Australia’s Body Melt, from 1993, feels like a movie designed to be a punk rock cult classic. It has the requisite absurdity, complimented by characters’ blasé acceptance of all the strangeness. It has weirdos and straights, a frenetic pace, and only a passing commitment to its plot. It’s kin to Repo Man and Street Trash — another entry chronicling the glorious downfall of western civilization.
Philip Brophy directed and wrote (with Rod Bishop, who also produced), and an ensemble cast stars as the beleaguered residents of Pebbles Court, a liminal cul-de-sac in a Melbourne suburb, and the scientists who toy with them.
There’s no main character in the movie, but there is a villain, in the form of Vimuville, a company that offers dietary supplements and health clinic packages. Shaan (Regina Gaigalas) is the head pusher, keen to get the company’s products onto store shelves as quickly as possible. Nevermind that the unwilling test subjects at Pebbles Court, all patients of Dr. Carrera (Ian Smith), a GP secretly dosing them with Vimuville supplements, are showing alarming health effects.
As one of the developers of the supplements says, before he becomes the first of this flick’s many gooey corpses, “The first phase is hallucinogenic. The second phase is glandular. And the third phase is AH GOD!” and then his chest explodes. These are not minor side effects.
The film follows the residents of Pebbles Court as they go through the phases to gory effect. But, the film does take a turn in the first act to the Australian version of mocking inbred rural dwellers, when we meet Pud (Vincent ‘I Am the NIGHT RIDER!’ Gil), and his family, the standout being Anthea Davis as Slab, whose horny portrayal 
and prominent jaw makes her look like a randy Habsburg. Brophy and Bishop manage to shove these characters into the plot, but it sure feels like a thin excuse to get this bunch into the movie. I’m all for it. It’s not as if it clashed with the movie’s general disregard for narrative sense.
The point of this movie isn’t to tell a story. It exists as spectacle. Poison dietary supplements and the scum that sell them are only the vehicle to get viewers to the gore, which is plentiful and disgusting. Then there is the wild pace, which isn’t conducive to detailed storytelling, anyway.
This film, not unusual for the time, has the look and feel of a music video. The characters are all the kind of shorthand caricatures familiar in that once common format of film. First impressions are everything. From the teenaged dumbasses that live next to the banker with the perfect hair, to the fitness obsessed middle-aged neighbor going through a midlife crisis, the characters present all of themselves to viewers within a split second of appearing on screen. All that remains to be seen is how spectacularly they coat the walls with goo when they explode.
I went back and forth on this one, trying to decide if Body Melt fit into Shitty Movie Sundays. What sealed the deal for me is that good films are not exiled from the Index merely for being good, but because those films lack the requisite je ne sais quoi of the shitty film. Body Melt, on the other hand, wallows in the outrageous. This is shitty gold — the kind of movie the mutants love. It takes over the #60 spot in the Index from Wrecker. Check it out.