Body Melt (1993)

 

Director: Philip Brophy

Screenplay: Philip Brophy and Rod Bishop

Cast: Gerard Kennedy as Det. Sam Phillips; Andrew Daddo as Johnno; Ian Smith as Dr. Carrera; Regina Gaigalas as Shaan; Vincent Gil as Pud; Neil Foley as Bab; Anthea Davis as Slab; Matthew Newton as Bronto; Lesley Baker as Mack

A Night of a Thousand Horror (Movies) #180

 

Fuck off, wiener-dick!

During my young adulthood, I was at the right and impressionable age for a resurgence of interest in Australian genre cinema, transpiring due to Mark Hartley's documentary Not Quite Hollywood: The Wild, Untold Story of Ozploitation! (2008), retroactively creating the "Ozploitation" genre. These films, mind, did in some cases have availability beforehand. Some were also outliers as that documentary, focusing on the seventies and eighties, with the end covering the resurgence in the 2000s, does not mention a film like Body Melt from the nineties.

In terms of its creator, Philip Brody if you research him is fascinating. He only made two films and short films, but he originally was a musician, co-writing this script with a fellow member of the experimental band → ↑ →. Looking at his career to the current day, he has composed scores including the drum n bass and techno soundtrack for Body Melt¹, and wrote texts for the British Film Institution and Film Comment, making him a fascinating figure, to the point that this barely covers the work he has done in graphic design or academic work.

Body Melt itself is a piece of pure gross out horror which is with a knowing sense of humour. Set in Australian suburbia, a corrupt health company, housed behind a health centre for families to stay at, is involved with texts with members of the public at Pebbles Court, a suburban place chosen without reason, just test subjects for their new chemical experiments. Adapting his own short stories to the screen together, the sense of Body Melt feeling like an anthology film with one central narrative connecting them together makes sense in hindsight. One involves a health conscious family, (or maybe just the father in his bright coloured running clothes) that will eventually be involved in the grand finale. One is of two young guys who, trying to get to the health centre, get lost and meet a deformed and sadistic family running a petrol station and diner. One is a young couple, the wife pregnant and the test subject, and the last is a single man who tries new health protein powers posted in the mail by the company, proving to be an ill advised choice.

The "body melt" of the title is that, experimenting with a new drug that can evolve human perception and consciousness, there are some very unfortunate side effects. Hallucinations, such as the single man seeing a woman in the airport who is horribly disfigured, then again as a beautiful seductress who collects men's rib bones by massaging them out of their tummies. Then glandular effects, as Body Melt is not averse to gross humour including a bogey moving by its own will in a sink. Then melting, this part in a sub-sub-category of body horror cinema called "melt movies". It is not a big sub-genre in the slightest, really coming from a series of films from the late eighties and the nineties. Effectively for the best example of this, if Street Trash (1987), a New Jersey production, had in among its plots a toxic bottle of cheap booze that, when drunk, caused people to melt into a rainbow spectrum of colours, then Body Melt whilst with more body horror imagery too, has a lot of grotesque and inherently ridiculous content including melted forms.

And it is played with humour. Inherently any Australian production is distinct because Australia is a unique country even in the trees you see in the background. But with this film as well there is a lot of dark humour too and open silliness, like a cockatoo bird put in a little t-shirt saying "Sexy" or that the body builders at the health centre, huge muscle men, are over-the-top in their body mass for deliberate visual effect. What could be distasteful at times, from a kid accidentally killing himself on a skating half pipe or a placenta falling out and becoming alive, is contrasted in the intentionally bright coloured world of the film with a twisted sense of humour. Even the family at the petrol station, probably the one detail that has not aged well as it plays to irrational fears of non-urban folk in the outskirts, like the rural South in American films, is at least contrasted in their patriarch having a key role in the main narrative. That and they are over the top - Gran watching porn; kangaroos killed with a single rock for their adrenaline gland; a home covered head and toe in bric-a-brac, similar to the villains' lair in The Texas Chainsaw Massacre 2 (1986), even with a Gene Simmons KISS mask and a Doraemon one too in the background among other content in the production value.

The exaggeration is compiled by it, yes, being quite gross. Whilst that bar had been raised over the years, and Street Trash among its many icky details even has a penis being ripped off and thrown about like an American football, this still has one implode off-screen from sexual arousal. Knowing that his previous work was a micro-length experimental film Salt, Saliva, Sperm and Sweat (1988), clearly the director-co-writer has a fascination with the human body in all its details, alongside the fact that, in the early nineties, the satirical edge of this being around health consciousness, post-aerobics craze and Jane Fonda exercise videos, he is not mocking this lifestyle but taking it as a step in his obsession with the human body with absurd extreme.

The other fact is that it is Australian, which bears repeating again. This is not just the geographical landscape, or a bias as I have family living in the country and a greater sense of connection to the country, but that in context, it has its own air of additional perversity as a melt movie, involving lots of goo and one person being choked to death on their own tongue, shot in Melbourne at a time where, if you follow the narrative of Not Quite Hollywood, the genre industry had died out for the most part. The sunny, warm environment, even with the motorways and suburbia, are remotely alien to where most known body horror exists from - dank seventies and eighties New York City, dark American metropolises, New Jersey, or the north in Canada - that adds a huge contrast on the mood of the production.

This oddness can even be found in one single casting choice, emphasising how as an Australian made film of this type, cultural differences can add a huge level of personality as well as peculiarity too for the better. That being the casting of Ian Smith. Growing up, my parents used to watch an Australian soap opera Neighbours (1985-), a very popular series which showed on the BBC at lunch times and afternoons, which I saw a bit of in my youth. It has a cultural importance, regardless of whether its legacy can last or not, because singer Kylie Minogue, early in her career, made her break on the show and even in terms of her musical success. Aptly here - as there is in hindsight something always sinister in the show's bright and cheery theme tune, about "everybody needing good neighbours", when like most soaps it had a lot of melodrama and tragedy - you have Smith, who played the jovial and lovable Harold Bishop, an older man when I saw the show loved by all, playing in vast contrast a corrupt doctor who cusses, waves a handgun around, and is involved in the shady activities in between the various plot strands. Like witnessing a beloved celebrity star in a horror film, or how British genre cinema (even our art films) populated over the decades by stars of beloved television shows, these casting choices add their own distinct cultural flourishes to any production.

It evokes what an odd creation Body Melt is in context. Genre films, according to Not Quite Hollywood, were not seen with good regard, that documentary's secret theme (and why it was great) tackling the subject of a country's cultural image, where for a long time the desire was to express their heritage in high art cinema. Yet Body Melt, feeling like what would happen if a melt movie was made in Australia, as it would likely lose much of the humour and tone if set in a different country, is odder in context knowing as you can see in the end credits all the official funding from Australian film bodies it had to create the movie. When said film, with a twist, ends with most of its cast melted and a mass of green good vomited out in a police station, it stands out with this knowledge. That it was not mentioned in Not Quite Hollywood either, part of the nineties period which the documentary said was a slumbering time of decline, this oddity I have always admired stands out more because, somehow, Philip Brophy managed to get the film made at that time.

 

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1) The music is of note and worthy of this passage to comment of it. It is of its era, but this was the time of house and techno music standing out; Philip Brophy within context of his music background nonetheless created a unique soundtrack for a horror film. Even compared to synth scores of before, the techno here is idiosyncratic and memorable, adding to its personality.