Society (1989)

Brian Yuzna produced Re-Animator, but didn’t direct his own film until this body horror comedy which took three years to be released. It’s blessed with special effects by Japanese FX master Screaming Mad George that are really the star of the film.

Bill Whitney (Billy Warlock, son of the best Michael Myers, Dick Warlock) has a great life. His family is rich, he’s popular, he has a new Jeep and a hot cheerleader girlfriend. Yet he doesn’t feel that he fits into high society. This feeling gets worse when his sister’s ex-boyfriend gives him an audio tape of his family engaging in a murderous sex act.

Meanwhile, he keeps noticing a mysterious girl named Clarissa (she masturbates in front of him at a pep rally in a scene that’s frankly sexual in a mainstream non-sex film) and falls for her, despite her hair eating mother. If you’ve noticed that Society may be a completely insane movie, you’re right.

Of course, it turns out that the rich are aliens and Billy’s family is incestual and all of the most well-to-do folks in town are part of a ritual called the shunting, where they suck the life out of poor people. So how do you beat an alien like that? Well, you fist him and pull his asshole inside out, that’s how.

While some of this was based on a project that Yuzna started with Dan O’Bannon, writer Woody Keith claims to have based it on real people that he knew in the Beverly Hills. Gulp.

For fans of Halloween 2, that’s the exact same hospital that was Haddonfield Memorial. So there’s another reason to watch this again.

Ready to check it out? You can watch Society with and without commentary from Joe Bob Briggs on Shudder. You can also get the Arrow blu ray at Diabolik DVD.

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