The Reel Review
A psychotherapist obsessed with a troubled young male patient is confronted by a demon capable of jumping from body to body, in this intentionally campy horror/thriller starring Heather Graham and B-movie scream queen Barbara Crampton. The film is an adaptation of the 1933 short story “The Thing on the Doorstep” by H.P. Lovecraft.
Director Joe Lynch throws nearly everything, including the kitchen sink, at this audience in this silly horror/thriller, which has Graham playing cat and mouse with the villainous demon. The plot requires his actors to quickly change personas as the demon enters them – some more believable than others.
Tonally, Suitable Flesh is all over place, its bizarre inconsistency on particular display during sex scenes more akin to the late-night Cinemax soft core sex films of the 80s. Gore aficionados will find enough to be delighted, however, especially with one scene prominently featuring a car’s rear camera. This is a niche film created solely for fans of this type of strange Lovecraftian horror, and for that, Suitable Flesh has its fair share of chuckles.
REEL FACTS
• Screenwriter Dennis Paoli previously adapted other H.P. Lovecraft stories for the 1980s films Re-Animator and From Beyond, both starring Barbara Crampton.
• H.P. Lovecraft was an American writer of weird sci-fi, fantasy and horror fiction. His writings frequently appeared in the 1923 pulp fantasy and horror magazine Weird Tales. Lovecraft was a teetotaler who supported Prohibition and a white supremacist. He died of intestinal cancer in 1937 at the age of 46.
• Suitable Flesh was filmed in Jackson, Mississippi.
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