Parents' Guide to

Suitable Flesh

By Jeffrey Anderson, Common Sense Media Reviewer

age 17+

Lots of gore and sex in bizarre but fun horror throwback.

Movie NR 2023 99 minutes
Suitable Flesh Movie Poster: Designed to look like an old poster, with creases from being folded up, the poster features Dr. Elizabeth Derby (Heather Graham), large in the upper left-hand corner, holding a knife

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A throwback to certain beloved 1980s cult favorites, this twisted tale is exceedingly weird, darkly funny, and fairly edgy in ways that may only appeal to a particular breed of horror hounds. Surprisingly, Suitable Flesh features a screenplay by the legendary Dennis Paoli, who started out in the '80s adapting H.P. Lovecraft stories for the big screen with the late director Stuart Gordon, making classics like Re-Animator and From Beyond and finding a clever blend of humor to exist alongside Lovecraft's unnamable terrors. (Other Gordon regulars, co-star Crampton and producer Brian Yuzna, have returned as well.) Based on Lovecraft's 1933 story "The Thing on the Doorstep," Suitable Flesh is Paoli's first screenplay in over two decades, and he's found a suitable new partner in director Joe Lynch (Wrong Turn 2, Mayhem).

Their finished movie is outlandish, garish, and sometimes (perhaps purposefully?) awkward; Dr. Derby makes some very obvious wrong choices for a horror movie character. The film embraces both gore and human sexuality. It's a full-body horror movie. On the whole, it's not as finely tuned as one of Gordon's classics (and not as imaginative as another more recent Lovecraft adaptation, Color Out of Space), but it has the power to give jaded viewers something they might not have seen before.

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