There’s a classic film-watching tradition — largely lost with the advent of streaming services — that involves randomly flicking through the wasteland of late-night television, in the oft-futile hope of stumbling upon something diverting enough to hold your attention. Considering the setting and time of day, these treasures were usually of the disreputable variety: outré horror flicks, low-budget actioners and other dependable deliverers of immediate, sordid thrills. Brian Yuzna’s Society (1989) is the apotheosis of this brand of movie, a largely humdrum thriller that, after a few lurches into surreal absurdity, eventually delivers in a far bigger way than could have been expected, with a blowout conclusion that literally turns the story inside out. It’s fitting, then, that it can currently be found streaming on Tubi, the platform most suited for this type of experience, a free service (albeit one with ads, which might enhance the mood were they not so bland) which most closely replicates the sort of offerings you’d find on display on Showtime at 2 a.m., circa 1997.
As for Society, it’s a midnight movie with a sharper-than-usual satirical edge, and a worse-than-average sense of structure and plotting. The story concerns a popular rich kid at Beverly Hills High (Billy Warlock, later of Baywatch supporting-cast fame), who despite his charmed existence, remains at a distinct remove from his WASP-y, otherwise entirely blond family. It’s a divergence, accentuated by awkward silences and a program of forced patter from his stiff parents, that causes him to repeatedly speculate that he’s adopted. He has no idea how correct he is.
A candidate for class president and star athlete (whose droptop Jeep’s license plate simply reads HOOPS), Billy is nonetheless increasingly subject to black moods and paranoia, treated by frequent visits to psychiatrist Dr. Cleveland (Ben Slack). His supposed detachment from reality is leveraged for a thread of suspense early on, as hallucinatory visions coalesce with whispers of a sinister conspiracy, making it difficult to tell what’s real and what’s imagined. Further tension is drawn from the idea of parents as distant, unsympathetic drones, incapable of getting on the main characters’ emotional wavelength, a common trope in teen horror to this day, and one that Yuzna eventually pushes to a disturbing endpoint. Side-plots concerning a big party and the race for president provide further commentary on the toxic social atmosphere of the upper crust, accentuating uncomfortable rifts between the haves and the have-mores.
Containing little substance in the way of narrative or character construction, Society buys time with about 60 minutes of table-setting, in a half-hearted attempt to build suspense (and save budget) before the inevitable grotesque climax, which to its credit is one for the ages. A gross-out spectacular of epic proportions, the finale involves a coming-out party in which young debutantes are inducted into a society of flesh-eating mutants, feasting on the bodies of their less-entitled counterparts. This sexually-tinged orgy of consumption, in which all the film’s authority figures fuse into a single monstrous entity united by an insatiable appetite, is a satisfying conclusion, one which pulls no punches in its condemnation of the sickeningly affluent, in a manner that’s visceral rather than intellectual. It’s also an appropriate one, considering Yuzna’s background as producer for 1985’s Reanimator, a movie with an equivalent fondness for fashioning gore into a satirical weapon, and one which closed out in similarly impressive fashion.
Yet unlike Re-Animator, Society’s capstone doesn’t serve as the apex to an escalating cascade of thrills, but a complete rupture, reconfiguring everything that came before it. Like the revelation it represents, this closing set piece represents a daring break from a previously stolid program of quasi-realism, at times resembling an after-school special, to pull the rug out from viewer and protagonist alike. This only makes it more effective. The masks all fall off at once, revealing the true image of the rich consuming the poor, as they’ve always done. It’s a squalid bloodbath reminiscent of the culmination of Abel Ferrara’s The Addiction, which dramatizes the incestuous, backbiting world of academia as a vampiric feeding frenzy. The fact that the rest of the film doesn’t match up only makes the ending more rewarding, resulting in the kind of movie that, were it airing live, you’d catch for the climax, rewatch at some point to get filled in on the leadup, then stick around for a repeat of the final gory bits, a palate cleanser for the disappointment of what preceded it.
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