Killer Yogurt and Creepy Corpses

In the fall of 2023, I programmed a retro series, The Disreputables, at the Lightbox. The idea was to celebrate indie projects that used their under-the-radar status to slip some sociopolitical commentary to ’80s genre audiences … and give present-day moviegoers the chance to see a modern classic on the big screen rather than as a Simpsons reference or a series of YouTube clips.

Thanks to the diligence of the TIFF Cinematheque team, we managed to get our hands on 4K restorations and even a few 35mm prints for most of the titles – including a 35mm print of The Hidden that was sourced from somewhere in Central America, with a handmade Spanish title card – but the one we couldn’t get, either on film or as a DCP, was Larry Cohen’s The Stuff. We could license it, but no one had the materials.

Except that I did. I’d picked up the Arrow Blu-ray in one of the label’s UK sales a few years earlier, and that was the source for the digital file we screened that night. This happens in repertory situations more often than you think, and it is entirely above-board so long as the appropriate exhibition rights are cleared. Really, it was an honor; I’ve introduced hundreds of movies to audiences over the decades, but this was the first time I’d literally delivered one to them.

And now, everyone can see why I was so eager to spread the good, goopy word. Last month, Arrow brought The Stuff back into circulation in a glorious new 4K edition – and unlike most of their UHD upgrades, this release doesn’t just upgrade the feature. In addition to a frankly glorious restoration, Arrow’s 4K Stuff is loaded with new supplements and an extended cut of the film long thought lost to history.

If you aren’t familiar with The Stuff, it’s right up there with Cohen’s God Told Me To, It’s Alive and Q: The Winged Serpent for its unapologetically eccentric presentation of a brilliant B-movie concept. Most genre directors would sell their souls to make any one of those four movies, which Cohen cranked out along with four or five others between 1975 and 1985; The Stuff is his most pointed and political, a reaction to both the relaxation of FDA standards under Reagan and the health-food crazes that followed.

See, there’s this new dessert product on the market: It has no calories, needs no refrigeration, and it’s downright delicious, selling faster than ice cream and frozen yogurt combined – which has led the leaders of those industries to employ one Mo Rutherford (Michael Moriarty) to figure out what the stuff actually is so they can develop their own product. But as Mo soon finds out, some desserts are better left on the shelf.

It’s about corporate espionage, and militias, and killer yogurt. It effortlessly juggles satirical comedy and body horror. Like the kids say: It’s a floor wax and a dessert topping! It’s also preposterously well-cast, with Moriarty – reunited with Cohen after his tour de force as the hustler antihero of Q – bouncing merrily off the likes of Andrea Marcovicci as a cynical marketing shark, Garrett Morris as a stand-in for cookie magnate Famous Amos, Paul Sorvino as a surprisingly reasonable militia leader and Danny Aiello in a very fun cameo as an FDA suit who’s uncomfortably solicitous of his Doberman.

Child actor Scott Bloom gets a subplot to himself as an anxious kid who watches his entire family fall victim to the Stuff, and while it’s kind of a one-note role – I don’t know that Cohen was ever that good at writing for kids, unless you count the It’s Alive movies – he gives it his best shot.

Arrow’s new 4K master brings The Stuff back to low-budget life, its image much sharper – with colors much more vivid – than the previous Blu-ray master. Cohen and DP Paul Glickman wanted the movie to look like the Stuff’s in-universe advertising campaign, to the point that the audience wouldn’t be able to distinguish between the two; this is the first home version of the film that really gets that across. The additional detail does reveal the seams in certain shots – especially when actors are matted against miniature or stop-motion elements – but the jankiness of those images was always part of their charm.

It’s also just fun to watch Moriarty, Marcovicci, Morris and Sorvino react to the increasingly preposterous visuals; you admire them for getting through a take without breaking. And then you watch the extras and discover that every time we see The Stuff in volume, it’s a fire-retardant foam made from ground-up fish bones, and you’re amazed everyone could keep lunch down.

I mentioned the supplements are above and beyond for an Arrow 4K release; as with their upgrade of Cruising earlier this year, the label has enhanced its excellent supplemental package with a mix of new and rediscovered archival material.

“Can’t Get Enough of The Stuff,” the 52-minute documentary produced for the Blu-ray a decade ago, is now followed by an additional featurette, “Enough is Never Enough,” built out of unused interview footage with Cohen and producer Paul Kurta shot for the 2017 documentary King Cohen.

Critics David Flint and Adrian Smith contribute an enthusiastic new audio commentary, and the disc also includes the track Cohen recorded for the initial Anchor Bay DVD release 25 years ago.

Trailers and a TV spot that emulate public-service advisories (“If The Stuff is in your house, do not eat it!”) are adorable, and if you’re a little too young to remember the sort of audience The Stuff was made for, Arrow provides that context with Callum Waddel’s 2015 documentary 42^nd Street Memories: The Rise and Fall of America’s Most Notorious Block – a celebration of grindhouse movies and the community that embraced them, with Cohen as one of several invaluable talking heads.

But the real highlight of the package, and something I never expected to see, is a two-hour “pre-release” version, presented on a companion Blu-ray. It’s clearly been mastered from a 35mm print rather than the negative, but it looks great for a 40-year old artifact, with full credits and an alternate musical score.

