Oh, The Stuff. You had me at embittered cookie entrepreneur.

In the end, The Stuff isn't quite a camp masterpiece, but it's close enough to recommend. It's outlandish in a way that makes its comedy unpredictable and satisfying, and the effects are ineffective enough to give it additional cheesy appeal. Writer/director Larry Cohen is creative (and looney) enough to convince me to embrace his patchwork plot and bizarre characters.

He cast Moriarty as his lead; the Tony- and Emmy-award winning actor (who'd later become the first D.A. on Law & Order) had already worked with Cohen once before in the equally quirky (though less effective) Q: The Winged Serpent. Here he plays David "Mo" Rutherford, the industrial saboteur who is hired by some ice cream moguls to investigate the rabid success of a new desert called "The Stuff" that they can't reverse engineer (and which looks like really feisty sour cream). Only a low budget wacko like Cohen would make his hero an immoral huckster, and then ignore the philosophical implications of that choice by turning the character into an unstoppable action hero with a mean right cross.

When we soon learn that The Stuff is, in fact, a goo that bubbles up from the earth and when ingested eats out your insides leaving you little more than a fleshy husk controlled by a pulsating blob of marshmallow fluff. Mo's only support against this grand, sticky menace is, in the grand tradition of utterly implausible movies, Jason, a small child who is terrified by the food in his refrigerator. At first, one simply assumes Jason is anorexic, but then he takes his hatred of Stuff to all-new heights: marching into a supermarket and destroying every container he can get his hands on. It ultimately takes about four dudes to wrestle him to the ground before he stops breaking Stuff stuff. I didn't even get that mad when they canceled ALF.

Cohen's message is so muddled. The general message is the typical sci-fi scare tactic: you are what you eat - and if you eat tub after tub of gross fatty crap, you're going to turn into a huge gelatinous pile that will not rest until it devours your friends and loved ones. Yet The Stuff is not an alien creature, nor a product of science-gone-mad, it's all-natural. It even sort of looks like tofu. So, basically, do not trust vegetarians with a sweet-tooth. They are hollow soulless weirdos. But don't take my word on it -- trust Larry Cohen!

And about that "embittered cookie entrepreneur?" He's played by Morris, an original SNL cast member without the slightest hint of regret or sadness. He enters the film in unforgettable style: Mo is investigating a ghost town that seems to have disappeared after falling in love with The Stuff when, suddenly, he is attacked by a karate-chopping black man. Mo overpowers him and stares at him, then shouts "YOU'RE CHOCOLATE CHIP CHARLIE!"