Stream It Or Skip It: ‘Suitable Flesh’ on Shudder, in Which Heather Graham Anchors a Sleazy Take on Lovecraftian Horror

Body-swap movies are rarely as demonic as Suitable Flesh (now on Shudder), a cheeky adaptation of great old shithead H.P. Lovecraft’s Cthulhu Mythos story “The Thing on the Doorstep.” As you may know about Lovecraft, his stuff was all about dread cosmic evil, and here it manifests in a quasi-erotic tale of demonic possession, but isn’t necessarily like all those other demonic-possession movies with the Catholic exorcists and the foaming at the mouth and the worn-out power-of-Christ-compels-you crap. No, Lovecraft’s work was deeper and more complex, and here it’s director Joe Lynch (Point Blank, Mayhem) guiding Heather Graham and “scream queen” Barbara Crampton through the weirdness – to somewhat middling effect.

SUITABLE FLESH: STREAM IT OR SKIP IT?

The Gist: Body bag cam! Unzipped, we peer up at the doc and coroner. “It’s impossible to tell that’s a person,” is the summation. Golly. But these two – they’ve seen it all before. The doc is Daniella Upton (Barbara Crampton), and she’s invested in whatever happened to this poor corpse. She heads to the local padded cell to visit Elizabeth Derby (Heather Graham). They’re old friends, fellow psychiatrists. Nobody expected Elizabeth to be the one who’s wackadoohonkhonkhonk in the head, and that’s what makes her flashback so damn interesting: It was a normal day of counseling patients until knockknockknock. Elizabeth answers her office door and there stands Asa (Judah Lewis). He read her famous tome about out-of-body experiences and he thinks she can help him with a crazy situation involving his father and then all of a sudden he starts convulsing and seizing and when it’s done it’s like he’s a totally different person. He aggressively gropes her down there and she sends him away, but not before giving him her personal number, because if anything trumps sexual assault, it’s the potential to make a major case study out of the assaulter. 

Elizabeth goes home to her husband Edward (Johnathon Schaech), who gives off some loser vibes, and when they play hide the hot dog later that night, the guy’s notable dearth of sexual charisma confirms the loserdom. What helps her get through the lackluster humpery is imagining young Asa as her partner. You do what you gotta do to get through it, right? The next day, her concern for Asa’s well-being (read: pretty sure she wants to jump his bones) brings her to his home, where she meets his father (Bruce Davison), who acts weird and eccentric in all manner of unsettling ways, including but not limited to threatening her with a knife and cutting her a little bit and as she runs out he sets the knife down on a book filled with drawings of Cthulhu and the pages soak up her blood. Now, if I’ve learned anything from death metal lyrics, it’s that this development ain’t no good for nobody. And if that is indeed the “Necronomicon” that’s absorbing her plasma well, let it be known that it makes “The Lesser Key of Solomon” look like “The Monster at the End of This Book.”

You’d think Elizabeth, being of sound mind, might at this point wash her hands of all this strangeness, but nooooo, she has to be all obsessed with helping or studying Asa – or screwing him, which happens during another bizarre encounter with the guy and his dad. Interestingly enough, there’s a moment when Asa verbally expels some manner of unpleasant incantation, and if I’m not mistaken, he temporarily brain-swaps with Elizabeth – or did he just transfer some kind of evil entity into her skull? The next day, she tries to piece it all together. Was it all a hallucination or something? Did Asa drug her? Did [something really hideous that wasn’t the sex or the mind-transference; NO SPOILERS, y’know] actually happen? It doesn’t make any kind of worldly sense, key word here being “worldly.” But suffice to say, Elizabeth doesn’t end up in the asylum just for committing adultery. Oh no. It’s much more complicated than that. 

What Movies Will It Remind You Of?: Crampton is a credited producer here, and it makes sense – she made a name for herself as a horror icon with two 1980s Lovecraft-derived cult classics, Re-animator and From Beyond, both of which deserve revisiting, and share a screenwriter with Suitable Flesh in Dennis Paoli. 

Performance Worth Watching: Graham’s been flying under the radar for a bit, but Suitable Flesh finds her capable of carrying a tonally tricky film, and fully committed to its nutty sexy-scary-schlocky vibe. 

Memorable Dialogue: Elizabeth, clearly not quite herself, offers her husband and the cops a drink: “Me? I’m just dandy. Brandy?”

Sex and Skin: Tons of it! Semi-explicit rutting, toplessness, some butts.

Our Take: Suitable Flesh is pretty batshit-crazy, and there’s a nagging sense that it could’ve been even more batshit, and therefore more memorable. But vestiges of it hang around in your brain for a while, especially the psychosexy stuff, and the super-grody practical effects, all prosthetics and reddish-black corn syrup splattered and smeared hither and yon. Tonally, Lynch farts around with satire and camp, landing on a provocative and surreal form of neo-sleaze that’s part nighttime-cable soap opera, part ’80s slasher. 

The possession plot demands multifaceted performances from multiple cast members, none more inspired to bug her eyes out and smile disconcertingly like Graham; her work here is at once earnest, funny and disturbing. Where the acting is consistently credible, it feels like Lynch left some points on the field, whether due to limits of budget or imagination. It only flirts with the psychosexual components of Elizabeth’s motivations, and its sometimes overt Sam Raimi-isms don’t land with the wallop that’ll send horror mavens into fits of you-gotta-rewind-that-part glee. But it is gory and steamy and weird enough to raise an eyebrow or two on a few occasions – and satisfying enough as a delivery mechanism for trashy throwback thrills. 

Our Call: Suitable Flesh is slightly more than suitably entertaining for fans of diabolical strangeness. STREAM IT.

John Serba is a freelance writer and film critic based in Grand Rapids, Michigan.