Body Melt (1993)

Doesn't really work as a film, due mainly to a broken-backed structure -- for whatever reason, the puzzling decision was made to stitch the narrative together from four short stories previously written by director Philip Brophy. The vague throughline (about deadly vitamin supplements that cause all forms of mutations in a group of unsuspecting guinea pigs) tries to hold all of this together, but it's to no avail, as the film careens about from thread to thread with little coherence or sense of buildup. One thread in particular, involving two hooligans and their encounter with a family of inbred outback denizens, has absolute fuck-all to do with the main business of the film, and the last-minute attempt to make it fit into the larger structure is pretty desperate. However, what this film lacks in cohesion, it makes up for it in gumption, grotesquerie and sheer brass balls. The makeup effects, as one might divine from the title, are the raison d'etre of Body Melt, and they don't disappoint. Dead Alive is an obvious touchstone, but Brophy at times goes past even that moist milestone and hews out radical form-warped space that generally only gets explored by David Cronenberg and Brian Yuzna. You want killer placentas? You want melting heads? You want blown-out faces and humongous tongues and exploding dick beef? Here's your film, all sickly-shiny and plasticine and gleeful. Body Melt is an absurd lurching mess, but it's also kinda fun; I've certainly sat through worse, and so have you.

Grade: C+