Oh, oh man. You know when you find a movie so bizarre, so grotesque, that you just have to talk about it? Body Melt is that kind of movie. It’s an Australian body horror splatter film from the early 1990s, and it reflects that in every possible way: the soundtrack is early ’90s dance beats, there are overly muscular guys and a lot of leftover neon from the ’80s, and the teenagers are now wearing their sweaters around their wastes over shorts. Plus, you get ’90s 3D effects on the computer. And that’s not going into the straight up what-the-fuck nature of what you end up seeing. By the end of this movie you’ll have seen gore, a seriously messed up sex scene, a seriously messed up pregnancy, and a guy drinking dish soap. Yeah, it’s that kind of movie.
Body Melt is about a neighborhood where a health company built on a toxic waste dumping site is testing its new type of vitamins. The problem is, the vitamins are unstable, and they have…side effects. That’s putting it nicely. People end up getting killed in the nastiest of ways, from killer placenta to exploding penises, tentacles coming out of open wounds, faces tearing open, vomit, snot…if you can name a bodily fluid, it’s gonna be involved, and it’s gonna be weird.
The film has a portmanteau kind of feel, taking the time to focus on each of the neighborhood residents and how they almost all die in some gruesome and horrible way as a result of Big Pharma. One guy experiences weird sexual fever dreams. A young couple discover that pregnancy is far, far stranger than anything they had been told and to not trust their doctor. One family goes to a health spa with gross and deadly results. Two teenagers go on a road trip only to find themselves attached by a bunch of rural folk who look like they belong in a post-apocalyptic nuclear mutant dystopia. This is probably the most random story of the bunch, but even it finds a way to tie back into the primary story, where the whistleblowers and even the corporate goons eventually succumb to the horrific health supplements they’ve created. It’s like a criticism of the 1980s gym rat craze and pharmaceutical corporate malfeasance all wrapped up in one nice little gooey package.
Did you ever see Dead Alive? Bad Taste? Death Warmed Over? Then you have an idea of what Aussie/Kiwi Splatter is like, and with Body Melt, the emphasis is definitely on the splatter. People melt, explode, smash their faces, rip apart, or in one strange tale get murdered by incestuous rural deformed folk living out in the boonies of Australia, because I guess someone decided this movie needed more Deliverance? All of this while the soundtrack is pumping and literally screaming “Body Melt!”
If you haven’t figured it out yet, I love this movie. I love how over-the-top, how ridiculous, and how disgusting it is. It’s like watching Street Trash but without the homelessness, necrophilia, and guilt. It screams to be watched. It needs to be watched.
Here, have a NSFW trailer:
Movie Reviews by a Mook 