Predator 2 (1990)

You'd think it would be really easy to make a Predator sequel. I mean, the first one wasn't exactly the stuff of geniuses – you take a bunch of musclebound meatheads, stick 'em in the jungle and watch them get killed off by a sometimes-invisible alien. I had never seen this one, so I was like, oh, it'll probably be more or less the same, right? Right?

RIGHT?!

Nooooooo.

Director: Stephen Hopkins

Starring: Danny Glover, Gary Busey

IMDb

We start this one off with some news reports detailing the dystopian future we all have to look forward to: in 1997, apparently voodoo gang members rule Los Angeles and the police are helpless to stop the constant gunfire and gang warring going on. You read that right, yes – voodoo gang members.

I...just can't even comprehend what kind of bungled thought process went into THAT one – hey, let's make a predator sequel! Cool, what ideas do you have? Well, I thought I'd add in some voodoo gang members in a dystopian future landscape to really exemplify what the Predator is all about and...hey, why are you running for the door? Come back!

Well that's what should've happened. Also, yes, 1997. I do remember the violent gang wars that ruined LA at that time – what a fiasco. And to think all we have to worry about these days are lesser issues like ISIS and the economy and shit. We have it easy!

So apparently our main character is Danny Glover, playing a horrible actor. Or is that not a role at all? There isn't a lot to say about the first twenty minutes or so, as much of it is just a haphazard dive into gratuitous shooting and violence. This isn't necessarily bad, but it's tough to get invested in a film that doesn't seem to give two shits about actually introducing you to any of its characters in the least – instead it's just “Hey! Look at how much violent shit we can put in!”

The gunfire and the cars getting blown up have more character development than the actual characters.

Although there is one guy who we'll rememeber, though mostly for cocaine induced reasons:

Well that's how everyone on set got through making this thing, anyway.

This whole thing goes to shit when the Predator shows up and slaughters most of the gang members. The last guy, Mr. Cocaine over there, is left to jump off a building when he sees the Predator coming for him. This surprises exactly nobody until they notice the little detail of the one other guy in the building who was randomly chosen to be strung up like cattle with his heart cut out.

One of Glover's guys, Danny, goes off by himself and ends up getting killed. Glover gets shit for messing up the operation back at the base, because they weren't supposed to go in the building at all, and apparently he has a history of not obeying orders.

Astonishing; a movie cop that doesn't obey orders? What's next, a hot chick that needs to be saved from a villain twirling a mustache? Whatever will you do next to buck the system and fight against cliché, movie? I'm just on the edge of my seat.

We also get introduced to some other characters, like Gary Busey playing some hard ass special ops guy trying to take over this whole thing as his own. But really his job just seems to be showing off that gap between his front teeth.

Then there's Bill Paxton, who loves to tell wacky stories at crime scenes, because that's how a good cop acts, you know. This character is a constant annoyance on screen and there's really nothing about him that I enjoy.

While that's going on, the Predator is busy killing off a bunch of the Voodoo gang members in some condominium. The cops come and investigate, finding a little spearhead thingy, which Glover and his sidekicks take to some white-haired scientist lady who I think has been locked in a room for seven years with no way out:

Hi, character invented for no purpose but to dole out exposition like a Blackjack dealer!

The lady looks at the spearhead, proclaims she's completely baffled by it because it has no metals known to the periodic table, then just shrugs and lets the cops take it out with them again. You know, no point in actually researching that shit; just let them take it out with them and never bring it up again, like any good scientist is wont to do. Brilliant work, lady.

Then we get more action when a bunch of guys on some train are harassing some women when the entire train whips out guns, because this whole thing is really just the NRA's wet dream fantasy:

The Predator was apparently just waiting for this opportunity, as he comes down and slaughters most of the people on the train. The cops get there, and we see the movie's fetish for scenes where people wander around in the dark for a while before something jumps out and scares them, which is NEVER something overdone in these kinds of movies!

