‘Suitable Flesh’ Review: Heather Graham Gamely Steers an Uneasily Erotic H.P. Lovecraft Adaptation
“Suitable Flesh” bears a parting dedication to Stuart Gordon, who passed away in 2020 and is certainly missed, especially after watching this campy concoction, which revisits his beloved H.P. Lovecraft territory minus the late screen genre specialist’s knack for welding grotesque horror content to a black comedy tone.
There are some yuks (and yucks) to be had in his frequent writing collaborator Dennis Paoli’s very loose, gender-reversed riff on the cult fantasist’s lesser-regarded 1933 short story “The Thing on the Doorstep.” But director Joe Lynch haplessly plays much of this supernatural tale as an erotic thriller, the uncertainty of satirical intent leaving his actors looking silly. Releasing to limited theaters and streaming platforms on Oct. 27, it’s a movie best watched after a few libations, which might make more of the laughs play as deliberate.
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A framing device finds Dr. Dani Upton (Barbara Crampton, also a producer here) examining an apparently grisly corpse in a morgue, then going to visit a colleague turned patient in a nearby psych ward. That would be longtime best friend Dr. Elizabeth Derby (Heather Graham), also a psychiatrist, now considered highly dangerous due to her association with the aforementioned stiff. Claiming innocence, she answers Dani’s request to “tell me from the beginning” what happened.
Not long before, Liz had been seeing a client when frantic stranger Asa Waite (Judah Waite) showed up at her office without an appointment, babbling, “He wants my body.” The young man seems to be talking about his father Ephraim (Bruce Davison), and when that man calls mid-session, Asa goes into a sort of seizure from which he emerges with a dramatically different, smirkingly self-assured personality. Dr. Derby judges him to be a paranoid schizophrenic — the same diagnosis we already know she’ll receive herself, later on. But once he reverts to form, Asa insists he’s under threat from some malevolent exterior force.
Immediately starting to pile up ethical violations by giving him her private phone number, Liz finds she can’t get the boy out of her head, even when making love with neglected himbo husband Edward (an oft-shirtless Johnathon Schaech). The next morning, she crosses another line by driving to the home address this new patient had given her. There, she finds Asa absent, but his father alarmingly present — as well as a book of necromancy-type occult intel featuring illustrations that very much resemble Lovecraft’s favorite tentacled “cosmic entity” Cthulhu.
A second such visit takes a much more drastic turn, making it clear that Asa, his father and now Liz are beleaguered by some ancient spirit which can occupy their bodies and control their actions at will. This peril is rendered yet more awkward by the nasty thingy’s prodigious appetite for smoke, drink, violence and sex.
It’s the shagging that “Flesh” chooses to emphasize, albeit with a rather mundane sense of kinky abandon and somewhat obvious body-double inserts for nudity. The moaning saxophone of Steve Moore’s pedestrian score, de rigueur shots of rotating overhead fan blades, and Lily Bolles’ bland production design unfortunately tamp down this story’s macabre elements while heightening its cheesy “Body of Evidence”-grade eroticism.
All this may well be intended as tongue-in-cheek by the script, but Lynch’s indelicate handling arrives at something more subjugated by heavy-breathing clichés than ironically playful towards them. His actors get hung out to dry, convincing neither in that steamy mode nor in their escalating multiple-personality acts, as the evil spirit plays leapfrog between different bodies.
When we get back to the framing device about 75 minutes in, the present-tense action back at the protagonists’ medical institution of employment does whip itself into a giddy froth of gory, identity-switching excess. Nonetheless, it’s frustrating that the film doesn’t make even more of this bizarro climax — Lynch lacks the flair for over-the-top yet concise staging and tone that Gordon brought to similarly extreme finales in his own Lovecraft films, notably “Re-Animator” and “From Beyond.”
This enterprise represents something of a reunion for personnel from those movies, which Paoli, Crampton and returning producer Brian Yuzna were also conspicuously involved in. If the spirit is willing, the skill set on tap falls short of reincarnating those cult classics’ uniquely outré tenor. Game performers get reduced to wide-eyed caricatures, and the level of certifiably intentional humor here is unfortunately clinched by the closing credits’ use of children’s songwriter Barry Louis Polisar’s “I Need You Like a Donut Needs a Hole.”
Likewise, the story’s more hallucinatory aspects get realized via such strenuous but unimaginative devices such as David Matthews’ camera spinning 360 degrees like a pinwheel. There’s no lack of effort here, but too often “Suitable Flesh” just feels effortful, rather than the outrageous good time aimed for.
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