The Substance
It’s all nice and metaphorical in the first two thirds, but then it goes nuts and loses the plot for the sale of referencing The Shining, The Thing, and eXistenZ. Maybe it’s too French and I didn’t get it.
Jane Fonda expy Lizzie is coasting on her previous fame by doing the aerobics soft core porn show, but since she’s 50, Harvey the Producer wants someone much younger to leer at (yes, he of jerking-off-into-potted-plants fame).
After a car crash, they fire her and place an ad for a girl to replace her. She comes across a back alley Substance (designed by Apple, that’s some slick packaging) that promises a better version of herself, every other week at the time.
It requires gruesome bodily fluid exchange and stitches, but it works, she can pilot a 20 years old avatar of herself. Her old body is drip-fed some goo for a week, while she wins back her job titillating people at home.
After some emergency porking session, she notices going over the allotted time in her young body will rob her true body of vitality. It’s a vampire story but the other way around, the nubile young being feeds on spinal fluid from her old brethren.
After going for months in her new body and sucking the old hag dry, the spinal tap dries up, so the hag must return. She tries to ends the experiment, but ultimately can’t, so the two can duke it out and give rise to the monstrous The Thing hybrid bodypart flesh blob. By then, it goes full shlocky, with literal gallons of blood, a standalone boob plopping on the ground, and giblets galore, all against a backdrop of Crazy Horse cabaret with pompoms.
The main actresses do their best, but they are mostly required to feel themselves naked and do aerobics stunts with extreme ass closeups, it’s a bit over the top with the ass zooms. Andie MacDowell’s daughter and Demi Moore are perfectly reasonable. Dennis Quaid has an even easier job as Weinstein, but it’s a cameo.
Weird to see the Working Title logo on this, I thought that was the Coen’s company? Are Tim Bevan and Eric Fellner like Roderick Jaynes, or are they real people?
This is my place for ramblings about sequences of images that exploit the human visual limitation know as persistence of vision.