Run! The Invisible Man has gone INSANE!

Fortunately Paxton gets killed off in this scene, which raises the movie up a notch for me personally, as I was about to claw out my own ear drums if I had to listen to another scene of him telling jokes in the middle of a crime scene.

DIE!!!

Like clockwork, Glover gets chewed out back at the station and it's revealed he has a history of being psychologically unstable and violent, yet has been on the force for a jawdropping 18 YEARS. Are you shitting me? In the real world he would have been fired and then gone through rehab twice in that time! 18 years? Were they really that short on people? What did their other options look like?

Oh. Oh, I see. Well THAT I understand - carry on, then.

Anyway, Glover then immediately goes out and violently confronts Busey, which I'm sure will really change the higher-ups' outlook that you're some violent, crazy madman...oh wait, no, it really won't.

Oh, the guy with a history of psychotic angry breakdowns in public just did the same thing again after an 18-year career of the same shit over and over? OK, you can stay on the force.

While Glover is visiting his buddy's grave, the Predator stalks him because he has that arrowhead thing, or something like that – this scene is just an excuse for the Predator to have a scene where he runs into a little boy with a gun. C'mon; are we really that bereft for ideas that we're putting a “monster runs into little kid” scene in this shit? Is that the level we've stooped to?

Be careful, kid; you could get expelled from school for having a toy gun these days. Gotta appease the overreaction culture!

Then we get an interminable number of fight scenes which pretty much go like this: people wander around in the dark, then the Predator reveals itself, and we get a decent splurt of actual action. These scenes aren't bad, but they certainly aren't good enough to rival the intensity of the first film. I guess the most pressing thing going on is that Busey and his Special Ops idiots have figured out how to detect the Predator with some kind of thermonuclear detector or something.

Great! How will that wo---oh, I forgot, having any characters be competent would just be silly. Instead the losers and fuckups are the only ones who can survive in a movie like this!

He died as he lived, with his mouth open.

Glover and the Predator have a showdown where Glover takes off his mask and the Predator does his whole "repeat a line from earlier in the movie" thing like in the first one. Only unlike that movie, this time it's a really dumb, lame line that mostly embarrasses me for the makers of this movie. Are you ready for this? The Predator, this ultra badass alien super-warrior, utters this line: "Shit happens!"

Fuckin' seriously? THAT was the best you could come up with, writers? "Shit happens" was the summation of your creative wit? On the one hand, it doesn't even make sense; how does that have anything to do with the situation at hand? On the other, at least it kinda sums up the making of this movie. Shit does happen. As is quite evident here.

You'd think THIS would be the end of the movie, but no, there's still 30 minutes left. 30 minutes? How? What more do you really have to do with this story? Are we going to have the all-important scene where the Predator talks to his therapist about how his mother never loved him and that's why he turns invisible and kills people on other planets?

What about the scene where the Predator helps his best buddy set up a wedding reception? Is that one included?

I'm just asking out of curiosity, as really, this thing is dragging on like a party thrown by your great aunt where she tries to get you to play Parcheesi with your redneck hick cousins who you haven't seen since you were in diapers because oh, it'll be like the old days, except she ignores the crushing reality that the reason you haven't come over in a decade and a half is exactly because of this, and because she also sneaks in snide racist comments she doesn't realize are outdated and kind of offensive and you just don't want to get mixed up in that kind of thing anymore, so you just stick to calling her twice a year on Christmas and birthdays from now on.

What? Oh, where was I? Oh yeah. 30 minutes left after all this? Nobody was around in the editing room nodding off to sleep going “hey, maybe we need to cut this thing down by at least 20 minutes”? I mean that's really all you're doing at this point – creating a cure for insomnia.

But hey, it's not all a loss...we do get the scene where he scares an old lady in the bathroom.

The Predator tries heroin...his experimental days...

In the alternate ending, the Predator is killed by an old lady with a broom. This ending was eventually rejected after test audiences thought it was too realistic.

