SOCIETY (1992)

Class warfare has always been ripe for satire. Oscar Wilde, Moliere, Luis Bunuel, Alice Cooper, National Lampoon—all the majors have tackled the idea that the rich feed off of the poor, that proper standing and breeding are more important than human decency. In 1989, horror producer Brian Yuzna took the themes and ran with them for his directorial debut, Society, and wound up with a very strange movie indeed.

As well-bred Bill Whitney (Baywatch’s Billy Warlock) approaches his eighteenth birthday, he starts to suffer the onset of existential angst. Yes, he has it all—fancy girlfriend, wealthy parents, the high school presidency all but locked up, but he just feels so alienated by it all. Dr. Cleveland, Bill’s therapist and an old family friend, chalks it up to normal post-adolescent angst, shoves some pills down his throat and sends him on his way. But then he runs into Blanchard, his sister Jenny’s creepy and bloated ex-boyfriend, who gives Bill an audio tape containing what sounds to be his family involved in a perverse and squishy murder-cum-orgy. When he plays the tape for Dr. Cleveland, however, Bill hears only the delighted sounds of Jenny’s “coming out” party.

Only Bill’s lower-upper-middle-class best friend Milo believes his story. Blanchard’s sudden death in a car accident confirms their suspicions that something is amiss. At a high-class party, the insufferable upper-upper-class Ferguson boasts to Billy that not only was the first tape real, but he was there and he had sex with Jenny. In quite a huff, even a huff-and-a-half, Bill leaves the party with the genetically-perfect Clarissa. At her house, they have sex a contortionist would envy—at one point, Bill enters the bedroom convinced that he sees both her front and backside aimed in his direction.

Things get even nastier for Bill at home. At one point, he walks in on his parents and Jenny oiled up together on the bed, grooming or preening in their underwear. Which, face it, has to be worse than anything you’ve ever caught your parents doing.

After a series of misadventures, Bill winds up back at his parents’ house, where he is caught in an animal-control snare and dragged into the dining room where another party is being held. All the upper-and-upper-still-class members are there—his parents, Jenny, Ferguson, Dr. Cleveland, Clarissa (the Professor, Mary-Ann, etc.)—and they want to confirm his fears. He’s not blue blood-related at all and the rich really are different from us. To prove it, they drag a stripped-down Blanchard into the middle of the room and corral him for “the shunting”. All around him, Bill sees the people he’s known all his life, their bodies elongating, melting and merging, changing form—his father’s head, for instance, literally pokes out of his ass as he, mom and Jenny have “sex” for lack of another word. The upper-classes start to ooze around each other, becoming a single organism as they literally absorb Blanchard’s nutrients, reducing him to similar fleshy ooze while he screams. And Bill is meant to be next—he’s been bred his whole life for just this night.

“Surreal” doesn’t begin to describe the climax and it must be seen to be believed—just don’t make the mistake of eating while you watch. Reducing pompous rich folk to malleable slugs must have been satisfying to all involved but particularly Yuzna and effects-maestro Screaming Mad George. The climax is especially effective because it’s clear that’s where the movie’s entire budget went. The rest of the movie looks low budget, cramped and cheap, which it was. Made at the tail-end of the ‘80s direct-to-video hey-day, getting a weird movie in the can and to the audience was the main goal. And like the best of that era, Society is not your run-of-the-mill horror entry.

Occasionally referred to by fans as a black comedy version of From Beyond, which Yuzna produced in 1986 with Stuart Gordon at the helm. The Lovecraft-inspired Yog Shoggoth story also featured body horror in the form of molecular change. While Society lacks Gordon’s polished panache, Yuzna keeps things moving admirably. It still feels like a “first film” in a lot of places, but it doesn’t feel like anyone else’s first film, that’s for damned sure. The plastic atmosphere generated by the low budget actually works to the film’s advantage in this case, accentuating the artifice in which the “Society” lives outside of their marble palaces, where they retreat to be themselves.

Unfortunately, Society may have proved to be too pointed in its satire as it had a hard time finding an audience. Completed in 1989, it didn’t reach home video in the U.S. until 1992 and then in only limited release. But it did quite well overseas. Europeans in particular found it clever, disturbing and wonderful. Which seems to add gravity to the argument that Americans can’t make fun of themselves in the same way as the Europeans. We have thinner skins and unless Hollywood is lampooning itself (ala The Player), the suits in charge certainly don’t take well to some indie upstart pointing a finger at them.

