I wouldn't consider this is the worst movie I've ever seen, but it was one of the most hilarious. The entire premise is great, and the beginning is my favorite part. We open with an old man (a guard?) walking around some kind of factory grounds in the snow. Suddenly he pauses when he sees a sickening, steaming, bubbling white pool of STUFF oozing up from the dirt.

What does he do? Well what any sane person would do: he dips his finger in it and eats it. Just pause and take that all in. You see some strange glob of ooze bubbling on the ground ,and you just eat it. Needless to say, I just stared open-mouthed as he called his friend, Zeke, or some other old man name, over to eat some too. It turns out this disgusting looking gunk is really tasty!

The two old dudes decide to market it to the whole world, and BOOM, we have THE STUFF. Everyone in the country enjoys the stuff but one little boy. Tommy or some other little boy name does not enjoy The Stuff. And heaven knows why, with such an attractive color, nature, and name. But this brings up an interesting point: why are old men always Zeke or Old Pauly or something, and the kids are Tommy or Johnny? Was Zeke ever a child or has he always just been an old man? Or are people Tommy or Johnny as a kid and Zeke or Cornelius or something in old age?

So Tommy goes downstairs in the middle of the night because his room is hot. He tells us so in a rousing soliloquy. He opens the fridge, only to see The Stuff oozing its way back into its container -- and this is not some subtle ooze; this is a huge globe just crawling across the shelf. Then Dad catches Tommy and starts to berate him harshly for being up so late. He seems to be about one second away from backhanding this poor kid, and then he asks Tommy why he's so nervous.

So on to our other characters. The ice cream superpowers have hired a man to sabotage The Stuff operations. A dangerous man. An ex-FBI specialist. A man not to be trifled with. A man that goes by the name of Mo Rutherford. He's called Mo because -- and I quote -- "I always want mo money when the job is done." Yes, Mo is full of all kinds of catchy sayings and witty repartee. Unfortunately, hardly any of it makes any rational sense. The funniest parts of the movie are when Mo says something with his weird kind of Cary Grant country halting accent.

So to cut this short, basically Tommy decides (rightfully) that The Stuff is taking people over. So in the supermarket he suddenly goes insane. I am not exaggerating. I have never seen anything like this. I was in shock for at least ten minutes after it happened just because of the massive destruction this little nine year old was able to cause in the span of about a minute or so. He just wigs out and smashes every container of The Stuff he can find, tripping over product displays and finally getting a broom to smash the glass of the freezers. It takes three grown men to wrestle this wildcat to the ground.

Now after Dad's little conniption about Tommy being up late just walking around, I thought he was gonna shoot the kid dead for this. But it is never mentioned. I guess they just let him off with a warning after he destroyed three hundred or more dollars' worth of merchandise.

Meanwhile Mo is investigating in a very boring manner. But he does meet the film's best character, Chocolate Chip Charley. This almost offensive name for a black character is just the tip of the iceberg. Charley is also a kung-fu expert ("I don't carry a gun; my fists are deadly weapons!"), and he owned his own huge chain of cookie...uh, restuarants (??) until The Stuff people ran him out of business. He and Mo join forces briefly and beat the crap out of some possessed Stuffies -- heh heh: that's the name for those addicted and possessed. Apparently Stuff causes humans to become incredibly weak, because Mo punches one in the face, and his face comes off. That scene just comes out of nowhere and is surprising to say the least.

Meanwhile, Tommy comes home to find his family all Stuffies. They force him to eat some, but he fools them by flushing his Stuff down the toilet and then eating shaving cream instead. Smart! This weird plan really had no purpose, since Tommy only took two bites of the shaving cream and understandably had to stop, and once again his family was at his throat. As he runs from his house, suddenly Mo shows up in a car. "Get in the car!" Mo yells. "I saw it move, too!"

Now wait a minute. I think that at least a half an hour of plot was cut, because Tommy and Mo had had no knowledge that either of them even exist, much less know that they were on the same side, much less that Mo knew how Tommy saw that stuff crap move, much less that he knew knew where Tommy lived, much less that he got from one side of America to where Tommy was just in time to save him.

Before this review gets too long, I'll cut to the chase. After finding out where The Stuff is all gathered from, Mo, Tommy, and some forgettable woman who came up with the name "The Stuff" for the company but who is now rebelling, they all steal a truck and blow down a mountain to cover The Stuff. They go for help, and this has to be the strangest of Mo's strange things that he says. They are driving toward a castle, and Mo is asked if he knows who lives there. "I know all about him, but he doesn't know that I know all about him." Ooooookay......if I had been in the truck at the time, I would have just stared slack-jawed at this guy for several minutes, just to let him know how dumbfounded I was by virtually every string of words that tumbled from his mouth.

So Mo finds none other than some insane, paranoid, red-scare kind of cold war throwback army general, played for some reason by Paul Sorvino, Mira Sorvino's father, of course. Anyway, ol' Paul is blackmailed by ol' Mo into helping to attack the main Stuff factory.

Some weird gun battles happen with a bunch of soldiers who look more like the cast of "Goonies" than well-trained commandos killing Stuffies. Really, though, if I knew that these were the kind of people defending my country, I would either move or surrender immediately in every war. Anyway, the Stuff starts chasing Tommy and then busts out of the building. I don't know where the filmmakers got all the white crap, but I guess that's where all the budget went, because there is enough to fill an olympic-sized pool. For some reason the stuff can move and kill on its own but stops short of killing the soldiers.

Then commander Paul "my daughter is talented and gorgeous but keeps getting in bad movies" Sorvino takes them to his radio station, which he for some reason owns, and broadcasts a warning to everyone. Just before the broadcast, Chocalate Chip Charley shows up and reveals he has become a Stuffie, his mouth grows horribly till his head explodes, and Mo must save Tommy as the kid screams like a girl. Then they broadcast their warning, and immediately riots begin, and The Stuff is burned. In fact, in one hilarious scene, instead of just removing The Stuff from a convenience store, the angry mob just blows the store up in a huge fireball. At the end, it is revealed that The Stuff is now being sold like a drug. What, to leave an opening for a sequel?

Rating: 4 turkeys. I recommend seeing it with a friend, but bring a deck of cards, as it is slow in parts.

Response From RinkWorks:

So what the heck *was* "The Stuff"? An alien intelligence? A military experiment gone awry? They never even *attempt* to explain? Yeesh.