Because yes, this movie was so desperate it needed to include both the 'little kid' cliché AND the 'old lady' cliché just to show how lighthearted and goofy it really is with its monster movie concept. That's fuckin' astonishing, the level of pandering here.

Then somehow Glover slides down an elevator cable and finds a spaceship with an inside that I think was decorated by the crew from Big Trouble in Little China.

Except Kurt Russell could have made this movie awesome. Seriously; who thought replacing Arnold Schwarzennegger with Danny Glover and Gary Busey was a good idea anyway?

Glover fights the Predator and somehow beats it down, but then a bunch of its buddies pop out of thin air and carry him away. But not before tossing Glover a gun from the 1700s for no reason whatsoever!

What the hell was that about? I have no clue. I guess they intended to have a sequel to this thing, but obviously after 24 years that isn't happening.

And why should it? This thing is just a mess. There are some goofy fun moments, and not all of it is bad, but for the most part it's too long, the characters are annoying, there are a bunch of cliches and the story is just kind of a mess – the Predator mostly just seems like he's stumbling around aimlessly, and what is he even doing in this setting? I get wanting to change things up from the first film, but this just seems like some entirely different movie, some sort of dystopian gang-war thing like a discount The Warriors, with the Predator thrown haphazardly into the middle. Half the time he just seems like he's confused, as he doesn't have much purpose or direction in this movie and just pops up wherever.

There's no consistency to this thing and with a near two-hour runtime, it gets tiresome by the end, real fast. I guess I can see why some people like it, but really to me it is just an overly long, ridiculous bore for the most part. I guess you could do worse though. You know, the best thing you can say about any movie!

Images copyright of their original owners; I own none of them.

Ghostbusters 2 (1989)

Ghostbusters was a great film and a classic of cinema. But it wasn’t just a classic. It was the film that defined a generation. It was a movie about a bunch of working class schmucks starting up a business at their lowest point and succeeding. Never mind the fact that it was a goofy, hilarious ghost-romp - it also had heart to it and a lot of wit, and the people of the 80s were probably attracted as much to the working class, blue-collar American entrepreneurial spark as they were to the supernaturally charged antics.

And then the sequel came out.

Director: Ivan Reitman

Starring: Bill Murray, Harold Ramis, Dan Aykroyd

IMDb

A lot of people really didn’t like this movie for whatever reason. I dunno - I didn’t see this as a kid; in fact I only saw it as a young adult for the first time, but I always thought it was good. While the original had more classic lines and iconoclastic scenes, this one I always thought was a good movie anyway and plenty funny and enjoyable on its own. As this year marks the 25th anniversary of this film, I thought I’d take a look and see what it was, from a more critical eye, that people didn’t like about this flick. Let’s turn on the proton packs, don our grey janitor suits and try not to cross the streams.

This one starts off immediately with a text card saying Five Years Later - and as the film was made five years in real life after the first one, I think the movie deserves an accolade for truth in advertising. Take that Guardians of the Galaxy - you should’ve waited that 26 years after the opening scene to make the rest of your movie!

We then see that this was at the very edge of that time in movies where things like this could happen and not cause an infuriated outrage immediately:

I'm never having kids.

Sheesh. If that happened in a movie these days, you’d get five Facebook pages the night after it was released crying for the beheading of the director in the middle of a crowded city street. Also, shouldn’t Sigourney Weaver be a bit better at looking after a baby when she’s fought off aliens in the past? Just saying, movie.

We then see where a ghostbusting pedigree gets you - birthday parties where little kids scream about wanting He Man instead. Most parents didn’t want a 75% naked guy with hair like Fabio at their 10 year old boy’s birthday party, so I guess the Ghostbusters were option #2. I guess getting Teenage Mutant Ninja Turtles (i.e. real turtles with voice boxes Krazy Glued to their shells) was option #3.

