However, I was almost going to write a separate post about how Society, which I watched on Friday night, was my potential practical effects substitute for Peter Jackson's Dead Alive a.k.a. Braindead, which it is looking increasingly unlikely I am going to get my hands on this month. I ended up writing about something else yesterday instead.
Then on Saturday night I watched a Swedish horror new to Netflix that I had only known about for approximately 24 hours.
Brian Yuzna's 1989 film Society came up on more than one of the lists I looked at for horror comedies, and at the start, I thought the reason it was considered funny is that it's a low budget film made in the late 1980s. Now mind you, most of the technique in terms of acting and writing belies the low budget, but the cinematography itself is not great, and everything looks, for want of a better word, dated. I feel like it might have even looked dated in 1989.
As the film progresses toward a truly nuts climax, though, it became more clear that this is a film that isn't just going to get by on the notions it presents about a possible secret society of people who engage in murderous orgies, but actually show us one of these events ... and all the practical makeup effects it requires.
I don't think you necessarily need to issue spoiler warnings for movies that are 34 years old, but it's possible some of you reading this will be using my words to get ideas for things to watch on your own Halloween viewing schedule. So I won't go into detail about how this movie ends. But I will say that the movie holds back most of its effects until the very end, and they are the kind of thing that Jackson certainly would have adored at that time. (I googled to see if he'd made any public comments about the movie, but I couldn't get the necessary search terms to be sure.)
In terms of the "society" theme, other than its pointed title, the movie does include how the haves and have nots both of their predetermined role in a system that is created by the haves. I won't go into it any further than that.
The Conference is a more straightforward film that might be more like a horror satire than a horror comedy, though the reprehensible nature of some of the characters, and the comeuppance they receive, certainly seems to qualify it as a viewing for this month. (Part of the reason I chose it, also, is that it gives me something to review this week. In a way, being a horror comedy was just a bonus.)
The Swedish film involves a retreat by a group of nine public sector employees on the eve of breaking ground on a new shopping center that they brought to fruition. They're at a remote camp that's equipped with things like zip lines where the team can engage in trust activities and complete competitive group tasks. Their phones are taken away from them so they can unplug. Of course, it's a great -- though not totally unexpected -- setup for a horror movie.
The mask you see in the poster -- which is supposed to be a mascot for the shopping center -- gets worn by an intruder who begins picking them off one by one. The satire, though, comes from the corrupt leadership of this group, who may be setting the project up to fail for the benefit of another company who is going to sweep in and capitalize on the ruins of the project -- in exchange for cushy jobs to the key collaborators.
A work conference makes for an interesting dynamic for a horror frame story, because unlike an excursion between supposed friends -- which is the setting for most horror movies -- a truly diverse set of personality types may be represented, since these people only came together because they happened to have interviewed for the same job. And of course the way their dynamic echoes the larger dynamic of different people in a society is ripe with satirical potential.
A good time for sure, if perhaps not quite as memorable as it may have had the opportunity to be.
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