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Body Melt

1993 Australian body horror film From Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia

Body Melt
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Body Melt is a 1993 Australian independent body horror film directed by Philip Brophy and written by Brophy and Rod Bishop. Brophy and Bishop are ex-members of the art punk group → ↑ →. The pair also composed the film's soundtrack. The movie satirises suburban lifestyles and fitness fads.[2]

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Plot

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Ryan, an employee of the Vimuville health spa, sets out early one morning to warn the residents of Pebbles Court in the suburb of Homesville in Melbourne that they've been targeted for experiments with their illegal new vitamins. His lover and Vimuville's manager, Shaan, having correctly suspected that he was only using her to find out about her plans, sneakily administers him with a major overdose of the vitamins, causing his body to begin mutating uncontrollably as he nears Pebbles Court. He breaks the speed limits in an attempt to get there alive, and tries to record a warning on a dictaphone, but crashes and is thrown through the windshield of his car, before tentacles sprout from his throat and smother him to death, retreating into his body before the pursuing police can arrive on the scene. Veteran detective Sam Phillips is assigned to investigate, aided by his rookie partner Johnno.

With Ryan dead, and Phillips and Johnno not finding anything untoward in their initial investigation of Vimuville, Shaan is free to continue with her plan to experiment on the residents of Pebbles Court, despite the warnings of her business partner and the local family physician, Dr. Carrera, that they need more time to test the vitamins, which he was one of the main developers of. The first to die is Cheryl Rand, a pregnant young woman whose placenta detaches itself and begins scuttling around their house and attacks her husband Brian, before Cheryl's unborn child explodes, blowing open her stomach and killing her. Brian is wrongly arrested for her murder, and Carrera, having shown up to make a house call on her, takes the opportunity to check in on next-door neighbor Paul Matthews, who was also sent a sample of the vitamins. He finds Matthews with the lower half of his face rotted away, and he attacks Carrera with superhuman strength, ripping off Carrera's ear before the doctor is able to give him a fatal overdose of a sedative. However, Carrera forgets to take the vial of sedative with him when he flees, and the two detectives find it and his ear with Matthews' body.

In the meantime, a subplot sees two young Pebbles Court residents named Sal and Gino try to take a trip to Vimuville to accept an offer to act as sperm donors, but they get lost and end up at a farm owned by a disfigured man named Pud, whose mutated and even more disfigured children eventually kill them. It transpires that Pud is the former colleague of Dr. Carrera, with the mutations of him and his family being the result of experimenting on himself while developing the vitamins, after which he was cut out of any credit for developing them. Carrera shows up to confront him, and Pud reveals that he deliberately omitted a vital part of the vitamin formula from his notes, ensuring that the vitamins would be fatal to anyone who took them.

Shaan, meanwhile, welcomes another set of Pebbles Court residents, the Noble family, and feeds them samples of food illicitly laced with Vimuville's vitamins, though the family's daughter, Elloise refuses to eat it due to being on an organic food diet. Elloise's younger brother Brandon is the first to die, injuring himself in a rollerskating accident, after which his body disintegrates in the course of the night. The rest of the family remain unaware of his demise, and the following morning, the family's father, Thompson develops an uncontrollable sneezing fit which soon causes his head to dissolve into mucus. Elloise tries to get help from Shaan, but finds that she herself has succumbed to the effects of the vitamins, incoherently mumbling Vimuville's slogan with her face half-melted; Elloise tries to get Shaan's attention by slapping her around the face, but this causes Shaan's head to implode, killing her. After she drives to a nearby doctor's surgery with her mother Angelica, Elloise finally realises that the food was spiked with the vitamins, but this comes too late to save Angelica, who dies when her tongue suddenly grows to being several feet long and chokes her to death.

Carrera arrives at Vimuville to find all its employees dead from various mutations, and is cornered by the two detectives in Shaan's office, where he commits suicide by shooting himself in the head. The detectives note that their findings will at least exonerate Brian Rand of murdering his wife, only to return to their police station to find the interior covered in green slime, which Brian, having also consumed the vitamins, projectile vomits until he eventually dies. Inspecting his body, the local coroner dryly notes that a new classification for death, "death of hypernatural causes" has been created as a result of the incident. In the film's closing shot, the vitamins are shown on the shelves of a local store, showing that some of them were sent to retailers before Vimuville was shut down.

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Cast

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Production

The film was shot in October and November 1992.[3]

Critical reception

  • Video review wrote "With over 150 ways to melt your body, it's one of the most innovative and versatile horror films ever. Guaranteed to make you squirm."[citation needed]
  • Samhain wrote "Unique and individual. A wicked and gruesome satire on the clean-living lifestyle of modern Australia as seen across the globe in various TV soaps."[citation needed]
  • Screen International described the film "As satirical as it is sick-making. A cult hit."[citation needed]
  • Star Burst wrote "Packs more mucous, phlegm, puke, snot, slime & spit than you'd ever think possible."[citation needed]
  • Time Out wrote "Despite its emetic preoccupation with exploding stomachs & bodily fluids there is also a liberal injection of black humour."[4]
  • Fangoria wrote "A slime-soaked all-out shocker!"[citation needed]
  • Face described the film as "A dumb/smart satire on health fascism. The kind of movie they just don't make anymore."[5]
  • According to Bloody Disgusting Magazine: «The film is a satire of extremely healthy living»[6]
  • PopHorror: "Residents of peaceful Pebbles Court, Homesville, are being used unknowingly as test experiments for a new Body Drug that causes rapid body decomposition (melting skin etc.) and painful death."[7]
  • SBS Movies: "A yucky, shlocky, gory, tongue-in-cheek horror film".[8]

Accolades

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Home media

Body Melt was released on DVD with a new print by Umbrella Entertainment in August 2006. The DVD is compatible with all region codes and includes special features such as the original theatrical trailer, Umbrella Entertainment trailers, a behind the scenes featurette with cast and crew and a storyboard gallery.[9]

On 25 September 2018, the film was released on DVD and Blu-ray by Vinegar Syndrome.[10]

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See also

References

External links

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