That's Jason Reitman as the little boy, who would later grow up to make movies like Thank You for Smoking and Up in the Air. Call this scene a "passing of the torch" between father and son, if you will.

We also see them dancing to their own theme song at the party. Wait a second; who the FUCK recorded that song in-universe? I thought it was just a theme song! So they’ve actually gotten a real song IN THE MOVIE’S UNIVERSE to dance along to? Huh. Go figure.

This is like watching your childhood heroes get drunk and fall on their asses while trying to reclaim their former glory. Painful - going down in flames, guys...

This scene is just proof of one of the movie’s flaws … it’s a debilitating condition I like to call sequel-itis, where a follow-up to a well-acclaimed film doesn’t further the story of the original so much as deconstruct it, leaving its characters in a run-down place in life and having the first film’s accomplishments serve as a yellow brick road to the unemployment line.

Characters will do silly and demeaning things that mostly just make them look, well, silly. Instead of a continued story, sequel-itis knocks the franchise over with the proverbial flu, forcing it to lose ground and have to pick itself back up again. It takes a lot more guts and talent to write a sequel where the characters don’t fall down and regress to where they were before the first movie started again - it takes talent to write characters that continually progress. Unfortunately Ghostbusters 2 does tend to fall into this trap.

We also get Bill Murray as a TV show host on a show about weird psychic phenomena - his guests include a guy who wrote a book about the end of the world, claiming it will end on New Year’s Eve, and a lady who says an alien took her to his hotel room and told her the world will end on Valentine’s Day in 2016. Well, all I have to say about THAT is, at least we won’t have to sit through another presidential election that’s actually just a big media circus.

Also I thought aliens would have better taste in hotels than the Hilton. I mean at least go to the Marriott instead, guys. That’s the real hub for supernatural vacationing.

The guys all meet up again to help out Dana Barrett with a problem involving her infant son, who she fears is in danger from some kind of supernatural force. But we see the only danger the baby is in comes from Peter Venkman, who likes to pick up the baby and insult it for not being his child. I sure hope he doesn’t remember any of these diatribes when he gets older. Those are the sorts of things that mess a kid up.

Don't shake his hand, kid. That'll open up doors you never expected - like bursting randomly into comedic jokes...

We also get this line from Egon: "I had part of a slinky as a kid. But I straightened it."

Wow. That's got to be the saddest fucking thing I've ever heard. Good job - up there with Million Dollar Baby and pictures of starving children for sure.

They end up discovering there’s actually a giant river of pink slime under the streets of New York City - wait, this is news to people? I always knew that.

I don’t fucking know. I’m just wondering where the hell they got that construction equipment. Was it just in the trunk of the Ghostbusters car the whole time?

I guess they all somehow became masters of using that construction equipment too. Guess ghostbusting involves a lot of different skills.

They get arrested and are in court the next day with a judge that is perhaps the most extreme I’ve ever seen in my life - he screams like a Looney Tunes character and says he wants to burn them at the stake for being frauds. Geez. Either this guy was having a really bad day and just needed some Quaaludes to calm down, or he’s never judged anything more serious than a parking violation before this.

"Bahahahahahaha....my life is an unending ruinous smoldering pile of rubble. Why do they let me be a judge again?"

Then again, these days you can shoot an unarmed black kid and get off because “you were defending yourself”...maybe judges in the 80s were just more innocuous.

Dana’s troubles aren’t over either, as she is attacked by Ditto from Pokemon:

"I WILL HAVE MY MOTHERFUCKING REVENGE!"

That isn’t the only thing she’s attacked by though - she’s also under constant siege from Venkman, who she shares possibly one of the weirdest relationships ever with. He didn’t want a baby when they were together years ago and constantly avoided the subject, yet now acts jealous that she has a kid.

She constantly warns him not to try anything funny and acts like she doesn’t want to be together, but then walks around in his house wearing nothing but a towel.

"We can have sex, but it doesn't mean you can try any funny business."

