Body Trash

This movie really surprised me. I picked it up after reading the rave reviews from other IMDB members, and on the strength of everyone comparing it to Braindead (aka Dead Alive).

Well, it isn't like Braindead. It's something new, something extremely unique and original. Really impressive if you ask me, and a whole lot of fun. I loved the inbred family, loved the "over-the-top" gore effects.

There is one thing that not many have mentioned yet, this film is clever. It isn't just some empty splatter film, it has personality and style. We never really get to know the characters that well, but it tells a good story just as well.

Oh, and it's funny. Very funny. Any movie in which a couple of deformed hillbilly kids kill a kangaroo with a rock at 1000 yards, then eat it's adreno glands to get high, has got something to say.

Love it.

What the Heck is this flick? It's not really a comedy or horror movie, it's not really sci-fi, and I'm pretty sure it's not a drama. Mystery, thriller, Western- there's not a genre section at Blockbuster that can tame this wily beast of a movie!

Here's what it is, as far as I can tell: A mysterious pharmaceutical company, run by one naked woman and a bunch of muscle-bound squeeky voiced guys, is secretly testing it's new drug on the inhabitants of a small housing complex somewhere in New Zealand. They also front a health spa where their unwitting test subjects come to have their urine sampled. The drug is, of course, malfunctioning, and all the folks who take it eventually mutate in various ways (not many of them actually melt, as the title implies. Most explode).

In one subplot, two lustful teens are off to donate sperm but get lost and end up with a bizarre backwoods family with big welts on their faces. The teens hang out with the inbred yokels for a while, watching them eat kangaroo glands and riding in the truck from "Even Dwarves Started Small". Unfortunately, one of the guys puts the moves on the huge, revolting sister in the family and gets a stake in the loins.

Other highlights include killer placentas, exploding genitals, huge swelling tongues, and tons of other gore (from the people who handled the effects in "Dead Alive"). This movie is a sloppy good time, for no one escapes the wrath of... BODY MELT! Recommended!

If you like Peter Jackson's earlier works, "Bad Taste" and "Braindead," you'll love this film as it works in the same vein. It's a great parody of the dull life of suburbia whose citizens seem to have no reason to live but would be willing to do whatever they can to live as long and as healthy as possible. They become unwitting guinea pigs of experimental drugs designed to create superhumans. Warning: it has some really gross scenes, but this is secondary. This is one of those rare B-movie horror films that actually tries to convey a message and pokes fun at itself at the same time.

Here's an unassuming Australian-made horror-comedy, a hybrid of David Cronenberg's early 'biological mutation' movies and fellow antipodean Peter Jackson's comic gore fests.

Inhabitants of a tract-home development in suburban Melbourne are used in a controlled experiment by scientists at a trendy health resort (called Vimuville and built on a condemned toxic dump). Their revolutionary E-59 vitamin supplement is promised to create a "new you." Unfortunately the side effects are equally revolutionary -- recipients hallucinate, their bodies malfunction, glandular secretions get up and move around, and eventually they explode into colorful goo.

BODY MELT's episodic script plays down the ultra-gory possibilities of the situation, and takes occasionally funny stabs at suburbanites who will eat just about anything they get for free, and are otherwise oblivious to how they are exploited by government and industry.

In the film's most outrageous sequence, a pregnant Yuppie housewife dies when the fetus erupts from her womb, flies across the room, and slithers down the throat of its horrified father. But BODY MELT works best when it avoids spittle 'n grue and brushes with the nightmarish. For instance, there is a protracted but effective sequence of an infected businessman with a recurring hallucination, a female apparition who collects rib bones from men "just like him."

The humor is uneven but co-writer/director Philip Brophy exhibits a healthy distrust of white middle-class swank. There's a good "ear joke"; a police station awash in green vomit; liquid detergent guzzling; a chintzy Cronenberg-style TV commercial; a mutating ex-Vimuville scientist with moronic, Mongloid offspring, who keeps the antidote to E-59 a secret; and a pill-popping bodybuilder with an exploding penis! The cast, a contingent of Australian TV actors, is good, especially Suzi Dougherty as the rib-girl.

'Body Melt' is one of the most misunderstood Australian movies of all time! Director Philip Brophy, who has a background in avante garde electronic music and performance art, has created a wicked subversion of splatter movies. The film is all the better for having many Aussie soap stars and familiar faces in its cast, a fact that will probably be completely lost on overseas viewers. Just imagine your own "beloved" family favourites in the main roles and you might start to see what Brophy's done here.

'Body Melt' is rude, crude, messy fun that only a complete idiot could take SERIOUSLY as a horror movie! So sit back, tune in turn on and drop IN to 'Body Melt'! Just watch what you eat when you do....