"We eat plenty of things that are alive that are still good for us... They kill the bad things inside of us."

Here I thought we were ready to move on from celebrity death and maybe explore lighter subject matter, like snow. What a great time we had in the snow, huh? Closed schools, ransacked grocery aisles, canceled flights, car crashes, fistfights over freshly shoveled parking spaces, and the good, old-fashioned boredom of being stuck indoors.

It reminded me of The Shining, which is on Netflix.

But then Death, in his wisdom, decided to deliver me Ritchie Havens and Abe Vigoda, and at least one of those people deserves the same respect I paid Angus Scrimm and Dan Haggerty in my last two posts. Besides, what am I going to say about The Shining that hasn't been covered in more than 30 years of film criticism, or in a compilation of whack-job theories about it, as seen in Room 237?  And now there's something called The Chickening.

After seeing that, what is there to say? Everyone liked it but Stephen King. If you haven't seen it already, why are you still reading this? Go watch it now.

To those of you still reading, let's talk about Abe Vigoda.

He was best known for his roles in The Godfather movies and TV's Barney Miller, but Vigoda had a long and varied career as a character actor and made contributions to the horror genre with appearances in TV shows such as Suspense, Dark Shadows, Tales from the Darkside, Monsters and Weird Science. He also played a member of a Satanic cult in the 1973 TV movie The Devil's Daughter, which starred Shelley Winters.

How old was Abe, exactly? Let's put it this way. He played a bed-ridden old man in the 1979 TV movie Death Car on the Freeway.

And respective of nothing I've said so far, but worth mentioning all the same, he starred in a 1997 comedy called Farticus, which IMDb says is about an old man who gets uncontrollable gas whenever a beautiful lady is present, but I could find no actual evidence of this movie on YouTube. 

In 2008, he was in a film called The Unknown Trilogy.

About the most entertaining thing I could find that he was in was Larry Cohen's 1985 horror/satire The Stuff.

Vigoda appears briefly as a "special guest star" alongside Clara Peller, who was once famous for yelling, "Where's the beef?" They both appear in a television ad for a delicious, trendy dessert called "The Stuff". Be very attentive a little over halfway through the film. If you blink, you might miss them.

Here's what happens: a miner discovers a mysterious, white glop bubbling up out of the ground, so naturally he sticks his hand in it and tastes it. He finds it sweet and delicious, and before you know it, with little government oversight, The Stuff is outselling all the other sweets on the market. As one suburban mother (Colette Blonigan) points out, it's low calorie, tastes good and doesn't leave a spot.

The old guard of Big Sugar want to know what it's made of so they hire industrial spy David "Mo" Rutherford (Michael Moriarty) to steal the recipe. It turns out The Stuff is actually a sentient, alien organism that controls the minds and possesses the bodies of all who eat it. It's highly addictive and it slithers around and attacks people's faces.

So it's part Invasion of the Body Snatchers, part The Blob, and entirely a send-up of 1980s consumer culture. The horror holds up surprisingly well. Danny Aiello and Garrett Morris are also in it.

The Stuff streams on Shudder.

My next review will appear in February. Let's hope white actors stop dying because I have a full slate of movies already set up for Black History Month.