Not to say either one of them is at fault - THEY’RE BOTH WEIRD AS FUCK. Being a relationship counselor for these two must be fucking fun, huh? Probably requires a person with a will strong enough not to bang your head against a wall with your eyes bleeding and your brain aneurysm screaming after twenty minutes.

Not to mention the crowning achievement of complete insanity these two characters have - after learning that a bloodthirsty centuries-old immortal tyrant is the cause behind the slime in the sewers (just go with it), what is Venkman and Dana’s plan of action? Well, the logical one of course: go on a date while the other Ghostbusters go down in the sewers and mess around with the slime.

Actually, on second thought this is some brilliant entrepreneurial work. Smooth-talk the other guys into doing the dirty work while you go eat at a high class establishment with a beautiful woman. That’s the kind of thinking that allows you to do nothing else after this movie but Wes Anderson films and become a fodder for Internet memes.

They also discover that the pink Ditto slime can light on fire when you get too close to figuring out why it exists. But luckily Ernie Hudson with a fire extinguisher is right there to save their asses, like the boss he is:

They just keep him locked in a closet with a fire extinguisher until they need him.

Down in the sewers, Winston discovers the genesis of one of the great Halloween haunted house scares - the good ole “train coming at you then disappearing” thing:

So after that stunt, the Mayor gets them into his office and they try and explain exactly what the fuck was going on. The Mayor’s aide, who hates them for no reason, ends up getting them locked up in an insane asylum, unbeknownst to the Mayor:

That's Bill Murray's brother Brian Doyle-Murray playing the doctor here. Guess that was fun at family reunions. "You didn't really want to lock me up in an insane asylum, did you, Brian? Brian? Uh...why are you so quiet right now?!"

This is another of the film’s worst moments - why are they in an insane asylum? Did nobody remember the giant fucking Stay Puft Marshmallow Man from the first one? Was everyone in this movie just passed out drunk on cough syrup when the Ghostbusters were fighting Gozer in the first movie? How does nobody believe them? In terms of half-crazy TV paranormal investigators with a slightly worrisome obsession with marketing, THESE GUYS are probably some of the more believable!

Fortunately there’s a Statue of Liberty cameo to save us all:

Man that's a lot of people waaaay too happy about seeing the Statue of Liberty marching toward them. How do they know it isn't the bad guy here? They can't see the Ghostbusters from way down on the ground!

That's several thousand dollars in property damage, good job!

I wonder if they’ll use this as a promotional campaign for the city - hey, if you want to experience NYC the right way, take a ride in the Statue of Liberty! It may destroy the city’s streets and sidewalks, but it’ll drive our tourism industry through the roof faster than shiiiiiit. Then go gorge yourself on hotdogs.

So they all save the day, even Louis Tully, who dons a Ghostbusters outfit in a clear case of "nobody needed to see this ever":

I'd say this is jumping the shark, but frankly I'm still traumatized by the word 'shark' after seeing Creature.

So that’s Ghostbusters 2. I still like it. While I won’t say it’s as good as the original by a long shot, I also wouldn’t say it’s bad either. I don’t really know how any sequel they made to Ghostbusters would have been satisfying to fans - after all, most of the cast and even director Ivan Reitman didn’t want to do this at first and only changed their minds later. The genius behind the first Ghostbusters was, in part, because the guys were nobodies; they had no reputation and they just sort of came out of nowhere and captured the worlds’ hearts.

In the second one, not only do people know about them in the movie’s universe, the WORLD knows the Ghostbusters exists in real life. They had huge reputations. For a movie about a bunch of down on their luck schmoes, it doesn’t really work so well when your losers are actually the biggest stars in the world in real life. The cartoon had already aired at this point too, and so a lot of the quiet and somewhat mature wit of the first movie is replaced with goofy slapstick and over the top emoting. And that’s a bit of a letdown.

