The Stuff

A sweet, addictive substance is found bubbling out of the earth, marketed as a fat-free dessert called The Stuff, and it sweeps America. It is alive, it is a parasite, and the people hooked on it are being hollowed out.

Larry Cohen made a blunt, gleeful satire of consumerism and advertising: the tagline, that enough is never enough, is the whole thesis, and the film's real targets are junk food, marketing and the willingness of people to eat anything with a good jingle.

Michael Moriarty, again, plays an industrial saboteur investigating it, in another loose, charming, improvised performance.

The effects, people flattening and dissolving as The Stuff takes them over, are cheap and inventive, with rooms filling with white ooze.

It is not scary and it is very funny, and the anti-advertising message has only got more relevant.