Last year I featured Street Trash. This year I’m featuring the similarly gross Body Melt. Maybe “melt movies” will become a tradition on 31 Days of Gore. The movie’s satirical look at our obsession with dietary supplements is more topical than ever. I’ve seen far too many otherwise intelligent people who trade hard scientific data for celebrity advice and too-good-to-be-true promises. Maddeningly, the problem seems to be growing increasingly worse despite the fact we have better access to education than ever before.
What I’m saying is it’s time for melt movies to make a comeback. Today they could take on the anti-vaxxers, the helpless self-help trolls, and the ridiculous “get motivated” crowd, to name a few. There’s so much humor to be mined from the kind of “concerned” (paranoid) people who are constantly on the lookout for short cuts and disastrously short-lived bursts of feeling actualized. In our quest to never feel bad, we’re letting corporations and social media define what bad is so we always feel it.
Body Melt opens with a sexy commercial for Vimuville, a pill company which promises its customers a better lifestyle. What the product will actually accomplish is vaguely worded, but hey, who wouldn’t want to feel better? An employee for the company plans to blow the whistle, at which point the product’s spokesperson injects him with a lethal dose of their latest concoction. It turns out it’s not the dosage that’s the problem, it’s the stuff itself, and the company has already been feeding it to a test group at the end of a quiet cul-de-sac in Melbourne, Australia.
These unknowing participants, by the way, are screwed. From Wikipedia’s plot summary:
The pills are consumed by the residents, and produce liquefying flesh, elongated tongues, exploding stomachs, exploding penises, imploding heads, monstrous births, tentacles growing out of the face, living mucus, sentient placentas, and other gruesome mutations.
I was under the impression the whistle blower was the main character. Literally minutes later, he melts down in spectacular fashion before fatally smashing headfirst through the windshield of his car. To say Body Melt is protagonistically challenged (yeah, I’m still trying to coin that phrase) is an understatement. Street Trash was like that, too, but this one is a lot more focused even though its mind is all over the place. It seems there are a lot of non sequiturs for the first 90% of the movie, but it’s mostly wrapped up nicely by the time we get to the splatterific ending.
Body Melt is a fine cult film. You should know by now if it’s your cup of tea or not. Just don’t leak on me, man.
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