The Stuff: Limited Edition - 4K Blu-ray Review

[Michael Scott]

The Stuff: Limited Edition



Movie:
Video:
Audio:
Extras:
Final Score:


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Movie
Do any of you remember when the 1937 brand “Krispy Kreme” became extremely popular in the 2006-2010 era? They were EVERYWHERE! You couldn’t look at a street corner and not see one of the gigantic donut shops, with hundreds of people lined up to get multi-dozen boxes of their glazed raised donuts, which took the United States by storm in the early 2000s. Then, after four or five years of total domination, the bubble burst, and the stores started closing one by one. Now Krispy Kreme is relegated to less than 400 stores nationwide, and you mostly see them inside of pre-packaged Walmart or Target boxes for sale rather than littering every single street corner as they were 15 years ago. In a small way, their meteoric rise to fame without anyone knowing HOW they made those donuts literally melt in your mouth mirrors that of 1985’s The Stuff.

Ala The Live, The Stuff takes a lightly tongue-in-cheek look at American consumerism, and placing it inside of a horror lens. It may not have the big budget (comparatively) or the sardonic wit of Rowdy Roddy Piper at the helm, but the 1985 film viciously pokes fun at the advertising market, as well as laying a good heaping blame on the consumers who continue to keep these greed peddlers in business. The film starts with some random miner finding a white substance bubbling up out of the Earth in small town Georgia, and realizes that it tastes REALLY good (why on God’s green earth would you go up to something bubbling up out of the ground and taste it is beyond me, though). Fast forward a few years, and said white substance is being sold in every grocery store and gas station in the nation. However, nobody knows what it is, how it’s made, or just the fact that everyone and their mother loves it. The ice cream business has nearly been put out of business overnight, and the petroleum industry really wants to figure out a way to copy it and get even richer themselves.

And this is where our protagonist David (Michael Moriarty) comes in. He’s highly skilled at corporate espionage, and the Petroleum bigwigs have hired him to infiltrate the corporate ladder of “The Stuff” (yes, that’s what they called it) company and extricate what information he can. And while David is the best in the business, even he runs into some obstacles in getting any information out of the people who will talk to him, let alone the ones he can’t. Every lead he chases down turns into a dead end (sometimes quite literally, dead) until he finds some help in the form of a young boy named Jason (Scott Bloom) who swears up and down that “The Stuff” has taken over his family. Now the a little more info, David decides to head straight to the heart of Georgia and try to find out just what’s in those gigantic tankers full of white goodness before the entirety of the nation is taken over by a malevolent entity.
The Stuff is heavily tongue-in-cheek, and doesn’t fit the motif of your average 80s horror movie at all. While most of us are used to slashers, gore fests, and supernatural horror bits, The Stuff borrows heavily from the 1950s and 1960s Sci-fi movies with a dash of body horror thrown in for good measure. But that being said, the body horror is exceptionally light and fluffy (excuse the obvious pun) here, with a lot more emphasis placed upon the scathing criticism of modern consumerist culture. There’s some bodies exploding, some white goo trying to come out and attack people, but most of the film can best be described as a Jonathan Winters comedy mixed with The Outer Limits. And while it’s most DEFINITELY goofy and out there, The Stuff is a fun watch that doesn’t require you to be a gore hound to enjoy.




Rating:

Rated R By the MPAA




Video:

Much like most of Arrow’s releases, they have done an in house remaster of the film in 4K for this home theater release, correcting the very VERY slight misframing that their 2016 Blu-ray had (it was accidentally framed at 1.83:1 instead of 1.85:1), and the results are really REALLY nice. According to the release notes, the remaster was done by going back to the 35mm OCN and then regraded in SDR, HDR, and Dolby Vision at Dragon Post, and the 35mm print of the included “Pre-Release” version of the film via Academy of Motion Picture Arts and Sciences Film Archive.

