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[video] "Body Melt" A Postview, copyright 1991 p-m agapow
A sinister chemical corporation tests its new products on the inhabitants of a new housing estate. Despite most of them being soapie stars, when they start exploding the police become concerned.
This most closely resembles the early creations of Peter Jackson ("Bad Taste", "Meet the Feebles") as an ultra-graphic yet funny splatfest. But though its heart is in the right place, "Body Melt" really doesn't have the Jacksonian stroke of genius or even enough of anything else to fill its (barely longer than one hour) running time. Moral: it's easy for a deliberately bad film to be just bad. "Body Melt" does feature a lot of Australian soapie stars in it, which provides some vicarious pleasure.
The situation, you see, is that power-vamp Shaan of the mysterious Vimuville Health Farm realises her head chemist is about to blab about their experiments on the occupants of a suburban culdesac. Hence she injects him with toxic goop during some thankfully gratuitous sex. "The first stage is hallucinogenic!" Stopping only to scarf some detergent at a service station (uh, why?), said chemist hurtles towards the test site. "The second stage is glandular!" By now moving into serious Bad Hair territory, he crashes the car. "The third stage is ... argh!" Tendrils whip out of the deceased's torn neck and run up his nose. Fersure. Only later, gentle viewer, will you wonder what was going on here.
The police show up and you know the investigation will go nowhere when they're played by Gerard Kennedy and one of the ubiquitous Daddo brothers. Sure enough, they excuse all the witnesses to go and get killed in their own scenes. Cue the sartorially challenged police pathologist, who after some ferocious overacting examines the corpse and goggles, "He's healthy - too healthy!". (Asides from the bubbling skin, protruding eyes, running sores and torn throat that is.) It's obvious that the drugs are "cognitive enhancers" that will "take you straight into other inter-phenomonological dimensions". Presumably it is within these dimensions that it is possible to understand what this movie is about. But there's no cognition being enhanced in the cast as they're all still in the movie, waiting to explode.
Two teenagers head out from the estate and get lost, eventually ending up amongst a group of extras from "Deliverance". It later will eventuate that their leader is the original inventor of the wonder drug. This coincidence is not so much outrageous as it is standing on a box, mooning the audience. But we find that out later, after the local retards have killed a stuffed kangaroo with a rock and started to feast on its pituitary system. "It's an adrenal gland!" shrieks one of the teens, showing an admirable identification of red, gloppy internal organs. The scene cuts before the other teen can call out, "Look, it's the cortico-hypothalamic axis!", but they are dead soon anyway.
Back in suburbia, it seems (set warm grandmotherly tone to ON) that nice Lisa McCune is playing a young pregnant wife. Aww. But her doctor is pumping Vimuville drugs into her! Oh no! But just when it looks like she might survive, she is disembowelled by her own foetus. Now, that'd never happen on "Blue Heelers". By now, even the police suspect something is wrong and skedaddle to the health farm where everyone is exploding.
It's gross, it's tacky, it's cheap. But it's not enough of any of those things to make it really fun, even for its short length. The pulsing electronic music and some moments of direction (particularly in the opening credits) are certainly well done, but don't make up for plot idiocies and the terribly banal dialogue. [*/misfire] and "The Young Doctors" on the Sid and Nancy scale.
"Body Melt" Released 1991. Director Philip Brophy. Starring Andrew Daddo, Gerard Kennedy, Brett Klim, Lisa McCune.
------ p-m agapow (agapow@latcs1.oz.au) "There is no adventure, there is no romance, there is only trouble and desire."
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