{"id":41306,"date":"2023-10-09T00:00:03","date_gmt":"2023-10-09T04:00:03","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/www.cinema-crazed.com\/blog\/?p=41306"},"modified":"2023-10-09T00:18:28","modified_gmt":"2023-10-09T04:18:28","slug":"bad-movie-monday-body-melt-1993","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/www.cinema-crazed.com\/blog\/2023\/10\/09\/bad-movie-monday-body-melt-1993\/","title":{"rendered":"BAD MOVIE MONDAY: BODY MELT (1993)"},"content":{"rendered":"

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I\u2019ve often mentioned that I don\u2019t really like the horror comedy subgenre. My rationalization for this has always been that, since the horror cancels out the laughs and the jokes cancels out the scares, you end up with something that is both a lesser horror movie and a lesser comedy. However, I think I\u2019ve started to change my mind about it, or at least I\u2019ve started to change my mind about comedy\u2019s place in a horror movie. Because, if I\u2019m to be honest, a well-made horror comedy can be astoundingly great satire<\/em>. Not to mention that I\u2019ve also been a bit of a hypocrite about this opinion, because I\u2019ve always loved Return of the Living Dead, Fright Night, and Texas Chainsaw Massacre 2. All of which I feel are top notch films. So where does that leave me? Well… it leaves me reviewing today\u2019s movie.<\/p>\n

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BODY MELT is a 1993 Australian body horror movie starring Gerard Kennedy as Det. Samuel Phillips, Andrew Daddo as Johnno, Ian Smith as Dr. Carrera, Regina Gaigalas as Shaan, and Vincent Gil as Pud. It was directed by Philip Brophy, who also co-wrote the movie with Rod Bishop.<\/p>\n

Quick Recap! When COVID shut down everything in early 2020, I started an online bad movie night get-together with some friends that we eventually dubbed \u201cBad Movie Monday\u201d. The premise was simple: We\u2019d torture each other every Monday with the worst trash we could find, tell a few jokes, cheer each other up, and in the process maybe discover some weird obscure cinema that we might never have seen any other way. This series of reviews will feature highlights of those night, along with some of my favourite trash, so you can all share in the fun and maybe get some ideas for your own movie night. <\/em><\/p>\n

Described in the fewest possible words. This movie is kooky doodoo bananas. I\u2019m very sorry if that sounded much too snobby and intellectual, but there are simply no other appropriate words to properly express the experience of watching the film. Body Melt barely gives you time to breathe in between all of it\u2019s craziness, so it just flies by, propelled by the sheer momentum of it’s madness. Try to imagine what it would look like if Bad Taste or Dead\/Alive era Peter Jackson made a David Cronenberg movie, and you\u2019ll be in the rough ballpark of what you\u2019re about to see.<\/p>\n

Also, even though much of it involves body horror, which can be unpleasant and depressing to watch, this one is so wild that you don’t care about all the gruesome stuff happening. The movie wisely keeps you at a distance and doesn’t really flesh out any of the characters too much. So it mercifully isn’t cruel and morbid. It’s just good dumb fun with gore, so most of the time you’re just thinking “I wonder how this character is going to die???” and gleefully waiting for the next weird hallucination or the next crazy batch of special effects. In fact, most of the time you laugh at the absurdity of it all. It’s just so joyfully demented that you’re in awe of it’s big massive balls.<\/p>\n

WHAT\u2019S THE STORY, JEREMY?
\nWell, it says it right there in the title: BODY and MELT. Trust me, that\u2019s very accurate. Yeah, there\u2019s a bit more to it than that of course. Like, for example, we spend some time following the police as they investigate the many gruesome deaths, and the main bad guys are a Health Farm that sent out a bunch of \u201cvitamins\u201d to the unsuspecting residents of a suburb in Melbourne to test out the effects. Don\u2019t even get me started about the clan of inbred mutant hillbillies whose patriarch is the guy who invented the drug in the first place. This is one of those movies where you just sit back and go with whatever it throws at you.<\/p>\n

PREDICTIONS, PROMISES, AND PONDERING!<\/p>\n

#1 – Nudity within the first two minutes. Thank you kindly madam. I tip my hat to you.<\/p>\n

#2 – I can tell the filmmakers are musicians. The soundtrack in this is quite excellent.<\/p>\n

#3 – According to this movie, the best course of action if you have tentacles growing in your throat is to drink detergent. I’m going to write that down. You know, just in case.<\/p>\n

#4 – Apparently, people will eat and drink anything that someone sends them through the mail.<\/p>\n

#5 – I realize this is a spoiler, so SPOILERS, but everyone in this movie is going to melt in some way. Don’t get too attached to anybody.<\/p>\n

#6 – These rural Australians that we meet don\u2019t have ancestors, they have incestors.<\/p>\n

#7 – One of the characters in this movie is pregnant. So I’m warning you right now<\/em> about the really really really messed up Placenta Monster. I found it hilarious, but some of you might be a tad disturbed.<\/p>\n

#8 – This movie is basically set up like a lunatic anthology of carnage that always ends in gore. It\u2019s essentially vignettes about people who are going to die in the most spectacularly disgusting and fucked up way possible.<\/p>\n

#9 – Ever wanted to see an exploding penis? Because, if you watch this movie, you’re going to see an exploding penis.<\/p>\n

#10 – This movie’s evil health farm\/drug company seems to be run by really stupid people, which ironically makes it rather realistic.<\/p>\n

WAS IT REALLY THAT BAD?
\nHell no! Go watch it right now. It\u2019s one hell of a ride. It\u2019s also a satire of how completely immoral most pharmaceutical industry entrepreneurs are. Where they have no qualms about making people addicted or sick or dead because of their \u201cmiracle\u201d drugs. It\u2019s a lean mean 81 minutes of glorious crazy fun.<\/p>\n

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I\u2019ve often mentioned that I don\u2019t really like the horror comedy subgenre. My rationalization for this has always been that, since the horror cancels out the laughs and the jokes cancels out the scares, you end up with something that is both a lesser horror movie and a lesser comedy. However, I think I\u2019ve started […]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":22,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"closed","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[3070],"tags":[1906,1282,478],"class_list":["post-41306","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-badmoviemonday","tag-australian-film","tag-body-horror","tag-horror-comedy"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.cinema-crazed.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/41306","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.cinema-crazed.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.cinema-crazed.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.cinema-crazed.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/22"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.cinema-crazed.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=41306"}],"version-history":[{"count":5,"href":"https:\/\/www.cinema-crazed.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/41306\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":41314,"href":"https:\/\/www.cinema-crazed.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/41306\/revisions\/41314"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.cinema-crazed.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=41306"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.cinema-crazed.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=41306"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.cinema-crazed.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=41306"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}