Review #271: Society (1989)

This review was originally written in October 2023.

Gabe's Horror Movie October Review #25 - Society (1989)

THIS IS A MOVIE WHERE SOMEONE PUNCHES A GUY IN THE DICK SO HARD HIS FIST COMES OUT THE GUY'S FACE, WHICH HE THEN GRABS AND USES TO TURN THE GUY INSIDE OUT.

Ahem. Pardon me, I just had to make that clear.

Society is an extremely 80s movie that follows Bill, the poorly-adjusted son of a high-class family who has been having paranoid delusions. Some of his delusions involve dreams of defending himself from his parents with a knife, thoughts that his parents aren't really his parents, paranoid ideation of an alien class of people killing those that try to expose the truth, and more. When he catches wind of some bizarre, incestuous happenings between his parents, his sister, and other people in their social circle, Bill becomes a target of these people trying to stop the truth from getting out. Or is Bill just imagining it?

(He totes isn't imagining it, there's some insane body horror in the last thirty minutes of this movie.)

The first half of this movie wasn't really very impressive. Bill's sister's ex-boyfriend records a conversation of some very bizarre things, but other than that it's just Bill first being a normal 80s rich kid and then it's Bill being paranoid but not being able to find out anything because "they" are always one step ahead of him. But then the second half did get interesting, if INSANELY bizarre. It took a while to figure out what the crap these characters are even doing during the lead-up to the intense body horror section, but when it got going MAN IT GOT GOING. I'd seen this movie on lists of "Most Disturbing Horror Films" and for most of its runtime I'm like, "Is this it? A recorded discussion about incest? That's not as disturbing as I expected" but then WHOA BOY it delivered in the last bit. I could try to describe what happens but words would not do it justice.

There's a lot about this movie that still doesn't make sense to me though. Like, a big part of the plot is Bill getting together with Clarissa, another rich girl at his school, and at the end of the movie she seems to not be a part of the bizarre alien orgy fleshwarping cult (since she tries to help him escape, and they ride off together). But when the two of them first get together, during and after their sexual encounter, she definitely was exhibiting some of the weird body horror stuff, right? And there's a running gag about her mother being some sort of a golem that eats hair (?) but this seems to be separate from the alien orgy fleshwarping cult, so what the crap is going on with her? I spent a lot of the movie hoping that it would turn out that in fact Bill WAS going crazy (as a subversion from the infinite supply of movies where the seemingly-crazy person turns out to be fully justified in their paranoia) but I guess that probably would have meant missing out on the aforementioned inside-out-fist-maneuver. (I tried typing that many different ways and that was the least bothersome way I could word that.)

Anyway, this is a VERY bizarre movie with an insane payoff near the end and some impressively horrific practical effects. The rest of the movie is a little weird but it really comes down to the party scene at the end. I want to encourage people to watch the whole movie so the party scene has context but I really don't know what kind of context could prepare anyone for THAT.

Overall Rating: 7/10 School Presidential Debates

Not A Surprise At All: Director Brian Yuzna claims he started with the idea of special effects and gimmicks, and reverse-engineered some of the plot points based on those. You don't say!