However, the movie as a whole is still very enjoyable overall. The electric energy and bounce of the first movie is still there, the supernatural goofy plot is still there (albeit maybe not as dark and occult as the first movie’s Gozer plot) and the characters are still really good. There are a few dumb moments, but for the most part the characters - especially Bill Murray and Harold Ramis - carry the film higher than it would have been otherwise, and the chemistry and energy between them is still very ripe and present throughout the runtime. So despite a few goofy 80s-movie moments, a couple dumb cliches, I still really enjoy Ghostbusters 2. I can see why some people dislike it, but it’s good in my books.

Images copyright of their original owners, I own none of them.

REVIEW: Society (1989)

With Black Friday just past us now, and the Christmas season coming up, there’s a lot to be said about the commercialism, superficiality and fakeness of society. So being that I need a cheap segueway to review Society, I might as well go ahead with that. Society is a criticism of society, and being that society has become even more obsessed with commercialism and marketing in the 25 years between the movie and this review, I might as well review Society, as Society is a critique of society!

Director: Brian Yuzna

Starring: Billy Warlock, Devin DeVasquez

IMDb

We start this masterpiece off with a scene of the main character, King 80s Mullet. I’m sure he has another name in this movie, but really that’s what he’s supposed to be. Take characters from any number of 80s flicks from Big Trouble in Little China, Gremlins, The Hitcher, Pumpkinhead, Rock ‘n’ Roll Nightmare and every slasher movie ever made after the first Friday the 13^th and throw them in a blender, and you’d get this guy. It’s practically alchemical. I mean, Dr. Frankenstein couldn’t have done so well.

So anyway, he goes out in the middle of the night with a knife, and then we switch to a scene with him talking to his psychiatrist. He says he’s afraid of the psychiatrist. I’d say this is a reason to keep talking to his psychiatrist, but the psychiatrist reacts in such a creepy way that I’m inclined to believe the psychiatrist is actually a serial killer.

Because the movie is about as emotionally consistent as a bipolar person off their meds, the next scene is about King 80s Mullet and his best friend, Cameron from Ferris Bueller knock off, playing basketball. The best friend character says King 80s Mullet will grow up to assassinate the president someday…I don’t really know what THAT’S supposed to mean. Maybe this is his future:

We also get a creepy guy in a closet assaulting King 80s Mullet’s sister, putting a hand over her mouth and shoving her down on the bed and everything. He says he wants to “talk” to her…sure, that’s why he hid in the closet and shoved her down on the bed like a rapist…I totally believe that. I also believe that the news isn’t biased at all, politicians are honest and M. Night Shyamalan had a point in his career where he made good movies. I’m not gullible at all.

He just wants to talk!!!

So they chase that guy out and King Mullet talks to his sister about her “coming out party.” Uh, excuse me? Is she a lesbian or something? And if so, is a party needed? Am I just uneducated on Beverly Hills upper-echelon culture? This comes up several times and is never really explained, even before we get the big “twist” of the movie later, so it’s just strange. Most movies go from normal to strange; this one goes from strange to stranger.

If you’re just so enticed by this world that you can’t bear to stop watching this film after scenes like the above, well, you’re in luck. Next we get some fun scenes like snails on fancy dinner plates out in the garden…

Truly escargot has made a comeback in Beverly Hills! It’s all the rage! We also get endless talk of this judge guy coming to the sister’s party. Do they just have nothing else to fill the void of their empty, meaningless, shitty lives? Why don’t they watch crappy 80s movies and spend time putting together elaborate reviews on a blog? That usually works for me. But I guess they didn’t have the Internet in ’89, so that must be why.

Then later that night, King 80s Mullet comes into his sister’s room and sees…

Yep. You just saw that. A girl with her boobs on her back. Or is it her ass where her vagina should be? I don’t know; thinking about it for too long gives me nightmares, and frankly I had enough of that with Pet Sematary’s cross dressing dead baby last week. I guess this scene served its point if the point was to make that girl un-dateable for the rest of her life until this movie faded into obscurity, though.

