Top 10 Deadly Dinner Parties!

#1. THE TEXAS CHAINSAW MASSACRE (1974)

Nothing beats family, right? Yeah, unless said family is a cannibalistic crew of maniacally murderous, human-hook-hanging, flesh-barbecuing redneck scum-buckets…the kind that worship at the feet of the moribund, desiccated remains of their elders while serving dinner guests a plate full of horrifying headcheese. You know, the kind of lovable lunatics we’ve come to know so well in THE TEXAS CHAINSAW MASSACRE? Yeah, that kind of family! Granted, there’s no formal dinner party invitation given by the f*cked up Leatherface clan, but goddamn what an unparalleled sinister ceremony they hold when poor Sally is strapped up to a chair made of human remains and forced to watch the fetid old bones of grandpa death’s doddering dome. I gag just thinking about it. Shite’s demeaning, disgusting and downright deadly!

#2. ALIEN (1979)

Few horror film appetizers have left filmgoers with such a perforated digestive tract as Ridley Scott’s chest-bursting scene in the original ALIEN. Hell, it was such a delicious dish the late great John Hurt ordered himself the meal again 8 years later in SPACE BALLS. That said, two preservative ingredients have made the dinner scene as figuratively fresh as any on our list. The first is the jaw-dropping practical FX, which have not aged at all in terms of their pure potency over the years. The second facet of the scene that makes it so damn delectable is the deliberate way in which Scott chose to surprise his cast. Remember, he told not a soul what the alien creature looked like or how the scene was to play out, so the reactions we see from the actors onscreen are 100% authentic. Exactly how a queasy cuisine should be!

#3. GET OUT (2017)

You can extend the disturbingly deleterious dinner gala in GET OUT to the entire weekend, can you not? What a hellish, heinous, horrifyingly f*cked up scenario. We’ll try to dance around the revelatory particulars for the very few who’ve yet to see the flick, but let’s be real, the first kernel of simmering nefariousness among the Armitage family was served in the dining room. And while there isn’t a direct death linked to the mealtime interaction, damn if you don’t want to flat out kill that iron-clad-douche-fist of a brother Jeremy. The way that dude demeans and speaks down to his sister’s boyfriend Chris, patronizing him about his physical build and genetic makeup, we can tell how he identifies Chris as the other. Of course, shite comes into frightening focus in a far sharper manner than that by the end. Seriously unsettling!

#4. BEETLEJUICE (1988)

Poor Otho. Look at that helpless foppish bastard. Dude stands nary a chance when the Maitland’s – Adam and Barbara – turn a lavish lobster cocktail dinner into a ghoulish gourmet of pants-pissing terror. Hysterical! As for the deadly connection, of course we know nobody dies during the petrifying prank, but Adam and Babs are using their supernatural powers of the deceased to pull it in the first place. It’s a wonderfully memorable scene in the movie, one that helps us root for the two desperate decedents, made almost entirely by the use of the ironic calypso “Banana Boat Song.” Here’s some trivia for you about that. First, that song was actually co-written by Alan Arkin (who would work with Tim Burton on SCISSORHANDS), but the original choice was to play a song by The Ink Spots at the dinner party. It was Jeffrey Jones and Catherine O’Hara who suggested a calypso track.

#5. KILLER JOE (2011)

How can anyone even look at a bucket of KFC the same way ever again? How can anyone dare lift a fried drumstick up their slavering maw ever again? So scarred and scarified everyone should be by the deeply disturbing dinner scene in the third of Billy Friedkin’s 2011 mini-masterpiece KILLER JOE. For those in the know not, let’s just say a vile and volatile family dynamic comes to, uh hum, a head when their quiet little dinnertime ritual erupts into a fit of abusive violence. A lot to digest here, no doubt, but the part of perverted poultry mentioned up top refers to a stint where Killer Joe, a small town Texas hitman, forces a battered and bloodied Gina Gershon to fellate a phallic drumstick he’s extended from his nether region as if it were his own penis. What starts as darkly humorous turns drastically disconcerting in mere seconds!

#6. THE INVITATION (2015)

How could you receive THE INVITATION to an elegant, upscale dinner party in the Hollywood hills with anything other than a profound starry eyed zeal? Oh, by slowly, subtly realizing that a cultish brand of far more extreme zealotry is behind the entire operation. Indeed, Karyn Kusama’s slow-roasting cauldron of mind-game brainwashing is fearsomely f*cked up for this exact reason. The evil intentions of this suicidal cult plotting to poison the entire party with a tainted wine sample are peeled like an onion, layer by layer, until we finally uncover the grand design. And its Jim Jones shite! Props to Kusama for waiting 7 years until she had complete control to make another independent movie, completely devoid of studio interference.

