Suitable Flesh

 H.P. Lovecraft's memory has been taking a beating this last decade, as his personal views and beliefs have come into the spotlight when nerd concerns became more mainstream. It was inevitable. You don't even need to step outside his fiction to sense something's wrong with it - just read Shadow Over Innsmouth to find out what he thinks about miscegenation, or any of his stories that mention non-white people and see how they come across.
 Besides being a huge, outspoken bigot, he was a prude and well, a bit of a misogynist. The guy had a lot of problems.
 I'm not trying to stir shit or anything - I think all of the above is kind of self-evident, and well documented. I'm just trying to explain why I find it so funny that out of Lovecraft's legacy, some of the most successful direct adaptations were handled by Stuart Gordon - and to a lesser extent Brian Yuzna and Joe Lynch, whose latest movie we're discussing now.

 The late Stuart Gordon was an insane genius with a penchant for memorable gore and bizarre sexuality. His Lovecraft movies (Re-Animator, Dagon and From Beyond) are suffused with sex and kinky as all hell*. There was no wokeness at play or a post-modern attempt to grapple with the original author's legacy about them, they predated most of that; It's just the adapter's fingerprints all over the material.
 Joe Lynch's Suitable Flesh takes on Lovecraft's story 'The Thing in The Threshold' and applies the same sensibility to a project Gordon had already done some development on; it's basically a darkly humorous erotic thriller wearing the tale's oozing skin.
 I should note Brian Yuzna and Barbara Crampton are credited as executive producers.

The severed head does not go down on anyone this time around.

 Psychiatrist Elizabeth Derby (Heather Graham) lives a contented life with her husband Eddie (Johnathon Shaech) until Asa (Judah Lewis), a distraught young man, arrives to her office unannounced. He rambles about out of body experiences and implies his father is trying to drive him out, trying to control him.
 Then he suddenly has a seizure, and when he comes back to, he's switched to a completely different demeanor - basically, he becomes a smug piece of shit. And because he's got Heather Graham in front of him, and because he's a raging asshole, he flirts with her as ex-president Trump would - yes, he literally grabs her by the pussy.

 And... it works! Definitely don't try that at home, kids. Dr. Derby is intrigued and aroused by both Asa's pathology and his subtle courting methods; Later, as she's fucking her husband, she fantasizes about Asa. The Skinemax vibes are strong in this one.
 Dr. Derby starts sniffing around Asa's house, doing some light trespassing, trying to figure out what's going on. One thing leads to another, and she and Asa end up having sex right in front of Asa's dead father (Bruce Davison). It... kind of makes sense within the fiction, I guess, but holy fucking shit, lady- I'm beginning to think you're not very good at your job. Definitely not very professional.

 Things (d)evolve from there, and as Dr. Derby is overwhelmed she drags another psychologist (Barbara Crampton, basically playing the part of the narrator in the short story) into the sordid mess.
 It's made perfectly clear that we're dealing with a body swap situation pretty much from the outset- but the protagonists think they live in a rational world, so a lot of the movie consists of them slowly working out answers we had reached a long time ago. It's not much of a mystery, in other words, and it's a pretty big and obvious problem with the movie.
 Another big problem is that it's really hard to sympathise with Dr. Derby; That woman should never be put in a situation of authority over anyone, ever - much less people with mental health issues.

 So it's a thin story; That's one of the main reasons why all the sex stuff is there, to kick it up a few notches. To be honest it works relatively well - both as a spoof and as an example of an erotic thriller; Playing it relatively straight while having a lot of fun with the premise. Then, of course, you get a couple of scenes where the gore hits the fan and blood flies everywhere. The action is very gruesome but fun - "Too much?", deadpans someone after definitely doing too much. There's also a truly great use of a rear-view camera.
 You know it doesn't go nearly as far as Gordon would have taken it -neither the mayhem nor the freakiness departments - but Lynch does a good job. It's a shame that there's so little mayhem, and so little style. Too much of the movie comes to resemble the more staid thrillers it's aping.

 The acting is a highlight: Crampton is an old hand at getting saucy with HP (sorry!), but it's Graham who gets all the best bits. The two principals have a lot of fun chewing the scenery, and both get a chance to act multiple roles.

 Probably the most surprising thing is that, despite some gender swapping and genre mixing, frequent Stuart Gordon co-conspirator Dennis Paoli's come up with a relatively faithful adaptation of the short story. A lot of the incidents and beats are kept. Lovecraft is notoriously hard to adapt to film, so that's fairly rare. Still, somehow I doubt he'd be happy with it.

 Karmic punishment or not, it's sleazy, fun, funny, pacey and dark. Shame that it apes its low-rent sexy thriller inspirations a bit too closely too much of the time. But at least that means it features a few ridiculously attractive people in various states of (mild) undress.

*: He also did a pretty good TV adaptation of Dreams in the Witch-House, but if I remember that correctly there's no sex in that one.