Then at the beach, King 80s Mullet and his girlfriend, Shallow Blonde Bimbo, are making out and talking about two things: a) how much they love each other and b) how much the girlfriend wants to go to this rich guy’s party. But kids using sunscreen as water guns put a stop to that riveting conversation!

Sunscreen is now a viable Call of Duty weapon.

Then we get a double whammy when a hot chick does the same thing to King 80s Mullet as he chases the kids…because, you know, that’s an acceptable way of flirting.

It could be her way of telling him she's a transvestite.

Then the creepy attempted-rape guy from the bedroom finds King 80s Mullet and shows him a tape recording of the family at the “coming out” party, apparently doing some kind of weird orgy. As King Mullet was already feeling alienated and like his family had adopted him, this only furthers his suspicions. At school the next day, King Mullet tries to tell his girlfriend about the orgy tape, but all she cares about is the party, and then she breaks up with him for being too selfish…yeah, high school fucking sucks. Wait till college, man; then you can have conversations like this fueled by too much weed and booze and a lack of sleep. That will be paradise.

He takes the tape to his psychiatrist, then comes back later to find that somehow, the orgy has been changed to non-suspicious talk of dancing and parties, nothing weird at all. So then King Mullet calls the attempted-rape guy again and tells him to bring another copy of the tape, BUUUUUTTTTTT….

Yep, a car crash! King Mullet tries to go dig around and find the tape, only to get told by the cops that he can’t be rummaging around at an accident scene – gasp! What oppressive pigs! Somebody call V for Vendetta! But really, what did he expect? The movie treats this like some kind of telling sign that there’s a conspiracy going on, but what the hell would happen otherwise? “Oh, well, he was your FRIEND…well, okay, come and poke around the accident scene all you want! Here, you can hold our guns as well!” Movie, I get it; you’re trying to be all high-minded anti-establishment here, but c’mon. It’s a fucking accident scene! Nobody would be allowed on no matter what, except law enforcement!

So, yeah, I guess King 80s Mullet goes to the funeral for the attempted rapist guy, and finds out that House of Wax and this movie are in the exact same universe:

We then get a strange scene that again tries to prove there’s something WRONG in big, bold, capital letters with the family, as King 80s Mullet goes home and tries to tell them about the death, but they don’t care, instead just talking about the party going on later. Which King 80s Mullet has been invited to.

Being that HE was the one so broken up about how all everyone else cared about was the party instead of the horrible death of one of their friends, he’s going to take the high road and not go, right? Nope! Next scene he’s at the party, dancing with that chick who squirted sunscreen on him earlier.

You can see the grief in his face.

Truly this guy is the picture of anti-establishment, going against the grain and proving that we can still have humanity and decency in these times of…oh, screw it; he’s just as bad as the rest of them. Part of me tried to rationalize this and say ‘hey, maybe that’s the point of the whole thing.’ But it’s not – the filmmakers were just clumsy clods. You want proof? How about the next scene?

Yeah, so King 80s Mullet and his new sunscreen-fetish girlfriend go back and have hot steamy sex in her room. Then they go out and she makes him tea, and says the following line: “Do you want it with sugar, cream, or do you want me to pee in it?” Then they’re making out. Her mother comes in, some big, hulking, mute abomination of nature (real good signs for her genes in the future…), and the movie expects us to think that yes, the mother is the weird one in this scenario! SHE must be the one we should be wary of! Certainly NOT the girl who just made a joke (?) about peeing in her new fuck-buddy’s tea!

"Mmm, yeah, talk some more about pissing in my tea!"

"MOM! You interrupted our tea-pissing session! YOU'RE SO GROSS AND WEIRD!"

