Suitable Flesh (2023)

 Suitable Flesh materialised on Shudder recently and I watched it almost straight away.

I had low expectations.  They were not met.  I mean that in a bad way.

I knew, going in, it was a product of the Troma-style group of film makers associated with Stuart Gordon, a film maker often but inaccurately described as an 'adapter' and sometimes even a 'great' or even the 'greatest' adapter of Lovecraft's fiction.

This accolade only makes sense if you have a) never read any of Lovecraft's fiction and b) never seen a Stuart Gordon film.  If you have done both, you'll know even if Stuart Gordon was the only person trying to adapt Lovecraft, he wouldn't be the best.  Some non-Euclidean director existing only in the curious space beyond the walls of Keziah Mason's would be doing a better job, even if the films produced could only be viewed though special spectacles manufactured by Migo and had the unfortunate side effect of rendering the viewer insane.

Gordon was a terrible hack.  But at least his 'adaptations' of Lovecraft had a sense of fun.  Reanimator is trash in the good sense - its absurd, and knows it, and leans in on its own absurdity.  Its a stupid film, and a travesty of the original tale (even if Herbert West: Reanimator was not one of Lovecraft's more serious efforts), but everyone seems to be having fun and it's enjoyable enough on that level.  Dagon, in places, actually seemed promising ... But then turned into a bizarre love (but not Lovecraft) triangle with extra exploitative boob-mutilation.  But beneath the sleaze there was a potentially good take on the Shadow Over Innsmouth struggling to get out, before being brutally smothered.

Suitable Flesh - a very loose adaptation of The Thing on the Doorstep - hasn't got any of these redeeming features.  The portends were (almost) promising.  Gordon was not directing, having died back in 2020.  They managed to cast Heather Graham in the lead role.  She's an actor I admire but perhaps this should have been a warning.  I have been baffled by Graham's career, which started well and then went precisely nowhere, in spite of her ability.

Heather Graham tries to make Elizabeth a credible character.  Her performance isn't bad.  But the role she's got to play out is terrible, an incoherent mess of a character who acts like an idiot at every possible opportunity.  Judah Lewis is also good as Asa / Ephraim Waite.  But they are fighting against forces stronger than they are - a dire script and clumsy direction.

Heather Graham does everything she can to make this stinking corpse come to life - but it isn't enough

The story?  Dr Elizabeth Derby has been confined to an asylum after murdering a young male patient.  Turns out, however, it wasn't actually the rather sweet young man she killed but his creepy dad who had used some magical thang to borrow his son's body.  And (important) if he does it three times he gets to be you for keepsies.

So sometimes it is likeable young Asa and other time it is nasty ol' Ephraim peeping out through those moody eyes.  Doesn't bother Liz too much, though, because almost immediately drops her pants and does the wild thing with Asa / Ephraim.  Yup.  Even though she thinks he is her patient.  And even though Ephraim's dead body is lying on the floor right beside them.

Turns out the sex is magic and I don't just mean it is good, I mean it is really was magic because Asa / Ephraim hasn't just filled Liz with his little babies ... he's filled her with his dark and twisted soul and suddenly she's in Asa's body, Ephraim's in hers and Asa is lying about on the floor watching his dad use his body to bang his therapist.  Whatcha make of that, Sigmund?  Literal transference!

Asa chops off Ephraim's head, which really means Ephraim is chopping off Asa's head which gets him nicely out of the way.  Liz runs away and - unaccountably - tells her husband about banging the kid.  He flips out.  But Ephraim - now a sort of supernatural marriage counsellor - possesses Elizabeth again and - after checking out her girl bits and deciding it's slick to be a chick - persuades hubby its all good by humping his brains out, while the real Liz languishes in the basement of Ephraim's house, until Barbara Crampton shows up and rescues her.

Giovannie Cruz is mentally composing a letter firing her agent even as this scene is filmed

Then Liz kills Asa / Ephraim, though decides not to bother finish the job properly by chopping his head off, just running him over repeatedly.  She gets taken to the asylum and Ephraim gets taken to the morgue which happen to be in exactly the same place.  And at a crucial moment Dr Barbara Crampton decides to leave her psychotic and vulnerable patient unrestrained and watched by two dimwitted guards, rather than just LOCKING THE FUCKING CELL DOOR and ... oh, souls go flying around all over the place but the important thing is I DON'T CARE because it is really, really stupid, dull and obvious.

The film is too cheap, shallow and - in the end - monumentally dull.   There is some bawdy potential in the story.  Written like that, it sounds like a tacky, exploitative riff on the source material.  If the relationship between Elizabeth and Asa had been fleshed (pun intentional) out a bit more, and if there had been a sense of chemistry between them, or some sort of explanation for her disregarding of every ethical expectation of a therapist, then the whole thing might have found itself somewhere interesting.  We might not have had much - a sort of supernatural version of Basic Instinct - but it would have been better than this lukewarm mess.

It might even have been mildly subversive to have Graham - now in her 50s - shed her clothes a bit more thoroughly and invite us to ogle a middle-aged woman and raise some questions about our attitudes towards older women expressing sexual desire and presenting themselves as desirable objects.  But the sex scenes - though frequent enough - are more cringey and awkward as Elizabeth and Asa pant and gurn at each other.

The idea of soul transference / possession is interesting - Lovecraft clearly thought so as he used it repeatedly in his work.  It might have been interesting to portray an angry entitled man inhabiting a woman's body - in the original story Ephraim Waite possesses first his daughter, Asenath, and then her husband, after finding his luckless child's sexually restricted role too limiting.  But things never get beyond the level explored in Hammers' nonsensical Dr Jekyll and Sister Hyde, where the very first thing Hyde does, having transferred from male to female is check out his / her new boobies.  

Martine Breswick - a spiritual predecessor to Heather Graham - does what is required of her in Dr Jekyll and Sister Hyde

Understandable, perhaps, and maybe even realistic - everyone likes new toy - but not really very elevated.  And that is as far as both Dr Jekyll and Sister Hyde and Suitable Flesh go.

But, hey, I am not fussy.  I can enjoy lurid trash as much as anyone else.  But this film manages to be trashy in all the wrong ways.  It is neither sexy, nor fun, nor gross.  It just bores.

Star Rating: * (For Graham's heroic - but unsuccessful - efforts to make this work)