Billy Warlock stars as Bill Whitney, a clean-cut teenage suburbanite who is having serious doubts about the very nature of his idyllic upper-crust life. His sister Jenny (Partice Jennings), an aspiring debutante, is the apple of his parents’ eye as she prepares for her pivotal coming out party. Bill’s parents are cardboard cutouts from the Reagan era both staunchly materialistic and molded from family values. However, Bill’s paranoia is soon verified when his sister’s jealous ex-boyfriend Dave shares with him a secret recording of his, betraying his family’s odious secret: Jenny’s coming out party was merely a camouflage for an incestuous orgy between parent and daughter, followed by a main meal of lower class humans. Worse still, Bill learns that his iconoclastic spirit has isolated him beyond reproach from his family, and he soon finds that he is the low-class, imported meat that his family and their "society" finds so appetizing.

Horror favorite Brian Yuzna’s (BRIDE OF REANIMATOR, FAUST) debut film is, despite the premise, not the lugubrious affair one would expect. Instead, it is an admirably consistent, perspicacious satire on the Reagan era and its deleterious effect on an individual’s liberties. The film is built like a time bomb, remaining deceptively dormant until the finale explodes in an astonishing, psychedelic bloodletting.

Thus, the obvious question is if the wait for that whammer of an ending is worth it. If a lesser director were at the helm, SOCIETY would simply bide its time in bland build-up, but Yuzna utilizes the interim to wittily play on the teen horror genre conventions. For example, the age-old adolescent stand-by of peer pressure has particularly more bite here, considering the terrible "society" that Bill is unwittingly a part of that literally consumes its dissenters. Such scenes as Bill’s girlfriend pleading to get the two of them admitted into the most popular boy’s (Ted Ferguson) party has particular resonance here. Yuzna also warps another teen standby, the coming out party, by confessing to the audience (however, after the event) that the gathering had truly devious, lecherous roots. The film’s dual identity (one of a saccharine, highly visible surface and another of the unspeakable evil that lies beneath) is succinctly portrayed early in the film when a troubled Bill admits to his psychologist " I’m afraid if I scratch the surface there’ll be something terrible underneath." A close-up of a rotten apple, writhing with worms supplants this admittance; perhaps too obvious a metaphor, but an effective one nonetheless. And Bill himself is far from a one-note caricature. Yuzna is wise to avoid painting Bill in all the typical "teen outsider" stereotypes (the nerd and, in more contemporary films, the goth) and instead makes him an average kid with a fair amount of popularity (as evidenced by the various cheers he garners in his debate at his school). Bill’s depth sprouts from his inner darkness, that is, his family’s horrible secret, and that darkness’ competition with his middle-of-the-road appearance. Finally, Phil Davies’ and Mark Ryder’s score, while unremarkable, does a good job of furthering the deception motif, often abruptly oscillating from the festive to the morbid in the same scene.

Yuzna allows us only a tantalizing few glimpses of the "rotten" of the apple throughout the film, but they are potent and imaginative enough to hold the attention. The excellent effects by Japanese-born Screaming Mad George (who also worked on Yuzna’s BRIDE OF RE-ANIMATOR and SILENT NIGHT, DEADLY NIGHT 5) border on the surreal, and the effects’ habit of suggesting the subjectivity of Bill’s reality strongly recall David Cronenberg’s work (his 1983 film VIDEODROME in particular). Throughout the film Bill is the exclusive voyeur to the horrors. In one memorable scene he helps Jenny zip up her dress and to his horror her back throbs and bulges mockingly. And in perhaps the most disturbing vision, Bill sees his sister’s naked body twisted in such a position that not even the most gifted contortionist could hope to mimic.

Occasionally, however, even freakish effects and a refreshing layer of social criticism can’t mask the film’s few shortcomings. The most glaring complaint is the oversimplification of the principal theme of conformism and all the metaphors clipped to it. Often the dialogue is simply too revealing and obvious and one gets the feeling Yuzna wasn’t confident in his audience (brought up on mindless gore films) to catch the subtleties. Thus the film is riddled with such dead giveaway lines such as "You’ll make a wonderful contribution to society, Bill."

Further complications arise due to a few potholes in the plot. One such character is clearly dead and then inexplicably shows up later in the film! And one character is utterly disposable and only burdens the film. The character in question, the mother of Bill’s new mysterious girlfriend Clarissa (Devin Devasquez), is a monstrosity of broad, grossly misguided humor and her presence vacuums any dramatic momentum from those scenes. And Clarissa herself poses a few un-ironed wrinkles in the film. Early in their relationship Bill learns that Clarissa is "one of them" and yet the audience is not given sufficient evidence as to why shy would take a liking to Bill. However, this blunder is not a complete loss, as it suggests that even the nefarious "society" that Bill is a victim of has its own dissenters and is not black-and-white.

However, those complaints are all but forgotten in the extraordinary finale when Bill finally meets his destiny as the main course for his "society." Easily the decade’s most robust horror climax, SOCIETY’s conclusion is truly mindboggling. Not only do the freakish visuals speak for themselves, but Yuzna, always the opportunist, refines the cannibalism motif to fit the overhanging subject of one class’s (the wealthy bourgeois) over another (the down-and-out victims of urban blight). Before devouring David, Ted taunts him with this exemplary Marxist quote: "the rich have always sucked on low class shit like you." And suck they do. The feasting sequence, the most upsetting of the entire climax, has the various members of society (including Bill’s parents) metamorphosing into their true form, resembling a sort of anthropomorphic anteater, typified by a fleshy proboscis slurping the innards of the low class infidels. Most impressive is the fact that the members of the society melt together into a homogenous mass, communally dining, furthering Yuzna’s meticulous attention to another of the film’s central themes, that of conformism and the power of group politics over the individual (who is the main course here). Finally, Salvidor Dali’s lasting impression on special effects man Screaming Mad George is obvious here, as George swaps melting clocks with melting subhumananoids. It is also commendable that Yuzna sews up the "rotten underneath" theme so well. In the climatic fight between Bill and Ted, Bill destroys Ted’s flabby subhumanoid form, revealing his rotting innards, thus making a direct link to the apple metaphor in the beginning of the film.

Society is, without a doubt, as fiercely individualistic as its subject matter and joins the ranks of ROSEMARY’S BABY and PERFUME OF THE LADY IN BLACK as the best the cinema of paranoia has to offer. Although Yuzna’s film often opts to tickle the funnybone rather than chill it with its relentless satire, all the roads still end in invigorating, ripsnorting horror entertainment, with a pleasant amount of gray matter mixed in with the ooze, pus and blood. It is also worth mentioning that although conclusions have been drawn between Yuzna’s film and John Carpenter’s THEY LIVE (1988), both films have their own agendas. Although both works share a similar conceptual genesis (that of the Reagan era’s conformist identity), Carpenter’s film punctuates this theme by the exposure of Reagan era propaganda and subliminal messages, whereas Yuzna’s film extracts the theme by means of cannibalism, that is, assimilation.