{"id":128711,"date":"2023-06-12T04:40:33","date_gmt":"2023-06-12T03:40:33","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/www.scifinow.co.uk\/?p=128711"},"modified":"2023-10-19T07:47:01","modified_gmt":"2023-10-19T06:47:01","slug":"suitable-flesh-review-a-lovingly-batsht-resurrection-of-stuart-gordons-lovecraftian-spirit","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/www.scifinow.co.uk\/news\/suitable-flesh-review-a-lovingly-batsht-resurrection-of-stuart-gordons-lovecraftian-spirit\/","title":{"rendered":"Suitable Flesh Review: A lovingly batsh*t resurrection of Stuart Gordon\u2019s Lovecraftian spirit"},"content":{"rendered":"

Suitable Flesh<\/b><\/em> begins with a POV shot from inside a body bag being zipped open.<\/span>\u00a0<\/span>As psychiatrist Dr Dani Upton (Barbara Crampton) and the morgue\u2019s pathologist (Graham Skipper) look down, Dani comments: \u201cIt\u2019s impossible to tell that\u2019s a person, much less who it is.\u201d As Dani moves on to visit her friend Dr Elizabeth Derby (Heather Graham), a schizophrenia specialist who is now herself a patient in the psych ward, \u2018Beth\u2019 will ask in a crazed panic: \u201cDid they cremate the body? Is he dead? Really <\/em>dead?\u201d, before launching into the story of how she came to be there – a story that will constitute much of the film\u2019s narrative until it loops all the way back to the here and now in Beth\u2019s padded cell, and beyond that to a new chapter in this ancient myth.<\/p>\n

As text reveals, this prologue is all unfolding at the Miskatonic Medical School, Arkham Massachusetts – a fictional institution familiar not just from the writings of H.P. Lovecraft, but from Stuart Gordon\u2019s Lovecraft adaptation Re-Animator <\/strong><\/em>(1985) which, like Suitable Flesh<\/strong><\/em>, was written by Dennis Paoli, and starred Crampton (who is also a producer here), and featured lengthy sequences in the Medical School\u2019s morgue where the dead would come back to life. Beth\u2019s story is different, but like Julian Richards\u2019 Reborn <\/strong><\/em>(2018) – which also featured Crampton – and James Wan\u2019s Malignant <\/strong><\/em>(2021), this latest film from director Joe Lynch lovingly resurrects the shriller, schlockier aspects of Reagan-era horror.<\/p>\n

When Beth is visited by a new young patient Asa Waite (Judah Lewis) who, following a seizure, appears to change personalities before her eyes from a nervous, shy student to someone altogether more direct and sexually forward, she finds herself unable to stop thinking about him, even when she is having sex with her loving husband Eddie (Jonathan Schaech) – an oh-so-Eighties softcore scene right down to the accompanying sax on the score.\u00a0When Beth\u2019s house call to Asa ends in passionate intercourse between her and the young man alongside the corpse of his father Ephraim (Bruce Davison)<\/span>, and in a transfer of more than just bodily fluids, what seems like standard erotic thriller fare quickly gives way to something wilder and weirder. For the horny, cigarette-smoking entity that is here fucking with people\u2019s minds as much as their bodies will prove very hard to kill, even by the tried-and-tested methods of defenestration borrowed from William Friedkin\u2019s The Exorcist <\/strong><\/em>(1973).<\/p>\n

In a body-swapping scenario that riffs on Jack Sholder\u2019s The Hidden<\/strong><\/em> (1987), Gregory Hoblit\u2019s Fallen<\/strong><\/em> (1988) and Justin McConnell\u2019s Lifechanger<\/strong><\/em> (2018), the principal cast shows great versatility in playing their own individual characters, the creature that occasionally inhabits their bodies, and the character whom it has last possessed, in a pass-the-parcel of identity that encompasses considerable latitude for sexual (and transsexual) expperimentation, and leaves the viewer, like Dani in the opening scene, finding it \u201cimpossible to tell that\u2019s a person, much less who it is.\u201d Although as the morgue pathologist had said: \u201cThey all look pretty much the same on the inside.\u201d<\/p>\n

After all, the vanities that make us different from each other – our age, our gender, our sex – mean little to an eternal, transdimensional being that merely regards us as transient vessels for its pleasures. Meanwhile Lynch too finds sensational new forms to keep the old ones alive, in this lovingly batshit resurrection of Gordon\u2019s Lovecraftian spirit.<\/p>\n

Suitable Flesh had its world premi\u00e8re at Tribeca Film Festival<\/a>. It will be released in UK cinemas on 27 October.<\/strong><\/em><\/p>\n

\u00a0<\/strong><\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

Joe Lynch\u2019s Eighties-inflected erotic thriller cum psychodrama cum body-swapping horror worships at the sacrificial altar of Stuart Gordon.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":52,"featured_media":128712,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"quote","meta":{"MSN_Categories":"Entertainment","MSN_Publish_Option":true,"MSN_Is_Local_News":false,"MSN_Is_AIAC_Included":"Empty","MSN_Location":"[]","MSN_Add_Feature_Img_On_Top_Of_Post":false,"MSN_Has_Custom_Author":false,"MSN_Custom_Author":"","MSN_Has_Custom_Canonical_Url":false,"MSN_Custom_Canonical_Url":""},"categories":[6954,3,8],"tags":[7664],"acf":[],"jetpack_sharing_enabled":true,"jetpack_featured_media_url":"https:\/\/www.scifinow.co.uk\/wp-content\/uploads\/2023\/05\/Suitable-Fish.jpg","_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.scifinow.co.uk\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/128711"}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.scifinow.co.uk\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.scifinow.co.uk\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.scifinow.co.uk\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/52"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.scifinow.co.uk\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=128711"}],"version-history":[{"count":6,"href":"https:\/\/www.scifinow.co.uk\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/128711\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":131321,"href":"https:\/\/www.scifinow.co.uk\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/128711\/revisions\/131321"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.scifinow.co.uk\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media\/128712"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.scifinow.co.uk\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=128711"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.scifinow.co.uk\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=128711"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.scifinow.co.uk\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=128711"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}