The Stuff (1985)

Even though the first 10 seconds of the film involve an old man discovering an unidentified white liquid bubbling out of a hole in the ground and immediately sticking a glob of it in his mouth, this is not actually a bad take on the mystery ooze genre.

By the second scene, The Stuff™ has already replaced ice cream as America's favorite dessert, and also generally just favorite food at all. Everybody is onboard except this one ridiculously blue-eyed kid who saw a pint of it moving in his fridge. He smashes up the local grocery store in protest, and his parents, zombified by The Stuff addiction, ground him for life.

Meanwhile, industrial spy/saboteur people-call-me-Moe-cuz-I-want-mo'-money, played with a thick southern drawl by later-to-be-crazy actor Michael Moriarty, is secretly hired by the ice cream industrial complex to find out what The Stuff is. He finds out pretty quickly that it's aliens when a big glob of it bursts out of the postman he was interrogating in conjunction with some other corporate spy, Chocolate Chip Charlie, who had just recently come flying over the top of a car screaming kung-fu noises.

Chocolate Chip Charlie kung-fu punches a literal hole in someone's neck, and The Stuff flies out. Moe, not to be outdone, punches a guy's jaw right off. Then they go to a diner and order chocolate chip cookies.

Moe deceives and then sleeps with and then befriends and then starts co-investigating The Stuff with the cinematographer in charge of the brand's film advertising. After a brief side quest to save the blue-eyed boy from his Stuff-munching parents (and equally blue-eyed brother), the three of them hop on a private jet and fly to Georgia, which they have determined to be the source of The Stuff. It starts off badly, when the kid is attacked by jet plane Stuff and the adults are attacked by The Stuff hidden in their hotel pillows. But Moe manages to blow up the mine and save the kid from imminent doom.

The editing is reasonably bad… no, wait, awful. That's the word. It's the screenplay, acting, and special effects that are reasonably bad. The social commentary is on point, anyway, and just as relevant today.

Moe goes to a castle guarded by a U.S. military colonel? Moe blackmails the colonel into waging war on The Stuff to save America. The military charges right in and starts shooting employees with machine guns, while the brass band & snare drum soundtrack of Stripes plays excitedly. The Stuff abandons its human hosts, leaving behind a sea of carcasses, dead mouths agape.

The Stuff is sentient and after them, but bound by the physics of a big blob of shaving cream, so they're able to run away at a not-too-fast pace. They run all the way to Atlanta, to do a radio broadcast warning people not to eat it. Chocolate Chip Charlie shows up, but explodes, and then Moe force-feeds a bunch of The Stuff to the dessert industry CEOs at gunpoint. It's a happy ending, even though most people are dead and there's now a thriving underground market for The Stuff contraband.