#7. YOU’RE NEXT (2011)

The drolly antagonistic banter that begins the dinner party scene in Adam Wingard’s YOU’RE NEXT shrewdly makes you think you’re watching a comedy. Characters argue over the merits of independent, underground filmmaking and the starving artist mentality, but soon we discover this masterful misdirection is simply a springboard for the real attack to commence. You know what’s up, smack dab in the middle of breaking bread, a dysfunctional family dynamic is crudely interrupted by a trio of hyper-violent interlopers with one thing on their minds: Murder! Poor Ti West is the first to catch an arrow plumb through the forehead, which sets off a barrage of homicidal histrionics. Joe Swanberg is next, landing a spear-dart right in the nape before bleeding out.

#8. THE LAST SUPPER (1995)

THE LAST SUPPER has such a brilliant premise and excellent cast it’s hard to believe how unheralded the movie remains 22 years later. It’s so good in fact we can’t believe its director, Stacy Title, is actually responsible for this year’s THE BYE BYE MAN. Sheesh. Let’s get back to the SUPPER though. A group of young idealistic liberals, who can no longer stomach the hyper-partisan right-wind pundits and political leaders, decide to invite their very kind to a dinner party, where they intend to systematically kill each one of them. It’s delicious irony and satire brought to its darkest corner. Cameron Diaz, Ron Perlman, Bill Paxton, Mark Harmon, Courtney B. Vance, Charles Durning and Ron Eldard lead the charge in a bitingly entertaining black comedy. Order this movie and devour it up ASAP!

#9. SWEET MOVIE (1974)

From one epicurean delicacy to another! If THE BIG FEAST didn’t include your cup of tea, perhaps you’ll find more to the menu on the unquenchably challenging SWEET MOVIE, the 1974 Euro-trash cult classic. This flick is so intentionally repulsive it defies you to merely finish its main course. Cooked up by Yugoslavian director Dusan Makavejev, the story tells of a quasi-mute beauty queen (Carol Laure) who gets passed on to various captors, one of which includes her husband who, on their honeymoon, enjoys urinating on her face. Not reviling enough? The poor gal is then brought to an Austrian commune, where a large dinner banquet includes the odious ingestion of not just urine, but feces, vomit, chopped up dildos, and other unidentified bodily fluids. In other words, it’s the OG SALO (which barely missed the cut).

#10. THE GRAND BOUFFE (1973)

While many of us have no doubt even heard of THE GRAND BOUFFE (THE BIG FEAST), much less seen it, and despite the fact it isn’t even an outright horror/thriller, the appetizing premise of the 1973 French/Italian film is too juicy to keep off the menu. Check it. Four lifelong friends from various but esteemed walks of life, decide to meet up at one of their luxurious Parisian villas with one sole intention in mind: eat themselves to death! Now, we’re not talking cannibalism here, we’re talking about men of means ordering as much gourmet food and fine wine (not to mention prostitutes) as they can, by the truckload, and systematically overdose on a weekend of gluttonous debauchery. They literally plan to stuff themselves until their hearts cease. THE BIG FEAST is a mordant black-comedy with a shocking NC-17 tableau.

#11. HONORABLE MENTIONS

In lieu of Thanksgiving, here’s an extra helping of honorably mentioned deadly dinner parties. Consider CLUE a sweeping inclusion of all the dinner-party-murder-mystery-whodunits that have been released since Agatha Christie’s halcyon days in the 30s and 40s. A great subgenre indeed!

Not for nothing, but I always got a kick out of the nasty and gnarly dinner scene from SCARY MOVIE 2, in which Chris Elliot inappropriately jabs his deformed little hand into places it should never be. Consider this one a dessert!

Boy oh boy that HANNIBAL Lecter sure knows how to throw a good dinner bash. And let’s be clear, by dinner we mean serving you your own lobotomized brains. Bon apetite!

While it isn’t necessarily deadly, the sheer psychological tripiness and surreal nature of Louis Bunel’s THE DISCREET CHARM OF THE BOURGEOISIE – in which a gaggle of dinner party guests are physically unable to stand up and leave the room – is about as unnerving as any movie can be.

Let us know what your favorite deadly dinner party is below!