Body Melt (1993)

BODY MELT (1993)

Dir: Philip Brophy

“The first phase is hallucinogenic... the second phase is glandular... and the third phase is AHH, GAWD!”

An Aussie ewwy gooey satire on extreme clean living. The residents of Pebbles Court are the new test subjects of a brand-new dietary supplement. We know these supplements aren’t going to provide the results anyone wants right off the bat, when someone from the company – unknowingly dosed with Vimuville – attempts to get to the residents before the supplements do. If they knew he had ingested the health-junk they were about to, his decomposing corpse would tell them all they need to know. Tentacles grow out of his throat and reduce his corpse to a sloppy puss and chili pavement stew. These drugs liquefy flesh, explode penises, heads, stomachs, and mutate until death. This virus of healthy humans leaves a mess all across the Melbourne suburbs.

The director, Philip Brophy concocted this satire with writer and friend Rod Bishop. The two had been members of an art punk group → ↑ →. The group performed music, produced artwork, films, videos, live theatre, multi-media, and wrote literature. While the collected had their heyday in the late seventies, I’d like to hope a lot of the rotating members helped on Body Melt. The film feels like and independent labor of love. There’s something that elevates it a degree above Troma, maybe it’s the fact that it’s from Australia, or maybe it’s the lack of tongue-in-cheek. Instead, it’s tongue removed from cheek and falling out of the mouth and drooling down to the floor as your child screams and watches you die. Though that scene sounds mean, this film doesn’t have a nasty bone in its ever-decomposing body.