Comparing against my Arrow Blu-ray, I noticed right off the bat that this is a fairly substantial improvement over the 1080p disc. The Blu-ray had a very obvious red push to it that made everything look just a tad ruddy, which has been redone for the 4K master. Colors look much more natural, with skin tones leaning back towards a more even look. Fine details are superb in most shots, rendering clothing, faces, and shows off the green screen technology used for many of the shots a bit TOO well, if you know what I mean. There are some inconsistencies throughout that could be source-related, such as the vertical line right around the 40-minute mark as Jason escapes his house in the night, or the 1 hour and 11 minute (ish) mark where he’s sneaking through the cave. Overall, the end results speak for themselves. It’s not a perfect transfer, but the image upgrade over the previous Blu-ray is well worth it, and this is by FAR the best I’ve ever seen the film.

While there is no Blu-ray included in the set in terms of a clone of the feature film presentation, Arrow has restored the long-coveted “Pre-Release” version of the film, which sports over 35 minutes of new material, a different score, and a 1.0 PCM audio track. The image here is definitely not nearly as taken care of as the 35mm final product that Arrow pulled the 4K master from, but it’s definitely watchable and kind of a cool addition for fans of the film (now if we could only get the lost cut of Hard Target, and I’d die a happy man)





Audio:

While the 4K UHD features a 2.0 LPCM Mono track instead of the older Blu-rays' 1.0 LPCM Mono, I honestly can’t tell a difference between the two. The track is reasonably aggressive, with a nice forward-heavy mix that features some awesome “gloopy” bits that accentuate the creepy nature of the dangerous marshmallow crème-like villains of the film. Dialog is rendered cleanly and clearly in the mains, and naturally, this isn’t going to have any surround activity. While relatively simple, the audio manages to incorporate some of the more gonzo elements of the horror/comedy and be a bit more rousing than I remember. It’s never going to be a fully fledged surround track, but this is a very solid replication of what I remember hearing from the 35mm print viewing in San Francisco that I attended about 15 years ago.






Extras:

Disc One - 4K UHD
• Brand new audio commentary by writers and critics David Flint and Adrian Smith
• Archival audio commentary by writer/director Larry Cohen
• Can't Get Enough of The Stuff: Making Larry Cohen's Classic Creature Feature, a documentary featuring Larry Cohen, producer Paul Kurta, actress Andrea Marcovicci, mechanical makeup effects artist Steve Neill, and critic Kim Newman
• Enough is Never Enough, a newly edited featurette featuring previously unseen interviews with director Larry Cohen and producer Paul Kurta, originally shot for the 2017 documentary King Cohen
• 42nd Street Memories: The Rise and Fall of America's Most Notorious Street, a feature-length documentary exploring the history of New York City's infamous 42nd Street, with first-hand accounts from an array of filmmakers, including Larry Cohen
• Trailers and TV spots
• King Cohen trailer
• Image gallery

Disc Two - Blu-ray
• An early, pre-release cut of the film featuring over 30 minutes of additional footage and a different music score, exclusively remastered by Arrow Films

Final Score: ​

I hadn’t watched The Stuff since my Arrow Blu-ray arrived 9 years ago, and while The Stuff is definitely not what you would expect from your typical 80s horror film, it has a weirdly fun vibe that is hard to resist. It reminds me more of a 1960s comedy/sci-fi film rather than abject horror, but there are some nifty body horror elements in the film that have a charm all their own. Arrow’s 4K UHD set comes with a very nice upgrade to the video, a slight tweak to the audio (almost imperceptible really), and jammed it full of extras that earn their keep as a Special Edition. Definitely check it out if you’re a fan of schlocky 80s horror movies with a 1950s/1960s sci-fi bent. Fun watch is my final recommendation.



Technical Specifications:

Starring: Michael Moriarty, Andrea Marcovicci, Garrett Morris, Paul Sorvino, Scott Bloom
Directed by: Larry Cohen
Written by: Larry Cohen
Aspect Ratio: 1.85:1 HEVC
Audio: English: LPCM 2.0 Mono
Subtitles: English SDH
Studio: Arrow
Rated: R
Runtime: 87 Minutes
Blu-ray Release Date: July 22nd, 2025

Recommendation: Fun Watch

 

[Asere]

Lol, I remember those 80's cable moments watching this anytime it came on. A fun watch indeed! Thanks for the review!