Here's an unassuming Australian-made horror-comedy, a hybrid of David Cronenberg's early 'biological mutation' movies and fellow antipodean Peter Jackson's comic gore fests.

Inhabitants of a tract-home development in suburban Melbourne are used in a controlled experiment by scientists at a trendy health resort (called Vimuville and built on a condemned toxic dump). Their revolutionary E-59 vitamin supplement is promised to create a "new you." Unfortunately the side effects are equally revolutionary -- recipients hallucinate, their bodies malfunction, glandular secretions get up and move around, and eventually they explode into colorful goo.

BODY MELT's episodic script plays down the ultra-gory possibilities of the situation, and takes occasionally funny stabs at suburbanites who will eat just about anything they get for free, and are otherwise oblivious to how they are exploited by government and industry.

In the film's most outrageous sequence, a pregnant Yuppie housewife dies when the fetus erupts from her womb, flies across the room, and slithers down the throat of its horrified father. But BODY MELT works best when it avoids spittle 'n grue and brushes with the nightmarish. For instance, there is a protracted but effective sequence of an infected businessman with a recurring hallucination, a female apparition who collects rib bones from men "just like him."

The humor is uneven but co-writer/director Philip Brophy exhibits a healthy distrust of white middle-class swank. There's a good "ear joke"; a police station awash in green vomit; liquid detergent guzzling; a chintzy Cronenberg-style TV commercial; a mutating ex-Vimuville scientist with moronic, Mongloid offspring, who keeps the antidote to E-59 a secret; and a pill-popping bodybuilder with an exploding penis! The cast, a contingent of Australian TV actors, is good, especially Suzi Dougherty as the rib-girl.

Body Melt is basically what it appears to be; just a big pile of gore. Australia isn't a nation instantly recognised for a lot of hit horror films (despite one or two successes), and this one really shows why - as aside from all the blood and guts, there is nothing at all to recommend it for; and anyone that doesn't watch horror films purely for gore won't even have that small pittance to fall back on. Body Melt is a more modern example of the 'melt movie' - a worthless type of film kicked off by the worthless James Muro flick 'Street Trash' towards the end of the eighties. I can't say I've seen too many of these sorts of movies, and this one isn't even as good as the earlier eighties film. The plot is similar to Street Trash, as it follows the unoriginal idea (also seen in Larry Cohen's "The Stuff") of a new product disrupting people's bodily functions. The product in this film comes from a health farm and is known as 'Verbatim'. The film starts with a sequence that sees a horribly mutilated man crash his car after his body begins to melt. After that, we see other people melting...

The film only runs for about seventy five minutes (not including closing credits), and the vast majority of that is filler. It would seem that every time director Philip Brophy doesn't know where to go, another person melts. It didn't come as a surprise to me, therefore, that the film is based on a series of short stories - as that's exactly what it feels like. The gore actually isn't bad, as despite being cheap it does have a cheerful feel to it; and the film goes further than most would dare, as offending body parts include penises, placentas and over-sized tongues developing a mind of their own. The way that they are used doesn't inspire the imagination, however, and that is a shame as this film could actually have been quite scary if done correctly. The only recognisable person in the cast is Ian Smith, who many will immediately identify as 'Harold' from the Aussie soap 'Neighbours'. It's not surprising that there's no other 'names' as this production is unprofessional and lacklustre, and if I were an actor with a good reputation; I wouldn't have gone anywhere near it. This film might delight fans of mindless gore; but most of us are better off elsewhere.

If you've been searching for a movie with an exploding erection in it, look no further than Body Melt.

I think this film is supposed to be an Australian Horror-Comedy. I'm not sure about that because while it is reasonably gory, it's barely funny. Now, I'm not terribly familiar with any Australian humor that does not involve throwing a shrimp on the barbie, so it's possible I'm just not getting it. But any possible comedy in the film can't be more than a very, very poor man's version of Benny Hill, if Benny Hill had a fetish for bodily fluids and rural inbreds.

The basic story involves a company called Vimuville and the special formula it tests on a variety of people to ill effect. There's a single guy, a pregnant couple and a family that takes a tragic trip to the Vimuville health spa. They take the drug and their bodies break down in what I'm sure were disgusting ways to Australian audiences of the early 90s. Compared to American special effects gore of that time period and since, it's fairly tame even if quite inventive. One of the more interesting things is that there's very little blood in this film. But it's more than made up for by buckets and buckets of snot, vomit and fleshy ooze.

There's also a couple of detectives investigating the case and a couple of kids, who look and act like the Australian version of the teenage guidos from that TV show "Growing up Gotti", that end up shanghaied and brutalized by a family of rural Australian mutants. I think a lot of the humor in the film is, theoretically, supposed to be wrapped up in the inbreds vs. Aussie guidos scenes. But, even though they pretend to tie in all together, it's like the Down Under version of The Hills Have Eyes got spliced together with the Down Under version of Videodrome or something.

What Body Melt has going for it are some creative though crudely executed gross outs, some naturalistic nudity, what I believe is one of the only fully sculpted, fake corpse penises in cinema history and some insights into Australian culture. What it lacks is a coherent story, characters you care about and fully discernible dialog. The Australian accents in this film are the full blow kind, not the cleaned up, Americanized sort you hear from Nicole Kidman or Hugh Jackman. Honestly, you either have to rewind and listen to certain bits over and over again or just shrug your shoulders and go along. I'm not sure even understanding all the dialog would make the story any better.

The credits list this movie as based on several short stories and they didn't work very hard to tie them together into a complete whole. It's more like one of those anthology movies like Creepshow, though it's not even as good as Creepshow II.

The insights provided into Australian culture are two.

1. Australians apparently like to say the F-word. A lot. And not for emphasis like Americans do, but more like it's a random adjective or punctuation.

2. Australian Cinema in the early 90s did not place a huge amount of importance on physical beauty. Body Melt has a fairly large cast and there's two, maybe three people in the whole movie pretty enough to be in an American film. Especially in an American gross-out horror flick, where pretty actors are used almost like set decoration. Frankly, Body Melt may demonstrate the wisdom of casting the handsome. If the actors in this film were more attractive, you might pay more attention to them and less to the film's flaws.

The effects don't live up to today's CGI standards, but if you're looking for some unusual gore (like that exploding erection), you can find it in Body Melt.