Suitable Flesh
To outward appearances, psychiatrist Doctor Elizabeth Derby would appear to have the perfect life, a private practice with a steady stream of well-to-do patients and a handsome husband who adores her with whom she shares two homes, but appearances can be deceptive, and in fact she is bored by both her marriage and her work until a young man shows up without an appointment, disturbed and desperate for help, flipping between two personalities divided by a fugue state.
Asa Waite’s symptoms indicating paranoid schizophrenia, appearances can be deceptive, but Elizabeth is fascinated and drawn to the man, inappropriately so, offering to treat him with no remuneration and visiting his home where she encounters Ephraim his hostile elderly father who surrounds himself with obscure occult volumes; her involvement already beyond the professional, when Asa murders his father Elizabeth finds herself more compromised than she realises.
Based upon H P Lovecraft’s short story The Thing on the Doorstep, first published in 1937, writer Dennis Paoli and director Joe Lynch have turned it into a hunt for Suitable Flesh starring Twin Peaks’ Heather Graham as Elizabeth, Tales of Halloween’s Barbara Crampton as her best friend Doctor Daniella Upton of the Miskatonic Medical School and Judah Lewis as Asa, unfathomable object of Elizabeth’s obsession when she has Prom Night’s preposterously handsome Johnathon Schaech waiting at home as the devoted Edward.
Paoli the co-writer of Re-Animator and From Beyond, the influence of the eighties is strong but in addition to the body-swap horror which Suitable Flesh metamorphoses into it is strangely under the equal influence of that other peculiar genre of that nostalgic decade known as the erotic thriller, Graham finding herself in a state of soft-focus undress under a spinning camera so frequently her state of disorientation is no surprise.
What is equally frustrating but less forgivable are the liberties taken with the portrayal of Doctor Derby in order to progress the plot, deeply unprofessional as she tries to juggle two patients without even a receptionist to assist her, cheats on her husband with an unstable patient then leaves the scene of a crime literally burning without informing the police or the fire service, neither Daniella nor the Miskatonic staff any more competent as they allow themselves to be distracted by inmates despite being aware that strange things are afoot.
A tale of a body thief better told in Skeleton Key, The Witch of Buffy the Vampire Slayer, even Turnabout Intruder of Star Trek, where the film does rise above its failings is in the performances of Graham, Lewis and The Lords of Salem’s Bruce Davison as Ephraim across their different personalities, possessed by the ancient unnamed soul which inhabits them, devious, manipulative and always hungry for suitable flesh.
Suitable Flesh is on general release from Friday 27th October
