Format: Streaming video from Tubi TV on Fire!
There’s something about the gross out movie that is both repellent and fascinating. That’s exactly what Body Melt is, and there’s no other way to categorize it. This is an Australian movie very much in the same vein as Peter Jackson’s Bad Taste, but there are going to be a lot of other influences from the 1980s tossed in here as well. There are going to be elements that feel like Videodrome, The Stuff, Society and even a direct reference to The Thing at one point.
Body Melt, in addition to making reference to all of those other films, is another in the long list of movies about an evil corporation. In this case, the company makes a dietary supplement called Vimuville. They’ve been putting these supplements in the mailboxes of a neighborhood called Pebbles Court in Melbourne as a sort of test run of what the supplements can do. These are designed to produce people who are perfectly healthy, but of course there are terrible side effects. These start with hallucinations and end with, well…body melt.
While the police try to track down what is happening, the people of Pebbles Court start going through all kinds of terrible physical changes, and that’s really what we’re here for. We’re talking tentacles growing out of their throats, liquefying flesh, animated mucus and placentas, explode-y bits and more. Essentially, everyone mutates and/or dies horribly until the end of the movie.
This is really the entire point of the movie, and is one of the main ways that Body Melt differs from the movies that it is trying to be. All of those movies had something to say about something, either it be about paranoia, or trust, or consumerism, or whatever. Body Melt seems to be about nothing but exploding body parts. In fact, there is one subplot of a couple of young guys who are a part of the test subjects who are headed for testing at the big evil corporation and end up with a family of mutants who happened to be connected in some way to the product that is killing everyone. And, for no reason other than to fill some time, they are murdered, including one of them who is killed by a mutant while having sex with her.
To be fair, there may be a commentary here on health culture, but this is absolutely secondary to everything else. This is much more about exploding penises (yes, that happens), melting faces, and mucus straight out of the Peter Jackson school of schlock effects. There are also a number of shots of what appear to be the insides of people’s bodies, specifically their esophagi, as they react to the chemicals that they are ingesting.
I’d love to tell you that there is more to Body Melt, but that would be a lie. This is as much squick as possible in as short a time as possible with virtually everyone coming to a really terrible and messy end in the 82-minute or so running time (including credits).
There is a particular odd charm to Body Melt not just because of the over-the-top nastiness, but also because it feels like the cinematic equivalent of lo-fi. In that, it feels connected to the original Evil Dead movies in some respect. While there’s blood, there’s also all sorts of bodily emissions in this, and that’s the point.
It's hard to actually like Body Melt because it is just a pile of mucus and vomit and gloop, but it’s also impossible to entirely hate it. It commits to the bit like few other movies do. Any place where there can be a bucket of green slime, we’re going to get three buckets of green slime. If we can have an exploding face, we’re going to have one.
And that’s really it. There’s no real reason for the mutant family, and no real reason for the evil pharmaceutical company other than there needed to be a villain for the film. I haven’t even bothered with actors for this because it’s honestly not really worth it. I have a weird respect for this film because it is unabashedly what it is, but that’s pretty much where it ends.
Why to watch Body Melt: It’s everything you love about Videodrome, The Stuff and Bad Taste in a single movie.
Why not to watch: It’s more or less just gross for the sake of gross.
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