It has been known for a while that Larry Cohen’s 1985 film The Stuff (watch it HERE) had around 30 minutes cut out of it before its release, but that excised footage has never made it onto the film’s home video releases and when Cohen was asked about it in an interview for Michael Doyle’s 2015 book Larry Cohen: The Stuff of Gods and Monsters he could no longer remember everything that had been cut. Now there’s a chance we might see the missing 30 minutes, as the folks at the nonprofit arthouse organization Denver Film have discovered that the 35mm print that’s in the possession of the Academy of Motion Pictures Arts & Sciences is “actually the Director’s Cut with 30 extra minutes of footage not found anywhere else”!
The Stuff has the following synopsis:
A private detective investigates a new consumer taste treat that’s absolutely delicious and just possibly lethal.
The film stars Michael Moriarty, Andrea Marcovicci, Garrett Morris, Paul Sorvino, Scott Bloom, and Danny Aiello.
In the interview for Doyle’s book, Cohen said,
I don’t think any of (the deleted scenes) were crucial to the narrative, but we did lose a few funny scenes that I wanted to keep. When I showed New World my original cut, they felt strongly that the film should move a lot faster. I realized that I’d made a picture that was a little too dense and sophisticated, so we increased the pacing. I know that along with some of the commercials, we did lose a romantic scene between Moriarty and Andrea that took place in a hotel room. It was perhaps a wise decision to cut some of those scenes out, because I don’t think they played well in the totality of the film. The story needed to drive forward at certain points and not be slowed down with extraneous material, although it can be painful cutting scenes out that you like.”
It’s good to know the footage that was cut from The Stuff is still out there, but it’s sad that this discovery wasn’t made until after Cohen’s death. He passed away in 2019. Something similar recently happened with George A. Romero’s Martin; the long-lost, 3 and a half hour director’s cut of that movie was recently unearthed, four years after Romero passed away.