctor Upton then moves to attend to a patient she knows well locked in a padded cell. Her best friend and colleague Doctor Elizabeth Derby (Heather Graham) who desperately asks, “Did they cremate the body? Is he really dead?” Dani calmly tells Beth that she must know how she is presenting – “Paranoid schizophrenia” – and from this point Beth narrates the events that have led her to be a murderer and locked in a psychiatric cell.
“It all started when he knocked on my door.” He is a young Miskatonic University student Asa Waite (Judah Lewis). A young man who presented at Beth’s private psychiatric practice exhibiting signs of paranoia and multiple personality disorder. Asa is terrified of receiving calls from his father, terrified of going home, and then after answering a call becomes a very different person – rebellious, sexually provocative, mercurial. Despite all her professional ethics Beth gets a little too involved with the handsome boy’s case – ostensibly she wants to use him as a study for MPD, but there is something that attracts her to him, something that causes her to fantasise about him while having sex with her husband Eddie (Jonathan Schaech).
Before long Beth is way over her head. She visits Asa’s house and meets his father, Ephraim. A man of cold riddles and threatening sexual violence who is on his last legs due to a heart condition. Beth tries to reason with him about Asa’s condition, but Ephraim is mostly disinterested “The boy has never been much earthly use,” until he spouts, “He’s my son. He’s my salvation.” A copy of Beth’s book ‘Out of Mind/Body’ a popularised thesis on the schizoid mind is in the home, so too a certain text by Abdul Alhazred. Ephraim attacks Beth with a particular knife and her blood soaks on to the pages of the grimoire known to be a threat to the sanity of anyone who reads it.
It all gets very messy and very gooey from here on in. Ephraim, Asa, and Beth become a pass the parcel for a chain smoking and decidedly horny ancient being who body hops through a spoken curse. Joe Lynch understands he is making a soapy styled erotic thriller with the lore of Lovecraft running through its veins. Almost everyone gives oddly hammy performances but that’s the point. Heather Graham goes from overly concerned doctor to hard drinking sexual fetishist. Judah Lewis goes from shy and scared to seductive and dangerous. Psychiatric terms like “transference” take on a new meaning as the thing puppets its human vessels. Its throwback exploitation meets horror and delightfully so.
“How much I enjoyed the use of your body,” has a double meaning after the Asa version has sex with Beth and transfers psychically into her. Laughing he says, “When people say go fuck yourself, you can say you have.” All of this goes on with the corpse and severed head of Ephraim in the same room. Joe Lynch is having so much fun and he really wants you to have it too – if you’re okay with consenting to the spectacle. The characters have no choice because the entity isn’t really bothered with human notions like will and self-determination. It laughs at such petty matters and teases anyone who thinks they have a choice.
There are so many call-backs to Gordon’s work. Beth once covered up a disastrous affair Dani had with one of her schizophrenia patients (From Beyond). Severed heads keep talking. Corpses refuse to die no matter how dead they should be. Secret basements, bizarre symbols, handcuffs. It’s all fun and games for the entity that doesn’t care about humans at all and just sees them as a vessel for their perverse desire. Barbara Crampton has dealt with some gross Lovecraftian horrors in her time, all doing their best to defile her flesh or make her a part of their sexual fetishism. It is a joy to watch her vape through this gonzo take on her many previously imperilled characters. But, of course, Doctor beware!
Suitable Flesh is a brilliant meta-fiction. It succeeds at being a disorienting horror film with slime oozing through its narrative. The film reeks of deliberately cheap but it’s anything but. H.P. Lovecraft essentially wrote pulp tales that over time became elevated to interconnected and vast mythologies of a world that exists beyond the rational. Lovecraft might not have been much chop as a person, but he was one hell of a world builder. There are so many adaptations of his work that it’s difficult to keep count, but few have been as important as Gordon’s. He understood that the palpable pleasure of Lovecraft’s work wasn’t just in its strangeness, but in its anthologised pulp background. Joe Lynch builds upon that legacy. The film isn’t just H.P. Lovecraft, it’s psychic contagion through bodily fluids and erotic dreams, it’s metaphorically awakened pineal glands (although this time not quite so phallic). “The future is female,” the entity laughs, “And so am I.” Suitable Flesh winks at the audience and dares them to be a voyeur and revel in its profanity; Joe Lynch has made a cult classic to sit beside the ultra-camp cult classics it homages and knows so well. If only there were a Jeffrey Combs cameo it would be absolute perfection.
Director: Joe Lynch
Cast: Heather Graham, Barbara Crampton, Judah Lewis
Writer: Dennis Paoli, (based on a story by H.P. Lovecraft)