It’s not as revelatory as some director’s cuts have been, with the restored material mostly amounting to extensions of scenes that were shortened for the release version. But there is one sequence that was cut entirely, which finds Bloom spending an afternoon in jail after freaking out in a supermarket, waiting for his family to pick him up; Cohen even finds time for Brian Bloom, Scott’s real-life older brother, to have a marvelously unexpected bit of business with the desk sergeant.

 Mostly, it’s just a more satisfying version of the movie: The story flows more smoothly from scene to scene, especially in the first act, and we get more time to appreciate Moriarty and Marcovicci’s flirty back-and-forth as Mo and Nicole’s relationship solidifies. Sorvino’s genial lunatic Spears shows up much earlier, which is also fun.

The Stuff wasn’t the only genre favorite Arrow brought back to life last month; the label also delivered Ole Bornedal’s 1994 serial-killer thriller Nightwatch – long out of print in North America – in its first-ever Blu-ray release, packaging it with Bornedal’s decades-later sequel Nightwatch: Demons Are Forever in a double-disc special edition called The Nightwatch Collection.

For those who might be wondering, Bornedal’s Nightwatch predates Timor Bekmambetov’s gonzo Russian horror adventure by a decade and tells a completely different story. Bornedal’s film is set primarily in a Copenhagen hospital morgue, where young medical student Martin (future Game of Thrones star Nikolaj Coster-Waldau, looking positively dewy) takes a job as a night watchman for some extra cash. It’s a quiet gig, right? Except … well, it’s a morgue. They’re creepy even when they’re empty.

And this morgue has more than its usual share of corpses, because someone is murdering local women, and eventually Martin – underslept, overworked and badgered by the detective (Ulf Pilgaard) on the case – begins see malevolence everywhere he looks, even suspecting his best friend Jens (Kim Bodnia) might be involved somehow.

Shot stylishly and featuring a cast of relative unknowns, any one of whom could be the murderer – Jens? Jens’ girlfriend Lotte (Lotte Adersen)? Martin’s girlfriend Kalinka (The Killing’s Sofie Grabøl)? – Nightwatch was a glorious nightmare on the big screen; Bornedal crafted a near-unbearable exercise in steadily mounting tension, locking us into Martin’s increasingly frantic perspective until all of his questions are answered in a genuinely horrific climax.

It was a less effective experience on video, when you’re not locked in the dark with it, and even more disappointing when Bornedal remade it for Bob Weinstein’s Dimension Films with Ewan McGregor, Josh Brolin, Patricia Arquette, Lauren Graham and Nick Nolte. (Everybody’s just sort of there. It’s weird.) But I was still curious to see what Bornedal would do with Demons Are Forever, since even in our IP-extension age, Nightwatch feels pretty self-contained.

Intriguingly, the theme of Demons Are Forever turns out to be “leave things alone,” bringing Coster-Waldau back three decades later to play a widowed, alcoholic Martin, out of work and living miserably with his college-aged daughter Emma (Fanny Leander Bornedal).

Hoping to shake her father out of his torpor, she signs up for his old job at the morgue, and soon learns the maniac who nearly killed him in 1994 is still alive, lying catatonic in a nearby asylum. Seeking closure for herself if not for Martin, Emma confronts the killer – and triggers a new cycle of violence, with a whole new selection of suspects.

It’s … fine, I guess, but not nearly as intense or as clever as the original; as with his remake, Bornedal doesn’t seem totally invested in the project. It’s nice to check in on the surviving characters – the only cast member missed is Gräbøl – and Emma is a nicely drawn character. But it’s an ultimately unnecessary sequel, existing mostly because someone saw the Scream reboot and realized the same “requel” template could be applied here. I didn’t mind sitting through it, and if its existence is the reason we get the original film on Blu-ray, that’s great. But a movie like this needs to remind you why you loved its predecessor, and Demons Are Forever doesn’t really do that.

Arrow gives the sequel the same careful treatment as the original, mind you, offering both features in excellent 1080p/24 presentations with your choice of LPCM stereo and DTS-HD 5.1 audio mixes. Demons Are Forever is pristine, as you’d expect from a two-year-old digital feature, and Nightwatch looks great; this isn’t a proper restoration, but the high-def master still improves on the earlier DVD release by leaps and bounds, better contrasting the moody, queasy palette Bornedal and cinematographer Dan Lautsen created for the environment of the morgue with the brighter, more natural-looking spaces Martin and his friends occupy in the world of the living. And the additional image detail makes certain prosthetic effects much more effective.

Bornedal’s audio commentary and the half-hour making-of doc from the DVD are carried over on the Nightwatch disc, along with a new interview with Laustsen, “Not Afraid of the Darkness,” and “Death in Denmark,” in which critic and Nordic Noir author Barry Forshaw places the film and its sequel in the context of the subgenre. (Turns out Nightwatch was an early entry!)

The Demons Are Forever disc comes with two new and very engaging video essays: Heather Wixson’s “How the Nightwatch Films Explore the Horrors of Adulthood,” and Alexandra Heller-Nicholas’ “Life (and Death) on Mars: Public and Private Life in the Nightwatch Universe,” which find interesting new ways to unpack the film’s themes while making a stronger case for the sequel than I might have done above. That’s always nice.

The Stuff is now available in a 4K limited edition from Arrow Video; Arrow's two-disc Blu-ray set of The Nightwatch Collection is also on shelves now. (In Canada, The Stuff is currently on sale at Unobstructed View!)

Up next: Which are more bloodthirsty? Dragons or accountants? The answer may surprise you!