I really liked director Philip Brophy's provocative short film Salt, Saliva, Sperm and Sweat, so I was keen to see his first feature Body Melt. This is a yucky, shlocky, gory, tongue-in-cheek horror film, made firmly in the tradition of Kiwi Peter Jackson's early work. A mad scientist – and where would we be without them – has developed a kind of vitamin pill which has horrendous side effects. And soon the inhabitants of an entire Melbourne suburb are experiencing ghastly symptoms: hallucinations, splitting throats, exploding stomachs, body meltdown, that kind of stuff.
But if you like this sort of nonsense, you'll probably like Body Melt, though it's cluttered with a few too many characters, and the screenplay is all over the place. The gory special effects, a lot of yellow-green slime, are par for the course, and it's good to see Gerard Kennedy as the stoical cop investigating all the mayhem.
