Society

Bizarre as fuck! It should be mentioned that this society includes a lot of strange activities involving incest, perversion and a scandalous feeding scene that will make your toes curl. Great body horror and perfect make-up effects for its age. 75% (05.01.2014)

QAnon the Movie, or how an unhinged high-school jock finds out that there is something very twisted at the core of California’s elite society. In its day, Society must have been a great revelation for unsuspecting viewers who rented it on VHS. But they probably had a pretty good idea of what was in store for them even then, as Brian Yuzna had clearly created a category of his own thanks to his association with Re-Animator. Therefore, the paranoid storyline that the film tries to build up through most of its runtime doesn’t work very well, since everyone guesses that the protagonist isn’t merely hallucinating. Unfortunately, this storyline takes up the greater part of the film and the messy Dali-esque surreal satire comes along only near the end. After all, the whole project exhibits the classic ills of VHS trash flicks, where the central goofy idea doesn’t merit more than a medium-length project (or rather, it isn’t developed into a proper screenplay that can fully exploit it), but empty scenes stretch it out to a feature-length runtime. But what we will say is that nobody is going to watch this movie for its screenplay (which really doesn’t work and actually goes from nowhere to nowhere), but only for the creations of special-effects master Screaming Mad George, which are excellent and grotesquely disturbing. Society is thus an exemplary illustration of the rule that the prevailing impression that a film makes is based on the viewing experience from the last quarter of the film. (06.11.2020)

A B-movie that will quite possibly bore you for an hour only to reward you with half an hour of insane and very entertaining bizarreness. The final fight reminded me a little of Slither and I wouldn’t be surprised if there was some inspiration. But back to Society. I really hate the boy heroes of the 80s and watching two thirds of this film was a pretty deadening affair for me. Thanks God for that ending, otherwise it would be two stars at most. (24.08.2008)