“She was dark, smallish, and very good-looking except for over-protuberant eyes; but something in her expression alienated extremely sensitive people.” That’s how H. P. Lovecraft described the character of Asenath Waite in his 1937 story “The Thing at the Doorstep.” In Suitable Flesh, a roller-coaster adaptation of that Lovecraft tale, director Joe Lynch, working from a script by Dennis Paoli, ingeniously tweaks the eldritch original in a minor Grand Guignol miracle that resurrects the spirit of Re-Animator and From Beyond.
The carnage begins in an institution where, as a horrifically battered body gets zipped up in the morgue, its living doll counterpoint is kept in a padded cell: Dr. Elizabeth Derby (Heather Graham) is being kept in isolation after she brutally killed a patient; her friend and colleague Dr. Daniella Upton (Barbara Crampton) tries to get to the bottom of things, which of course sends us back into gauzy flashbacks that involve a troubled youth (Judah Lewis), stately Victorian house and a white-haired madman (Bruce Davison).
Fans of Stuart Gordon’s ‘80s output will already recognize a key resonance: Crampton is a veteran of Re-Animator and From Beyond, both of which were adapted from Lovecraft stories by Paoli. And in a horror landscape that seems to regurgitate genre classics with less and less success, director Joe Lynch (whose credits include the unconvincing crime drama Everly) turns on the inspiration. Really, he turns it on: the film’s fevered (yet not particularly explicit) sex scenes equate sexuality with a totally upended visual axis, the camera pivoting along the general area of physical union as the varying couples reach their common goals.
Davison (you must remember Willard) brings the horror vibes back yet another generation. Yet while Lynch and colleagues pay clear homage to a wealth of genre legends including Brian De Palma (the split screen deployed here at just the right moment), this all still comes off as fresh Flesh indeed. That’s thanks to the spirited, fragmented performances. Judah Lewis’s Asa Waite (one of a few gender changes from Lovecraft) is a suitably creepy young person, his shifts from tormented teen to possessed monster totally effective. Davison only has one role to play, but he plays that to the patriarchal hilt.
But in the end, it’s Graham who has to carry the careening plot, and she does with plenty of flair. Those big peepers, which in Boogie Nights perhaps conveyed a corrupted innocence, here telegraph both her characters’ carnal desires and their terror. Note the plural “characters”; one is hesitant to spoil a certain twist — you will probably figure it out soon enough — but at the half-hour mark the already loopy plot takes an unexpected if probably inevitable turn.
In a director’s statement, Lynch explains that Re-Animator was one of his formative movies growing up. So it’s remarkable that Lynch has so skillfully channeled his inspiration without it coming off like a mere retread. The original script for Suitable Flesh was actually something Paoli had been working on with Gordon before the director’s death in 2020. For this jump-started script, Paoli applied a number of role reversals to Lovecraft’s characters, and that switch doesn’t feel tacked on; though Graham and Crampton both play roles originally written as male, the dynamic may shift but they remain true to the spirit, if not the letter, of Lovecraft all the same.
What a hoot this is! If you are at all a fan of Re-Animator and From Beyond, you will find this flesh most suitable.
Photo courtesy of RLJE Films/Shudder
The post Suitable Flesh appeared first on Spectrum Culture.