Before his death in 2020, director Stuart Gordon was planning a comeback, alongside his screenwriting collaborator Dennis Paoli, with whom he had worked on films like Re-Animator, From Beyond, and Castle Freak. That intended return was to be Suitable Flesh, another Lovecraft adaptation, and although Gordon didn’t live to see it completed, his friend and longtime collaborator Barbara Crampton was determined to usher it to completion, which she achieved this year with Joe Lynch in the director’s chair. I’ve never seen any of Lynch’s feature work, but I was very impressed with his short film Truth in Journalism that was a bit of an internet phenom a few years ago (although the fact that everything that references the film online now gives away the twist, sometimes in the title). And while there’s nothing that’s technically wrong with this one, I have to admit that I just didn’t enjoy it. 

Elizabeth Derby (Heather Graham) is a psychiatrist living an idyllic life of career success, loving marriage with handsome if temporarily unemployed husband Edward (Johnathon Schaech), and a fulfilling best friendship with colleague Daniella Upton (Crampton). After a session with a man who is trying to give up smoking, a young man from the nearby Miskatonic University bursts into her office and introduces himself as Asa Waite (Judah Lewis, of The Babysitter). He tells her that his father, Ephraim (Bruce Davison), wants his son’s body, in a scene that would have been more effective if it had been played with more ambiguous dialogue that implied (for instance, abuse at the hands of his father), but instead just sounds like ranting and raving. When she gets a phone call from Asa later, she fears that he’s in danger and goes to his house, only to become embroiled in an apparent domestic disturbance situation that belies dark magic. Eventually, Derby finds herself swapping back and forth between her body and that of Asa, but the entity with which she is exchanging corporeal forms with is not Asa, but something much older and more powerful, and if they switch a third time, it will be permanent. 

Narratively, this one is a bit sloppy, and it’s also not really a surprise that the Lovecraft story from which is takes its concept, “The Thing on the Doorstep”, is often considered one of the talented racist’s lesser works. Lewis is doing fine work as the menacing thing that first possesses Asa’s father before taking him over, and although I love seeing Graham in just about anything, there’s a bit of a disconnect between Lewis’s version of (what we’ll call) the spirit and hers, and I wish Graham’s version was as menacing as Lewis’s. There’s also something very fun about the idea of a possessing spirit that has bodysurfed through time in male bodies because of its misogynistic ideals, only to end up in a woman’s body and learn how much it enjoys riding dick. Unfortunately, that’s not enough to save this movie, nor is its gruesome final act, which is what I think will end up being what Suitable Flesh is most remembered for. A shambling, battered corpse that begs for death isn’t the freshest idea (An American Werewolf in London and Return of the Living Dead immediately spring to mind), but it’s realized here in a truly horrifying fashion. 

Still, for me, the film’s highlight was Crampton (as she often is). She looks amazing here, and her turn as the confused Dr. Upton who has to come to terms with the fact that her best friend is not losing her mind but is in fact experiencing a truly supernatural event is a sight to behold. In many ways, she’s the true protagonist, the one with the most character development and the person with whom we sympathize the most. It makes the first half of the narrative seem like filler until we get to the good parts, and I have to be honest, I think the late Gordon would have gotten us there faster and better. 

-Mark “Boomer” Redmond