Suitable Flesh

What should be a winning recipe for a movie: 1 Heather Graham doing her career best work 1 Barbara Crampton being Barbara Crampton 1 movie adapted from an HP Lovecraft story 1 dose of 80's B-movie camp 1 dose of 90's erotic thriller sexuality Copious amounts of blood and carnage Cooking, however, requires combining items. Suitable Flesh puts each of these ingredients on one of those plates with the separators like a school lunch tray, and says the job is done, and oh boy, is it not. Suitable Flesh is about a body-hopping demon and the carnage it inflicts upon the life of a psychiatrist played by Graham, and then her colleague, played by Crampton. I want to start off with praise, because if it's worth watching for anything, it's Graham's performance. I've never seen her as more than a C-tier actress; perfectly fine, but only just. This movie convinced me I was wrong. Body language, expressions, tone of voice, everything about her changes when the body swapping starts happening, and it is amazing to witness. Her performance carries this movie. Ms. Crampton, meanwhile, always brings it to horror, and her presence is always appreciated. I also have to commend the visual aspect here, both the camerawork and the effects. Minus some dodgy CGI on a couple of occasions, the blood and gore all looks practical, and it's nasty as all hell. And the visual direction is a treat too, using camera movement strategically to disorient the viewer as much as the characters are. Unfortunately, it's all in service of a movie that samples a bunch of tones but never commits to one, and never even considers letting them blend. There's clearly a love for the Stuart Gordon-helmed Lovecraft movies of the 80's like Re-Animator and From Beyond. The key to the successes of those movies was everyone being committed to the same vision; the production, the visual design, the acting, and the story went all in on embracing insanity and camp value, taking itself just seriously enough so that the horror elements feel horrific but the sense of humor and unbridled craziness doesn't feel out of place. Suitable Flesh never manages that. It wants to. I could feel it struggling against itself, desperately wanting to dive headlong into the same pool as Stuart Gordon's movies, but it never dips in more than a toe. The result is a movie brimming with craziness that is played far too straight and close to the vest when it should be a non-stop assault of weird. If someone did a global find and replace of "Miskatonic" with any other university name and turned the chanting that cues up the curse from Lovecraftian words to any vague gibberish, you'd never know this was from a Lovecraft story. It might as well be the voodoo incantation from Child's Play for all that it matters. And the tonal issues don't stop there. There's also a lot of sex in this movie, and it is shot like a satire of 90's Skinemax movies, with billowing curtains and soft lighting and sax music. I should say each of the FOUR sex scenes has a purpose (this thing is hornier than Basic Instinct), with some element of character development or plot development tied to each one. But they still somehow manage to feel shoehorned in, and the way they're filmed, if they were supposed to be sexy, they wildly miss the mark. You'd think with having a woman like Heather Graham -- a woman with definite sex appeal, and an actress who has never been afraid to use it on screen -- they'd pull that trigger and ramp up the sexiness when the demon is in charge, much in the same vein as what happens to Barbara Crampton's character in From Beyond, but no, it's shockingly tame and reserved. And I'm not saying "show your tits", I'm saying when this demon is in the body of a woman that is gorgeous, steer into the skid. Instead, Suitable Flesh keeps it PG-13, leaving the erotic thriller part of this largely chaste and tiresome. Because it doesn't commit to one style or another, when these elements are forcibly combined, they feel incongruent together. The movie is trying to convince me of an ancient demon taking over this young man's body through body-twisting seizures, but the dialogue is so corny and cliched, I don't know how to take the scene. By the end -- which is fairly bonkers, I'll give it that, even if it's like stepping on the gas pedal when you're pulling into the parking lot -- I stopped being interested in Suitable Flesh. Yes, it has phenomenal acting and impressive visual effects, but it uses too little of any of the elements it samples to feel like a cohesive, entertaining, worthwhile movie. It puts a lot of effort into trying hard, but it doesn't actually try hard, if that makes sense. And that leaves the movie, coincidentally, a lot like the victims of the demon in it: wearing the skin of something else and going through mannerisms it does not understand.