Main cast: Heather Graham (Dr Elizabeth Derby), Judah Lewis (Asa Waite), Bruce Davison (Ephraim Waite), Johnathon Schaech (Edward Derby), and Barbara Crampton (Dr Daniella Upton)
Director: Joe Lynch
I don’t know why I keep watching films based on HP Lovecraft’s stories. More often than not, it’s an exercise in being disappointed over and over. Maybe I have an inner masochistic streak or something, sigh.
Suitable Flesh is loosely based on The Thing on the Doorstep, one of Mr Lovecraft’s least cosmic horror stories, and it’s about old Ephraim Waite using an ancient spell to transfer his consciousness into other people’s bodies, thus exchanging their bodies. That naughty and randy old coot is a depraved villain that uses his new bodies (he isn’t picky about the sex of the body he hijacks) to have sex and cause all kinds of havoc—a cool dude, in other words.
This gives Judah Lewis a chance to play the villain when his character Asa is hijacked by his father, and that fellow does it very well. Unfortunately, Asa also wears only his boxers in many scenes and he gets to be in some nookie situations—unfortunate because Mr Lewis has all the sex appeal of a rhubarb.
Jonathon Schaech looks hot as always here, but the whole silver daddy vibe he has going for him here pushes his hotness past the charts. He has a scene where he gets to show off that he still has that hot body of his, and such dedication should always be applauded. Alas, his character is such a clueless dolt.
The performance from the rest of the cast ranges from okay to over-acting overload. Still, there is a lurid, exploitative feel to the whole thing that makes such overacting feel right at home.
Sadly, however, the movie prides itself as far too respectable to really become exploitative. The whole thing never pushes the envelope in any way that feels genuinely terrifying.
Instead, it is more of a thriller than outright horror, although some of the kills and gore are pretty nice and may be a bit too much for the average thriller viewer.
The movie is also missing much of the charms of the source material, as Dennis Paoli’s screenplay removes much of the supernatural baggage that comes with the original story for a more bog standard body-hopping psycho tale.
Like a typical Blumhouse-wannabe, this movie also breaks the rules it lays down throughout the whole film up to that point, just for a predictable gotcha twist at the end. Is it really a gotcha when it can be seen coming from a mile away? The whole thing feels perfunctory, something that is done because every other freaking horror film is doing it, and undercuts much of the story up to that point.
Anyway, this one is a perfectly acceptable slasher flick, although I find myself missing the darker, more tense, and frequently terrifying atmosphere of the source material. It’s an opportunity for Judah Lewis to show that he’s all grown up, I guess, but I wish the movie had done a bit more to stand out and stick to my mind.