Now in the DVD era, Society is a little easier to locate, thanks to Anchor Bay. The stand-alone edition is out of print, but it can be found on a double-feature disk with another underappreciated entry, Tobe Hooper’s Spontaneous Combustion. You are now free to view society in all its squishy, slimy glory, but from the safety of your own home. It gives you a solid reason to appreciate being an outsider. Seriously, tell me you couldn’t see Donald Trump melting down like that in a sex orgy with Oprah Winfrey? …Actually, don’t tell me. I don’t want that image in my head. Bottom line: the rich are different.

THE GUYVER (1991)

Because the early ‘90s were still in the technological copper age, I had very little access to the infant Internet. Living in a small town, I had little exposure to anime hounds and had seen little more than Akira at this point in my life, thus had little point of reference for the culture of crazy cartoons. I’d somehow managed to avoid The Mighty Morphin’ Power Rangers all of this time, had never been much of a Godzilla fan (and knew not of kaiju at this point in my cultural education) and had only dim memories of Speed Racer or Ultraman. So when The Guyver was put before me, I only gave a damn because it had Brian Yuzna’s name stamped on it. He’d produced Re-Animator and directed the slightly less-interesting Bride of Re-Animator, not to mention the daffy and slimy Society, so I was eager for this new little eye-ball feast.

Without knowing its origins, I was mildy amused by the story of a kung-fu student named Sean (Jack Armstrong), smitten with a young Japanese girl who accidentally winds up symbiotically joined at the neck with a “Guyver Unit”—a biomechanical suit of armor that encases his body and ramps up his kung-fu skills, enabling to fight the likes of Michael Berryman and Jimmy J.J. Walker who transform into bizarrely mutated monsters themselves. Oh, and it also had Mark Hamill in it (incorrectly—misleadingly—evilly—shown as the Guyver on the DVD box art), and David Gale, who played the evil severed head of Dr. Hill in Re-Animator. And did I mention that “Herbert West” himself, Jeffrey Combs pops up in the end, playing “Dr. East”? I’m sure I did. Anyway, it was a kung-fu monster movie with awesomely-goofy designs by effects guy Screaming Mad George, so I was more than satisfied with the results, even though the story about aliens and their “Zoanoids” didn’t make much sense.

Now that I’m older, wiser, and more educated in the Guyver’s history as first manga (Japanese comic books to those of you reading this review in 1991) then anime, watching the movie again I have to admit…it still doesn’t make much sense. But it’s fun and doesn’t have too many slow spots so I still give it a pass, nostalgic sap that I am.

In all seriousness, The Guyver is not that great a movie and you’ll enjoy it much more if you have a fondness for Yuzna’s chaotic ‘80s horror comedies, not to mention a soft spot for the wonderful Michael Berryman ("Everything's better with Berryman!"). And at least a tolerance for Jimmy Walker, who turns into a gremlin by way of Ralph Bakshi and raps… too often. I’m told that if you are a fan of the manga or anime, this movie exists solely to piss you off and probably kicks you when you’re not looking. Having had only minor exposure to the anime series, I can’t say that the live action movie is an improvement or a detriment.

I can say that the follow-up, Guyver: Dark Hero, also directed by Steve Wang, was much better received by anime fans than the first. Part of this has to do with the absence of Yuzna’s comedy as well as the absence of Jack Armstrong (in fact, in Dark Hero, Sean is played by David Hayter, screenwriter of X-Men and X2), and sticks a little closer to the original storyline. To my uneducated eyes, Dark Hero seemed even more like the Power Rangers and the monsters were more kaiju than Screaming Mad George’s. So I didn’t care for it. Leave it to me to dislike something superior.

But when all is said and done, The Guyver is little more than what it sets out to be: guy in a slick H.R. Geiger outfit goes head-to-head with B-movie actors playing monsters. It doesn’t promise to be anything else. Sometimes the action works, sometimes it doesn’t. For my money, there’s nothing funnier than the yak-headed monster in the lab coat and tie near the end. But, again, that’s just me.

For some reason, after rewatching it recently, I realized that I have been misremembering its gore quotient all these years. I’m so used to Yuzna-produced movies dripping with the red stuff I was actually surprised at how tame the action was in Guyver. Of course, it was released theatrically with a PG-13 rating, so that should have played some role in my memory. However, I do recall watching it on a bootleg video a few months before its release, so perhaps it was gorier before the final release. Alas, that video tape has been lost to the winds of time so I can’t go back to confirm or deny. I just remember monster brains.

Now, if this train-wreck of a review has you interested to check The Guyver out for yourself, it’s readily available on DVD. I would recommend you get Dark Hero as well so you can compare the two. I’m told one is better than the other, but you can’t go by me. Obviously.