Suitable Flesh

The visuals of a ’90s TV movie, two sexy blondes, a bit of dully simulated sex and a drop of blood. And a plot that’s exactly as “riveting” as you would expect. [Sitges Film Festival] (06/10/2023)

Joe Lynch with an adaptation of a short story by H.P. Lovecraft. It's a bit of a made-for-TV horror thriller that seems to have fallen out of the 90s and will be off-putting for some, but I have no problem with it. There's sex, there's blood and there's dark humor and that's plenty enough for 3 stars for me. It's proper B-grade retro trash, but anyone who doesn't have a problem with that can enjoy it. A psychiatrist becomes obsessed with one of her patients, who seems to have multiple personalities, but the whole thing goes a bit awry. I enjoyed Heather Graham a lot, especially in the final act, which has great lines and is kind of racy and creepy, quite fitting. Whether the film can be recommended I don't know, it obviously didn't sit well with many people, but if you likes offbeat oddities, you might give it a try. 5.5/10. (02/11/2023)

Joe Lynch adapts H.P. Lovecraft's short story “The Thing on the Doorstep” very loosely, paying homage to the work of Stuart Gordon, whose film adaptations of the Providence stories made that weirdo famous. You can expect a classic retrospective narrative of the protagonist locked up in a mental institution, a bit of eroticism, a few spontaneous outbursts of violence and a good dose of cute overacting and black humour. However, you won’t see the kind of striking special effects we would expect from a Lovecraft adaptation. Here, they try to make up for the visual niceties by playing with the camera and the editing, but it don't look very impressive in that low-budget guise. In its low-budget conception and visuals, it almost evokes direct-to-video films of the 90s, so if I were to compare Suitable Flesh specifically to Stuart Gordon's work, it would belong more to the Castle Freak era than Re-Animator or From Beyond, which is not necessarily a criticism, more of a clarification. For fans of the genre, it might be an interesting throw-back, but for anyone else I'd probably be reluctant to recommend it because of the specificity of the concept. In any case, Heather Graham and Barbara Crampton are a very dynamic duo here, and they don't even share that much screen time together. (07/10/2023)