Society - Lisa's Review

*** Contains Spoilers ***

As I finished this movie, I wondered how on earth I was supposed to review this.  Half an hour later as I type the beginnings of this review, I am still wondering.  So, here goes...

The movie starts getting to know our main character Bill, a privileged teenager living in Beverly Hills with his perfect parents and cute little sister Jenny.  He seems to be a decent enough lad, well liked and popular, but as we start the movie with Bill visiting his psychiatrist and having a rather weird hallucination, we know, not all is well.  Is this perhaps a clue that Bill is going to see some weird stuff as the movie progresses.

I have to admit that from very early on I was weirded out by Bills family.  There is such a thing as being a happy, loving family and being borderline incestuous and I felt we were almost crossing a line as the family got ready for Jennys coming party.  I actually had to google this.  I had no idea 'coming out parties' existed.  For anyone as culturally unaware as myself, this is where a young lady of high standing comes of age (usually 17 or 18) and is introduced to society.  Anyways, back to the movie.  While Jenny is getting ready for her party, there is a scene where Bill helps her with her dress.  It was here that I realised things were not as they seemed.  I think we're supposed to go with the idea that Bill is prone to hallucinate rather than think there is anything amiss with perfect Jenny and her picture perfect family.

We get some proof that Bills family are a bunch of wierdos when Jennys ex-boyfriend Blanchard keeps trying to get a cassette tape (yes, a cassette tape) to him.  He had his suspicions and had bugged Jenny.  This tape had an extremely odd recording on it with Jenny and her parents talking about her party and how she would 'do it' with someone her own age, followed by her parents and then the host.  It later progresses into rather lewd conversations with other women about what they all do together.  It sounds as like an orgy as you're likely to hear.

Sickened, Bill takes the recording to his psychiatrist, who later plays it back to him.  It is simply Jenny having fun at her party with all the lewd conversations removed.  When he tries to get another copy from Blanchard, he winds up dead before he can get the tape to Bill.  In fact, every time he tries to find out more, or reveal his growing suspicions to others, he comes up against a hurdle.

So, we sit through an hour or so of a banal American 80's style 'thriller' and then we cut to another style entirely, which is how I imagine the movie ended up on a horror list.  The following contains LOTS of spoilers so don't read if you don't want to know.

Earlier in the movie when Bill helped Jenny with her dress, I assumed that certain people (definately Jenny and her parents) were aliens.  The wierd skin thing also came up with a girl Bill got lucky with (Clarissa).   It turns out they are not actually aliens, but a different species to human who have lived alongside humans through the centuries.  Caeser and Genghis Khan are mentioned.

In the final reveal (which comes about half an hour before the films ends) we see Bill back at his house, which is full of high society friends of his family.  He is noosed with one of those loops on a pole used to catch aggressive dogs by his psychiatrist, who is also one of them... it's at the party we find out what 'they' are.  Blanchard is brought out and we see he is actually alive.  His death was staged earlier in the movie.  Everyone strips off to their underwear and the guests at the party start to eat Blanchard alive.  I say eat, but I should really say absorb. They refer to it as 'Shunting'.   I don't really know what to say to be honest.  His body becomes a gelatinous goo and everyone sucks parts out of him and puts fingers into him and through him.  At one point a hand is inserted where the sun don't shine and emerges from his head which is swiftly pulled apart.  While this sick orgy-like feeding is going on, all the participants have become pliable and gooey.  They all start to merge together, with peoples bodies turning into very odd shapes.

It is during this lengthy and very sick scene that Bill see's the woman who he thought was his mother who has a pair of mans arms instead of her legs.  We also see Jennys head pop from between her arms as if in some kind of vile adult birth.   If that wasn't gross enough, it's dad next.  His face is moulded onto an ass.  He utters the line "Who you calling Butthead now?".... My eyes are rolling out of my head by now.

I could probably give a lot more detail, but it's loads more of the same until Bill fights with one of the top gooeys - Ferguson.  Long story short, since Ferguson is all soft and pliable from the feeding frenzy on Blanchard, Bill inserts his arm into his stomach, pushes his way up to the head, his fingers out through the eyeball sockets and pulls Ferguson inside out.  He manages to beat a hasty retreat with a friend Milo, who is also human and the girl he slept with earlier Clarissa, who is actually one of 'them'.  Here the movie ends.

I suppose the effects were good for the time, but there was absolutely nothing horrific about it.  It definately has yuck factor, but it was all a bit skin crawly, embarrassing and silly for want of a better word.

Three quarters of the movie was dull, boring and too long.  The last quarter of the movie was just like something a teenage boy had dreamed up and handed to a producer.  I didn't see the point.  It was a mess as far as I was concerned.   I could see the last half hour ending up on one of those 'Tales from the Crypt' programs, but as a movie?  Seriously?  No.

I heartily advise to avoid.

Society - Will's Review

The Whitneys are a wealthy Beverly Hills family, their daughter, Jenny, fits right in, being part of the 'preppy' crowd. Their son Bill however, while popular, never feels that he fits in with his parents, or the circles they and his sister run with. He's often suspected that something was off, but when Jenny's ex-boyfriend plays him a recording supposedly of his sister's coming out party, he begins to learn just how different high society may be... And people helping him get close to the truth start dying.

Some time in the early 90's I bought a set of video tapes from a discount bookshop called "This is Horror: From the Archives of Stephen King's World of Horror". As best as I can tell they were cobbled together from a TV series which was made mainly to promote then recent (and in some cases, still in production) horror movies. One of the movies featured was Society, and I've been meaning to get around to seeing it ever since.

The thing is, there is a big shift in this movie 70 minutes into its 95 minute runtime, a shift in sub genre, I'll get into exactly what later (they'll be a spoiler warning, although the trailer does blow it to an extent), but all the footage on my old documentary VHS was from that final reel, and I was under the impression that this movie was wall-to-wall that genre.

Instead, for most of its runtime, it's a movie that would have bitterly disappointed my teenage self. The shift is an odd one, as I can imagine the twist being 'too much' for someone who went in blind, while being too late for someone who went in expecting it. In either case, I can see it being disappointing.

That said, a little older, I was able to appreciate the paranoid thriller that comprised the bulk of the movie, while my expectation prevented what followed from being a shock; whether this softening of the blow worked to the movies advantage is impossible to say; I'm hoping that Lisa has gone in blind, because I really want to know how well the shift works if you weren't expecting it.

Before I get to the last 20 minutes, I'd just like to mention that this movie is very much about how the rich are strange, bad, and not like us... I'm surprised this movie hasn't gained a new popularity in light of the 99% movement.

Definitely worth a look for fans of 80's movies.

MILD SPOILERS FROM HERE ON.

The genre switch it to body horror. It's hinted at a couple of times through the movie, with both Jenny and Bills love interest Clarissa being seen briefly to contort impossibly, but until the movie's final 20 minutes, these could have been Bill's imagination. My experience of the film wa, i think, somewhat changed by the cat that my "This is Horror" tape made the movie look like wall-to-wall deformed, melting and transmogrifying madness.

Ordinarily I wouldn't have mentioned it in a review, but a review would be incomplete without my mentioning the special makeup effects. They are superb, and serve as a reminder in this digital age at how much better physical effects can be for many things; I'd hate to see what the 'shunting' party would look like in CGI.

Week 144 - Society (1989)

Reviews / Author Comments due: 22/02/2014
Position on TimeOut list: 75
More Info: Wikipedia, IMDB
DVD: Link

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