YMMV / Society

• Accidental Innuendo: "Didn't ya know, Billy boy? The rich have always sucked off low-class shit like you!" Unfortunately, this is a rare case where the innuendo is far less troubling than the intended meaning. Though given Ted's Lecherous Licking after saying that, it may have been intentional.
• Complete Monster: Among the upper echelons of inhumanity, a particular few stick out:
  • Film:
    • Judge Carter is the most powerful member of the nebulous upper-class Society, a "different race" from humanity that for centuries has feasted upon the lower class. Routinely organizing grotesque "shunts", Carter and the other members of Society of Beverly Hills regularly devour victims in horrific Body Horror orgy-feasts that end with their victims torturously devoured, always meticulously covering up their deaths as unrelated disappearances. Carter demonstrates the shunt in its full visceral horror by devouring a teenager who finds out too much for his own good, even momentarily pausing the shunt to allow one of the Society's members to beat the hero Bill to a bloody pulp before intending to devour him as well.
    • Jim and Nan Whitney, seemingly the idyllic, wealthy parents of hero Bill Whitney, are in actuality a ravenous couple who engage in incestuous orgies with their daughter Jenny and participate in the shunts with the same frequency as the other members of Society. Jim and Nan adopted Bill for the sole purpose of fattening him up to devour him, gaslighting and even drugging Billy for seventeen straight years before finally revealing their true colors and taunting him about the fate they've prepared for him, intent on making him the pièce de résistance in the latest shunt.
  • In the comic Party Animal, Dr. Carroon is Society's "sexual disease expert", a grinning member of the incestuous mutant upper-class who uses his trade to pass along countless horrible sexual diseases to the lower-class through his clinic to keep Society "clean" after their constant shunts. Introduced ordering some "vintage syphilis" passed along to clients, Carroon gleefully probes Billy Whitney, while mockingly remarking "you have been faithful to Clarissa", before doubling around to Billy's friend who sold Billy out in the hopes of a compromise and horribly killing him in front of Billy's eyes.
• Crosses the Line Twice:
  • All over the place in the climactic "shunt" party where the imagery and dialogue constantly swings back between "hilarious" and "terrifying":
  • Billy's "father" is obstructive enough for Billy to call him a "butthead" in frustration. Later on during the shunt, when Billy accidentally walks in on his family in the middle of their own "party," Billy's father crawls from underneath the covers with his face literally where his ass would be: "well, son, I guess you're right: I am a butthead!"
  • After the genuinely tense and brutal No-Holds-Barred Beatdown Ted delivers to Billy, Billy manages to pick himself up after Ted is interrupted and spitefully winds him up by goading, "C'mon, Gumby!"
• Ensemble Dark Horse: Pamela Matheson as the trichotillomaniac Mrs. Carlyn, whom more than one reviewer noted she seemed like she stepped out of a John Waters movie.
• Germans Love David Hasselhoff: Society was received tepidly in North America where audiences were almost universally put off by the gross imagery and over-the-top writing, but the British ate it up in droves where Society performed extremely well. Yuzna remarked the British seemed to understand the film's commentary on the upper-class better, which makes perfect sense; the British were fresh off the rule of the "Iron Lady."
• Moment of Awesome: In the final battle, Billy turns the tides on the sadistic bully Ted Ferguson as he's getting beaten and turns Ted inside out. As horrific a scene as it was, Ferguson completely deserved it.
• Moral Event Horizon: No member of Society is by any stretch a good person (except Clarissa and her mom), but Billy's own parents rank among the worst of them and fly across the line when it's revealed they aren't Billy's parents at all, having adopted him and raised him from the time he was a baby for seventeen years, all for the sake of using him in the shunt.
• Nausea Fuel: The "shunting" in the climax. A massive, writhing... "orgy", for lack of a better term, where the members of high class society join together as their bodies morph into impossible shapes (generally a literal web of flesh) and consume a lower class member. The protagonist escapes from this madness, only to walk in on his parents and sister doing something similar.
• Nightmare Fuel: Sweet Christmas, you'd better believe it. Now has its own page.
• Signature Scene: Lets be honest here, the Shunting is the scene most people picture when they hear or talk about this movie
• Tear Jerker: The death of poor Dave Blanchard, a completely innocent, normal teenager who's kidnapped by Society and has his death faked as a car accident by them, for an infinitely worse fate: he's the prime piece of one of their shunts, and the subsequent, horrific fate they inflict on him is utterly awful to watch. Blanchard's sobbing pleas of "oh, God, please" as the mutants begin to strip him down were so convincing the director had to cut a few seconds of footage from the reaction shots.
• Vindicated by History: While it was completely ignored at the time of its release (at least in North America), the movie's now considered an 80s Body Horror classic for its amazing effects and still relevant social commentary.
• Visual Effects of Awesome: There's a reason Screaming Mad George is held in such high esteem among practical FX artists.
• What Do You Mean, It's Not for Kids?: The Amazon Prime video somehow only got a 13+ rating. Considering that this film has copious gore, nudity and incomprehensibly disgusting and psychosexual Body Horror, you think they might check first.

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