How about another scene, where the ex-girlfriend comes out to him and berates him for sleeping with the sunscreen-fetish chick? Bitch, YOU BROKE UP WITH HIM. What’s the logic here??? I mean, yeah, I get it; high school girls can act crazy at times. But again, the movie is treating it like this is some kind of tell-tale sign as to the creepy, unnatural stuff going on in the movie’s world! It’s not! It’s just a crazy, stupid, random, illogical segment shoved awkwardly into the film!

This movie is about as subtle as a giant ape wielding a broad sword killing the entire staff of a nuclear bomb research factory. Eh, still better than Parents any day though.

We get some other part where King Mullet goes out to meet another kid in the woods, who promises to tell him some of the secrets going on. However, that gets cut short when the kid’s life gets, well, cut short:

*canned laughter*

However, when they bring the cops back, the body is gone and the car has been replaced. King Mullet goes to school later and tries to raise awareness to the whole thing WHEN….

Yup, the guy comes back to life without a scratch on him. Guess he took a trip to the Lazarus pit in between the previous night and now…snore…I’ve seen this kind of scene in a million other films.

Then King Mullet goes home, thinking he’s going to get the jump on his parents, but really there was a whole room full of people waiting to ambush HIM that he didn’t even see! How stupid do you have to be to not notice all those people while you were waiting in the dark? I guess about as stupid to take a role in a movie with imagery like this in it:

Yep, the next 20 minutes is pretty much just this: bizarre scenes of some kind of alien orgy. Kurt Vonnegut would be proud. They’re actually very well done scenes, and the makeup and hands-on effects are incredibly done for a movie of this kind of budget in 1989. Pretty entertaining shit. I mean, provided you’re into Rush Limbaugh’s interpretation of gay marriage laws.

So after fighting a knockoff of Jack Nicholson’s Joker…

How is that not Jack Nicholson as the Joker? It's identical!

…he comes across what I am fairly sure is the strangest thing I have ever seen in my life.

Well, okay, maybe not; I’ve reviewed things just as strange as that in the last few months. And even the last few weeks. So I’ll just rectify that to “the strangest thing I’ve seen in the last five minutes.” I mean, look at this. His family had some kind of incest orgy that somehow transformed them all into one horrific abomination, all with the class and subtlety of Gene Simmons on a particularly bad night:

And the sense of manners regarding the correct and polite use of the tongue.

This is the longest set-up for a joke using the childish term "butthead" ever to exist in the history of the world.

I’m pretty sure even Peter Jackson circa 1992 would call this a bit excessive!

So, anyway, I guess they get away, even managing to get one last insult in at King Mullet’s dad (“Butthead”…what a crowning moment of intellectual BURN!). Then I guess the movie is over. What did we learn from all this? Absolutely nothing.

Yeah, so this was…something, I guess. Apparently having alien sex orgies translates to social commentary; whodathunkit? This whole thing should be insufferable, but somehow it still kind of comes off as likable. It’s just such a strange, psychedelic experience, almost dreamlike, and I have to admit it has some pretty interesting moments. Compared to similar movies like The Stuff and Parents, this is actually a lot more intriguing, having just as much schlock as it does actual, real storytelling.

But even then, I do think it could’ve been better. I mean, what the fuck WAS this about, anyway? What were those alien things? How were King 80s Mullet and Mr. Attempted Rape the only ones in the whole town who weren’t in on it? I think it actually would’ve been more interesting if, by some kind of twist, King 80s Mullet was the alien, and the weird orgy participants were human – or at least, human in their own world. Maybe King 80s Mullet is some kind of amnesiac space traveler who crash-landed on a whole planet of these weirdoes, who masquerade as human beings.

Sure, that’s pretty outlandish. But it’s also cool. Hmm, I think I’ll get started on writing a script for a remake! Oh yeah, shooting for the stars! Look out for the remake in 2014, starring Seth Rogen as King Mullet and Ellen Page as the hot chick with the sunscreen.

Watch Society here!

Images copyright of their original owners. The film Society (1989) copyright of its original owners. I own none of these things.