EDITOR’S NOTE: For a more glowing review of this movie, check out Jenn Upton’s review.

This happens every time.

I get excited for a movie, I buy into the hype, I wait for it and it starts so strong.

Elisabeth Sparkle (Demi Moore) has just turned fifty, a former movie star and award winner not unlike Jane Fonda all those years ago, now aged past her Hollywood prime. She’s so upset by the way that her producer Harvey (Dennis Quaid) treats her that she drives right into a car crash, which she walks away unscarred, but meets a nurse who informs her that there’s a way to get what she wants.

For the first quarter of this movie, I was shocked by how each scene seemed to be finely combed and obsessed over by director and writer Coralie Fargeat and cinematographer Benjamin Kračun. Rooms feel too large, angles feel too sharp, colors feel too bright. This excited me, wanting to see what was next, as Sparkle heads out in a yellow overcoat into the filthy end of the world in the 1980s of Los Angeles, finding sans serif type highly designed packages of The Substance.

She learns the rules and we already know they will be broken: She will get the youth that she wants, as a new body will appear out of her back. The two bodies are still one person and must switch consciousness every seven days. The active body must feed the inactive body with a weekly food supply and take daily injections of stabilizer fluid from the original body to keep from rotting. But we know that the young version of Elisabeth, Sue (Margaret Qualley, daughter of fashion model and actress Andie MacDowell, a ballet dancer in her youth that probably already has learned the lessons of this), will become addicted to the fame because how else do you experience being the center of the world?

As the film loses its color and edge, so do the characters move apart, forgetting that no matter what, they are one. Sue delays the switch to make love to a gorgeous boy on a motorcycle, causing Elisabeth’s finger to age. Elisabeth can barely move from the pain in her back — have you ever given birth by having your spinal column slide open? — and spends most of her days staring at the TV and the other times eating everything she can, leaving it lying everywhere, and then hiding out as she makes her way to get new supplies.

This new young life that she wanted isn’t even hers any more.

Instead of killing off her younger form — who has kept her in a coma for 90 days, transforming her into an elderly hunchback that appears more John Merrick than Debbie Sullivan — Elisabeth brings her back from the other side, only to be repeatedly slammed face first into a mirror and then murdered.

This leaves Sue the dream that she wants, being a star on New Year’s Eve, a very 1980s dream that no longer seems to matter.

To keep from rotting away, she loads up on the drug and then goes all Brundlefly in the mirror — don’t worry, the movie still has time to complete ape The Elephant Man and Eraserhead on the way to a close that you can spot from the opening frame — before emerging as Monstro Elisasue, a freakish creature that somehow is able to fool every single person around her by taking a poster and taping it to her face.

I knew this was an allegory at the start, then maybe magical realism. I didn’t let reality in the way when I debated who could survive a back wound like that with home surgery and no antibiotics, but by the end of the movie, it feels like the budget went out the window, as effects go almost chromakey in quality, other than a bloodletting than feels all Sam Raimi and a multiple bodies in one form that wants to shock you but forgets that you already saw Society.

Do I expect too much of the cinema of today? Do I overthink the male gaze in this movie, one created by a woman, that is supposed to make you feel bad for staring at bodies when, you know, it just keeps showing you bodies? I can’t even imagine how different this would be if Ray Liotta had lived and was in this instead of Quaid, who seems like he’s on the best of coke and ready to eat four pounds of shrimp in one scene (yes, I did look that up).

This is a movie that references other films until it becomes a Xerox that others will refer to, the stream backflowing into itself. Effects were called blob and Gollum and Requiem, all other movies and Coralie wanted the sensibility of The Elephant Man, according to the FX guys. Then, this gets so needledrop sledgehammer that it uses “Also sprach Zarathustra” and “The Nightmare And Dawn” from Vertigo and at that point, any pretense toward subtlety is washed away like a ripped off face on a Hollywood star, pretending to be the Lady In the Radiator after we’ve watched a movie that is like Seconds, only sloppy ones.

What are we to learn here? That we should love who we are and embrace aging? Maybe. I don’t know, it’s all buried under transgressive shock that will only be that to audiences who haven’t decided to wallow in the muck of the movies we grew up on. The film also has a major issue — and maybe it’s just me — but the beauty of Moore isn’t in the fact that her ass is tight or that she doesn’t have a wrinkle. She has lived in her body and been a goddess for decades, defying the expectations of how someone should age. The younger version of her feels like a sports car I’d be afraid to get dirt inside, a porcelain doll that you just leave on the shelf instead of risking being a bull.

The level of wit here is to name the sexist oaf Harvey. Hardy har harv.

At one point, I paused this — and the big twist had already happened — and it was 47 minutes before the end of the movie. Brian Yuzna had 96 minutes in Re-Animator. Lynch did Eraserhead in 89. This is 141 minutes long.

You will believe that someone can master home repair first time out to the point that she creates a room inside the bathroom that looks flawless. Who has that much real estate inside their walls? Also: An eye socket poops out a breast and in Hell, Lucio Fulci is like, “And?” Also: How did they keep that bathroom so clean when people are puking all over it, all the time?

This is a film that hates its character when she’s old and sexy, when she’s young and sexy, and then makes fun of her some more when she looks like Ephant Mon meets Castle Freak.

Unlike beauty, the movies that are cannibalized here will live forever.

This, not so much.