Body Melt Reviews

The Australian production BODY MELT delivers exactly what its title promises--and a script that, like its characters, dissolves into a collection of disconnected parts. The source of the film's horrors is the Vimuville Health Resort, where owner Shaan (Regina Gaigalas) is manufacturing a new kind of vitamin supplement. She's been testing her product on the residents of suburban Pebbles Court, and when her boyfriend Ryan (Robert Simper) becomes suspicious of the vitamins' effects, she secretly slips him an overdose. His body cracking and melting, Ryan crashes his car in Pebbles Court, and Det. Sam Phillips (Gerard Kennedy) and his partner Johnno (Andrew Daddo) begin an investigation. It's not long before more of the court's residents begin to meet grisly ends. Record producer Paul Matthews (William McInnes) has sexy/violent hallucinations before his face spontaneously explodes. Expectant mother Cheryl (Lisa McCune) is killed by her own pregnancy; her husband Brian (Brett Climo) is arrested for her murder. Young buddies Gino (Maurie Annese) and Sal (Nick Polites) get lost on the way to Vimuville and wind up taken in and slaughtered by a deformed family led by Pud (Vince Gil). Ultimately, it transpires that Dr. Carrera (Ian Smith), who invented the vitamins, once worked with Pud on other medical experiments that had horrible results. As Thompson Noble (Adrian Wright) and his family are falling victim to the mutating pills, and Shaan herself is melting down, Det. Phillips finally puts a stop to Carrera and the operations at Vimuville. But some of the vitamins have already been shipped to store shelves. BODY MELT director Philip Brophy (who also co-scripted, composed the music and is further credited with "testicles") clearly aspires to the same kind of transcendent gross-out spectacle that near-countryman Peter Jackson, a New Zealander, accomplished with DEAD ALIVE. But although his film has the right spirit, energetic and colorful camerawork, and an endless series of grisly, well-crafted effects by DEAD ALIVE's Bob McCarron, it lacks a solid story line to anchor them. Brophy and Rod Bishop's script is based on four short stories by the director, and his approach is to intercut among them almost at random; the connective thread of Vimuville's experiments isn't strong enough to tie them into a coherent whole. SHORT CUTS this ain't, and the lack of a real protagonist hampers the story. Nonetheless, even as it falls down on a narrative level, BODY MELT delivers the goods for its target audience on a moment-by-moment basis. Brophy and company have a good eye for oddball characters and details, and the general level of energy and morbid humor keep the film engaging on a surface level. The director's simplistic but jaunty score provides a lively assist, and at only 82 minutes, the movie doesn't have too many chances to lag. One looks forward to the day when Brophy either writes or gets his hands on a story strong enough to support his off-the-wall style. (Graphic violence, nudity, sexual situations, adult situations, profanity.)