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I don't know about you, but I like my social-issue movies doled out with a squirt of prechewed feminist resentments and a barrel of blood and guts. And here we go. French writer-director Coralie Fargeat, making her first English-language feature, has taken the evergreen idiocies of the beauty-and-wellness industry and run them, along with several idiots, through a woodchipper, creating the most way-over-the-top body horror movie since Brandon Cronenberg's excellent "Possessor." Let us now reconsider your weekend filmgoing plans.

"The Substance" leaves most pictures of its ghastly ilk deep in shadow. The movie's serenely creamy cinematography (by Benjamin Kracun, who also shot the less arterial "Promising Young Woman") is a solid base for its extensive slaughterama. And the two stars, Demi Moore and Margaret Qualley, are totally tops, filled with skittering energy and unafraid to embrace the picture's slick, twisted plot.

Front and center is Moore, one of the highest-paid screen queens of the 1990s, now, at age 59 (two years ago, when the movie was shot), barely a bit less steamy. In a story that hits boldly close to home -- and requires quite a lot of nudity -- Moore plays Elisabeth Sparkle, longtime host of a TV aerobics show of the sort once associated with Jane Fonda. We join Elisabeth on her 50th birthday, which turns dark when she overhears her boss, network chief Harvey (Dennis Quaid), braying about the need for a younger woman to front Elisabeth's show, despite its ongoing popularity. A subsequent bouquet of corporate roses ("Thanks for all those years") does nothing to calm her panic.

Now in the market for major help, Elisabeth connects with a sinister outfit called The Substance, whose sole product is a boxed kit of needles and injectable goo designed to create "a better version of yourself." Elisabeth ties off and shoots up, and the movie heads straight for horrorville. Her naked body falls to the floor and splits up the back and suddenly there's a new being in the room -- an equally nude 20-something gamine called Sue (Margaret Qualley), who has arrived with a lust for media stardom preinstalled.

The way Fargeat has designed the substance peddled by The Substance, it creates a second self that's not entirely separate: "You are one," the kit's enclosed ad copy reads, while also warning, "You can't escape from yourself." Each dose is good for one week of fame and/or (as it turns out) whatever. After injecting the first dose, the primary subject must one week later administer the second one to her fresh young successor, who will repeat the process, and so forth. In Sue's first week, The Substance leads her to a cattle-call audition for aspiring TV starlets at which a male auditor says of one prospect, "Too bad her boobs aren't in the middle of her face instead of that nose." The blindingly telegenic Sue, however, is immediately embraced and soon given her own show, called "Pump It Up." Elisabeth, on the other hand, begins learning some hard lessons, including the fact that youth and its triumphs cannot, in fact, be revisited. Soon, as her body deteriorates (in really freaking awful ways), she finds herself on a collision course with her young doppelganger, who's not above holding back a bit of Elisabeth's allotted supply of the drug after thinking up a better use for it herself.

The movie's design is bracingly simple, especially the flat, brooding light that fills Elisabeth/Sue's hyper-modern apartment, and effects like the quick shot of one iris sliding over another in Elisabeth's eye (an efficient way off announcing a new renter on the premises). And much of the befouled flesh on display is so garishly necrotic, it might have drawn gags of admiration from George Romero.

The picture has some problems, naturally. Like, when's the last time anybody wanted to watch an '80s-style TV exercise show? A more central objection, though, is the musty feminism that animates the story. Most of its points -- about worldwide cultural hostility to female concerns, and the smothering oppression of media beauty standards, were identified decades ago and are by now acknowledged even by some benighted men. (Quaid's Harvey, with his gaudy suits and open-mouthed shrimp sucking, is such a total pig that very little else about him would be likely to surprise us.)

Maybe even more of a problem, depending on your appetite for these things, is the picture's refusal to come to an end. It insists on ripping and bleeding and upping the ante at least 20 minutes past the point where it could have done itself a major favor by shutting up shop and just accepting the applause. Because as breathtaking as the movie's feral spirit may be, it's really about the intimately synched virtuosity of Moore, making a rousing comeback, and Qualley, continuing her delightful ascent. Long live the new flesh.

To find out more about Kurt Loder and read features by other Creators writers and cartoonists, visit the Creators website at www.creators.com.

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