Suitable Flesh

Suitable Flesh stars Heather Graham as a psychiatrist who becomes obsessed with a young patient suffering from an extreme personality disorder that leads her into a dangerous family occult. Having opened this year’s Pigeon Shrine FrightFest its release is just in time for the Halloween spook season. Now available in UK cinemas and on TVOD.

Psychiatrist Elizabeth Derby (Heather Graham) is in a padded cell in a psychiatric hospital, she’s there for murdering the person in the bodybag which has just arrived in the hospital morgue and she’s still highly disturbed by their presence there. Looking totally out of sorts, her doctor friend Dr Daniella Upton (Barbara Frampton) comes to find out what’s happened and so she begins to recount her story.

We flashback to her life before all of this, a happily married psychiatrist with her own practice before she’s visited by a young student (Judah Lewis) who says he’s read her book on Out of Body Experiences (as a Symptom of Schizophrenia) and that he’s had an out of body experience himself. With all his twitches on show he pleads with her to help him and she agrees to take him in her office where he has an episodic attack that has him convulsing on the floor. His personality is momentarily transformed but despite some pretty inappropriate behaviour Dr. Derby is taken-in by the patient and is willing to help.

Not being able to get the patient out of her head she visits his home where she curiously lets herself in to the open house. She finds the father (Bruce Davison), a somewhat cranky old gentlemen, who has an interest in another book with some strange occult like drawings and his own degree of inappropriateness. He sends her on her way rather abruptly but she’s soon back again when she receives an emergency call for help and finds the father unconscious on the floor. This time when she tries to help, the son intervenes, he’s in a state of high anxiety and starts ranting he needs to cut off his head and cut out his brain, at which point his father raises from the dead and then things start to get pretty weird.

The out of body experiences take on a David Cronenbergesque dimension with an 80s synth sound demanding some high tension and combined with a sultry sax it switches into a soft porn erotica experience capitalising on the multi faceted allure of Heather Graham, who puts in a kooky performance as she takes on the split personality roles head on.

Director Joe Lynch puts in some high gore to please the horror fans amongst the shuddering psychosexual melodrama and just before you can say how completely ridiculous it all is he drops a one liner to bridge the ludicrousness and ease the psychopathy. It’s a win win for genre fans looking to be entertained this halloween with some mind bending b-movie gore.