When the men and women of the small town of Pebbles Court begin to receive doses and pills for a new "supplement" pill in the mail, they take it with no qualms and objections. Nicknamed "Vimuville," the pill has been produced in order to produce a better breed of human beings. There are, however, side effects and different "stages" for the subject . The first, is hallucinations. The second, is potential organ failure. The third, is deterioration and deformation of the body.
Within literally ten seconds, I see that Australia's Body Melt is distributed by "Dumb Films," and if that doesn't set the tone for the remaining eighty minutes to come, then I can assure you that nothing will. I'm also subtly reminded that I need to desperately expand my "Ozploitation," or in layman's terms, Australian exploitation, motion picture repertoire. So far, I can recall seeing this and the very underrated killer boar picture Razorback, but not much else beyond that. This needs to change within the next year or two.
There's a very satirical edge to this film, be it in the focus on perfectionism with the "pill" that causes the eventual title effect, or the very odd side plot with two dopey young men encountering a small group of inbreds and essentially running into the story of a different type of horror film. As fun as it is, there isn't a great deal of plot beyond some scattershot stuff here and there. In fact, I don't really believe our "protagonists" were even given much in the way of backgrounds, and with the fact things are structured, you could make the argument that it feels like a collection of shorts pieced together based around one subject rather than one, coherent, cohesive story.
Viewers with a fear of decay or a fear of needles will naturally steer clear based on this title alone, but even for those with cast iron stomachs, the content found throughout certainly doesn't help matters. Even with its modestly low budget, some of the ways that people are dispatched of in Body Melt could give Peter Jackson's earliest works like Bad Taste and Braindead a run for their money in the department of disgusting, with the filmmakers' admiration for the man being very apparent. But, you do have to suffer through a fairly nonsensical plot (for what one there is) and a lot of boredom in order to get there, and unlike Jackson's works, the humor inserted and shot into the film just isn't that strong. The best bits are provided by the very off-putting family of inbreds mentioned above, but their entire side story feels like it wasn't even necessary in the end. In fact, most of the decisions for placement of humor, for as little as it is used, and the heavy emphasis on blood and guts and not much more, makes the movie come across like a group of blood-hungry fanatics making something for the sake of having a "gore fest" under their belts. It isn't necessarily a bad thing, but I get the feeling that if these folks could have predicted the future and foreseen something such as Youtube coming about, this would have made a killing there, such as the "Le Bagman" short from all those years ago because it was "so nasty," but for nothing else.
Lastly, Body Melt could house the most inappropriate soundtrack I've ever heard in my entire life, with an absolutely absurd mixture of techno and early to mid 90s-era instrumental alternative rock. Writer/Director Philip Brophy is lucky that juggernauts U2 are presumably not horror movie fans, as nearly everything in the latter category sounds directly ripped from their early 1990s works, and they most likely would have flipped out and tried to sue someone. True, this probably could have helped the movie turn into a box office monster, but still. In the end, I'm not entirely sure what to make of this one. There is some great, repugnant gore to be found here, especially considering the budget, but not much beyond that. It's worth a watch, but nobody would blame you for actually giving into temptation and just "skipping to the best parts."
Tomorrow (or today), we're keeping it messy with THE DEADLY SPAWN!
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