Society

Bill feels like he does not belong in his wealthy family. He is right. The rich of his neighbourhood are a separate species that feeds on the poor, literally, in a ritual called the shunting.

Brian Yuzna, who produced Re-Animator, made his directorial debut a blunt class allegory that spends an hour as a paranoid teen drama and then delivers one of the most extreme practical-effects sequences ever filmed.

The Japanese effects artist Screaming Mad George built the finale, a party in which the bodies of the wealthy merge, invert and consume, and it is truly unlike anything else: bodies stretched into impossible shapes, a hand emerging from a mouth.

The metaphor is not subtle and does not need to be. The rich eat the poor.

It flopped in America and was a hit in Britain, and the shunting is the reason it survives.