HorrorMovieDiscussionSeries(HMDS) #1 Society 1989

[lazario]

Director: Brian Yuzna (The Dentist, Return of the Living Dead III, Bride of Re-Animator, Progeny, Beyond Re-Animator, Faust: Love of the Damned, Silent Night Deadly Night 4: Initiation, The Dentist 2, Beneath Still Waters, Rottweiler)

Writers:
Rick Fry (Bride of Re-Animator, Dementia)
Woody Keith (Bride of Re-Animator, Silent Night Deadly Night 4: Initiation, Dementia, Angel's Tide)

Cast
Billy Warlock (Halloween II, Baywatch, Happy Days, General Hospital, Days of Our Lives, Young and the Restless)
Devin DeVasquez (House II: The Second Story, Can't Buy Me Love, A Low Down Dirty Shame, Citizen Toxie: The Toxic Avenger IV)
Charles Lucia (The Hand That Rocks the Cradle, Barnaby Jones, Cagney & Lacey, Jake and the Fatman)
Patrice Jennings (Beverly Hills 90210, What I Like About You)
Evan Richards (Down and Out in Beverly Hills, Twilight Zone: the Movie, Altered States)
Heidi Kozak (Friday the 13th Part VII: The New Blood, Dr. Quinn Medicine Woman, Slumber Party Massacre II)
Ben Meyerson (Freeway, Knocked Up, Tour of Duty, Speed 2: Cruise Control)
Connie Danese (E.R., NYPD Blue, Murder She Wrote, Who's the Boss?, The Facts of Life, Star Trek: The Next Generation)
Ben Slack (Archie Bunker's Place, St. Elsewhere, Hill Street Blues, The Wonder Years, The Practice, Cagney & Lacey, Murder She Wrote, NYPD Blue)
David Wiley (Friday the 13th Part III, Highway Patrol, Hogan's Heroes, Highway to Heaven, Night Court, Falcon Crest, The Dave Thomas Comedy Show, ABC Weekend Specials, Hill Street Blues)

IMDb plot(s):
"Bill is worried that he is 'different' to his sister and parents. They mix with other 'upper class' people while Bill is more down to earth. Even his girlfriend seems a bit odd. All is revealed when Bill returns home to find a party in full swing. Not for the weak of stomach."

"The teenager Bill Whitney (Billy Warlock) feels misfit with his parents and his sister Jenny Whitney (Patrice Jennings). When his sister's boyfriend David Blanchard (Tim Bartell) bugs his family, he shows the disturbing tapes to Bill showing incest and a weird society. When Blanchard dies in a car accident, Bill decides to investigate his family and find a scary truth."

[malbowski13]

Sounds decent. And...

[shunty]

i love society. i am shunty!

[tsmooth31]

i picked it up on DVD a couple years ago as a blind buy, it was pretty weird but i liked it, some good 80's fun

[lazario]

Aug 7, 2008 21:28:35 GMT -5 @malbowski13 said:

Sounds decent. And...

And... (?)

I think for a freak-mutant, goop and slime, transformation, sex-comedy-horror movie, it's very good. The acting is not great, but this is a rare movie where the style makes up for it. For the most part.

Certainly no one can say it's not a one-of-a-kind. A completely original piece of absurdist horror.

[shunty]

the party. one of the greatest horror scenes!

[lazario]

I hate the party scene. But that's my taste, without question. Not only did the goop gross me out, but you can see all the edges where the makeup is a different color than the people's faces. You can see all the areas where the makeup is fake movie makeup, which takes me out of the scene. I guess that's nobody's fault, though. But Screaming Mad George's makeup in the Nightmare on Elm Street movies looks great. I think money may have made the difference.

It's a low budget movie that really feels like a bigger budget movie. I don't know if I already said this, but the music is very good. Clarissa (bad name for a Latina character, in my op.) seems to have her own theme, every time you see her, the music gets very ethereal and ambient and soothing.

Both parts of the movie for me have 1 big problem a-piece. The second half, it's the FX. The first half is the main character, Bill Whitney. Why doesn't he fit in? Why is he the total typical high school Prom-King type, very jockish, gorgeous... yet he's an outcast? And his friends are nerds. I just don't get it. Which is probably why I love the stuff with Clarissa so much. She's the one thing that makes this movie less of a high school black comedy and more of a surreal fantasy-horror film. She's not just a dream girl type, because she's in control of everything that happens. Which is great too because she keeps bringing him places where he wouldn't normally go, and they do things that are completely different. It's interesting and different. And they make her kind of ugly at times for such a beautiful girl.

I also loved the sister, Jenny- I think her name was. She felt like a real little sister. And wasn't just perky, she seemed sweeter and more pure than Snow White. Which makes her character transition later a huge shock. She doesn't seem to fit in with the parents at all. Because they're both totally creepy. The mother always seems like she has incestual designs on Billy and the father just says things that seem so beyond bizarre, it's weird. Who believed him for a second when he talked about- "don't speak to your mother that way." It felt completely unreal. So, with that in mind, I liked that the sister was so nice and never seemed weird. She's also the only person that was part of the "society" that kept up the idea that maybe Bill was the weird one and they were all normal. Because she wasn't creepy and they all were.