Really Awful Movies

“You know what I blame this on the breakdown of? Society.” Of course that’s Moe from The Simpsons. In the movie Society, social relations crumble around young Billy, a teen lone-man out who noticeably doesn’t resemble his parents nor his sister and who is (unsuccessfully) trying to curry favor with the school’s rich and very popular kids.

If only it were that simple, from both a narrative and a normative perspective. You see, there’s something really amiss with Billy’s suburban Los Angeles family — really, really amiss.

Unlike the typical coming-of-age tale, it’s young Billy who is the moral center and is his center ever upended.

Blanchard, a prying schoolmate who’s been spotted hiding out in Billy’s sister’s closet, has some interesting information to pass along to him, but considering the source, Billy’s more than skeptical. Then, Blanchard presses forward and produces a smoking gun: an audio recording of some truly taboo-shattering chatter, some beyond-risque communication between Billy’s sister and parents.

Armed with the horrifying information that we won’t dare reveal, he marches into psychotherapist Dr. Cleveland’s office, but the audio recording “evidence,” appears to be harmless banter and fashion chat about an upcoming cotillion ball.

Undaunted, Billy presses forward while questioning his own sanity (a student council president hopeful, he hallucinates salacious behavior of an audience member during a candidates’ debate).

But it’s only upon ditching his girlfriend and hooking up with sex kitten Clarissa that things really begin to sharpen into focus in this Lynchian landscape, the brainchild of Brian Yuzna, frequent Stuart Gordon collaborator.

How he went from Honey, I Really Messed up the Kids here to shrinking them later in his career is anyone’s guess.

What’ll also keep you guessing: Society’s unlikely narrative and oddball characters.

Proof that a constant undercurrent of dread is worth 1,000 pig entrails, Society is a paranoid Freudian nightmare and unfailingly original.

This is Beverly Hills 90201 by way of John Waters and the Marquis de Sade.

***3/4 (out of 5)

[BE SURE TO CHECK OUT THE REALLY AWFUL MOVIES PODCAST DISCUSSION OF SOCIETY!]

24 Hours to Die sounds like a Rainier Wolfcastle shoot-em-up. Weird, as the original title for this 2016 Irish horror is less parody bait and more accurate to boot — Captive.

Whatever you call it, it’s a Saw retread but not nearly as sharp. Saw, for all its flaws — the annoying green-blue hues, the wallowing in degradation — presented interesting ethical dilemmas (How far would you go in the interest of self- and familial preservation?) and examined, in gross-out fashion, human examples of the psychology of learned helplessness.

Jigsaw masterminded a deadly game for his victims to play out, in a kind of Trolley Problem* thought experiment come to life (minus the saving others rather than just yourself bit that made that one so interesting for ethicists to study).

Saw is a polarizing film to be sure, but there’s no denying its influence in jump-starting its own sub-genre.

In 24 Hours to Die, the twist is that, rather than a detail-oriented, practically omniscient killer offing everyone, there’s a virus.

As IMDb describes it: “12 strangers are held against their will as each of them must go along with the rules if they are to get the cure for a killer virus which infects them all.”

It’s a concrete bunker, and each of the victims’ wake up times are staggered, so that they occasionally turn on one another for lack of any other reasonable explanation as to how they got there. The captives are put through a series of tasks in order to procure a cure, with the added benefit of a countdown clock to make sure things zip along with some semblance of suspense.

We’ve reviewed a few “how the hell did I end up here?” movies on this site, the superior Open Grave and Awaken spring to mind, and it’s rich territory to mine, a nice way to disorient a viewer as the plot unspools.

In 24 Hours to Die / Captive, there’s no investment in any of the protagonists, as they’re backstory-less, save for a brief explanation of their occupations, as they try and determine a reason they’ve all been subjected to this scenario. This is followed by a lot of yelling at one another, and a bunch of “why are you doing this to me?” and “I just wanna see my family!” cliches.

Skip.

*1/2 (out of 5)

*In the Trolley Problem, there’s a runaway train and you’re beside a lever. If you:
a) Do nothing, the trolley kills five people on the main track (passively) allowing carnage to occur.
b) Pull the lever, you divert the trolley onto the side track, (actively) killing one person.