Society (1990)

Brian Yuzna's 1989 directorial debut arrives with a premise that reads, on paper, like a slogan for a very expensive dinner party. Bill Whitney, a Beverly Hills teenager, suspects his wealthy family is not like him. He is correct. They are, in fact, a different species, and their social calendar includes the ritual consumption of the less fortunate. The film treats upper-class predation as biology, which is a tidy way of saying the rich are monsters and always have been. Subtlety is not on the menu.

The class warfare here is literal and wet. Where a lesser film might have staged a seminar on wealth inequality, Yuzna stages an orgy of melting flesh in which the elite feed on a human sacrifice. The message is present, but it is shown, not spoken, which spares us the lecture and leaves us the spectacle. The famous shunting sequence, all merged bodies and Salvador Dali grotesquerie, works as both punchline and thesis. It is a joke told in viscera, and it lands.

The film does not broaden its grievances. The cast is a uniformly white Beverly Hills ensemble, and the screenplay has no interest in race, queerness, or the environment. The women exist to be admired or to defect for love. The body is not celebrated here but turned inside out, which makes this the opposite of any contemporary wellness sensibility. Bill's therapist is a plot device, not a portrait of a mind. We are left with a single sharply honed blade: a savage indictment of the wealthy, delivered through the most disgusting finale of its decade. The rest of the arsenal was never unpacked.