Joe Lynch makes fun movies. Beautifully silly, gore-soaked love letters to genre itself, packed with clever casts and enough prosthetic goo to make even Herschell Gordon Lewis sick to his stomach. Lynch’s feature debut (’00s crowd favourite Wrong Turn 2) opens with a gorgeously grim sequence that’s become the stuff of legend – an unsuspecting driver, stunningly bisected by an inbred cannibal, with nothing but a rusty axe and his bare hands. So the promise of not only a new Lynch joint, but one both inspired by, and dedicated to, King of ’80s splatter Stuart Gordon, is enough to send any self-respecting horror fan clawing for a ticket.
And while Suitable Flesh is certainly one for the fans, filled to the brim with winking humour and Gordon’s inventively ghastly spirit, it frustratingly never quite delivers the same amount of bite as its bark.
It doesn’t really help that this is a film designed to not just pay homage to, but pretty explicitly be a new Gordon movie, just with someone else at the helm. Boasting a couple of mad-eyed medical professionals, a Lovecraftian backdrop (based loosely on his short story The Thing On The Doorstep), and a handful of Gordon’s regular collaborators en-tow (Brian Yuzna! Dennis Paoli! Barbara Crampton!), there’s shockingly little separating this from the likes of Re-Animator and co., at least on the surface.
Even the plot, about a body swapping sex demon who’s just as fascinated with the insides as the out, feels vintage Gordon. Heather Graham’s prim, proper and profoundly bored psychiatrist Elizabeth Derby (a clever gender-swap from the source material) finds herself very literally playing with fire when a potentially dangerous new patient (the terrifically-cast Judah Lewis) seduces her with his unusual, personality-shifting charms. And naturally, it’s not long before she’s thrust into a game of metaphysical musical chairs, because he’s not really her patient at all but a fantastical, host-hopping entity with some loose ties to a magical book, and maybe even Cthulu as well?
It’s not exactly clear, and Lynch is much more interested in wacky ’80s horror than he is any sense of world building. When it works, Suitable Flesh really does channel the glory days, with a pair of deliciously nasty practical effects sequences, and Barbara Crampton’s most exciting performance in some time. But it’s also very quickly obvious that despite writer Dennis Paoli’s script being suitably and sufficiently batshit, Lynch isn’t quite handed the budget or resources to match its energy and put every dollar up on the screen.
For one thing, we’re missing the trademark muddy sheen of Gordon’s visuals; Suitable Flesh is washed out and maddeningly bland on the eyes, filled with neat camera moves but drab colouring and the sort of sets that feel like they’ve been discarded by a soap opera. One of the film’s main standoffs is undersold by Derby’s office looking like your mum’s box room, and what feels like the build-up to a grand finale ends up just being… the grand finale, five feet from where we just were, in the middle of a grubby corridor.
The action too, particularly the sex, can feel oddly toothless. One of the things that put Gordon and Yuzna on the map was their incredibly liberal use of flesh, and while the industry’s thankfully come a long way in terms of no longer front-loading scenes with nudity for nudity’s sake, even when sequences really call for it here (from both male and female performers), there’s nothing but a lot of shaky grunting, and characters dry humping each over the top of their jeans. Usually, this wouldn’t be a problem, but for a hard-R rated horror specifically about a body-jumping sex demon, it seems like a massive oversight.
For the right audience – particularly a late night genre festival crowd – there’s a lot fun to be had here. A spot of nasty gore and a twisty little succubus fable that plays on gender and desire to some clever effect. But Suitable Flesh is ultimately, ironically, not exactly suitably fleshy enough to prove memorable.
Suitable Flesh was screened as part of Pigeon Shrine FrightFest 2023.
