In this world, few things are more mildly perturbing than leaving a film unsure of what exactly it was trying to say. At least for me. Death of the author withstanding, I like to have some grasp over what the filmmakers are trying to tell me. What is the writer saying? How is the director conveying it? What was the gaffer doing lighting the scene like that? Was it intentional, or was it just difficult angling a light there? Body Melt is one of those films.

WHAT IS BODY MELT (1993)?

Body Melt is a 1993 Australian special effects cult classic that delivers a lot of gooey and gorey deaths, but initially left me feeling ambivalent about its message. Given its efforts to nauseate are the main thing on display, there isn’t much deep conversation to be had by its characters. They’re mainly pastiches of people you would see around the neighborhood (the power walker, the doofy bachelors, the crochety old man, the young married couple, etc. etc.), and they’re treated just like that; cardboard cutout people to be cut apart.

While a horror film about a cul-de-sac being disfigured and sludged to death might seem like regular slasher fair, the villain this time around isn’t an alien with acid blood or an incredible melting man: it’s a pharmaceutical company called Vimuville, making guinea pigs out of the neighborhood and rapidly mutating them to death in the name of researching a new super drug.

Sending out free health supplements to the denizens of Pebble Court, the film is a series of loosely connected set pieces, with the throughline being Vimuville’s “vitamins” and the people who drink them to disastrous consequence (sort of like an evil wheatgrass shot, or Herbalife shakes if they made your spleen explode out of your chest).

INCREDIBLE EFFECTS ABOUND, COURTESY OF BOB CARRON

What results is a cartoonish splatter film, amplified in its grotesqueries by the effects of Bob Carron, an Australian special effects legend. If you need to know his street cred, fans of more obscure animal horror will know his biggest and boar-iest creation, the titular pig monster from Razorback.

More likely you know him for helping to make the human battery scene from The Matrix, where a tube-fed catatonic Neo is awakened in a pod of viscous red goo. He’s also the man who helped do prosthetic application on the set of an early Peter Jackson classic Braindead, which was made only a year before Body Melt. Given how notoriously explosive the blood sprays and zombie deaths were in Braindead, there’s some definite creative crossover between the two.

His work here on Body Melt, like on Braindead, probably wouldn’t play well in most movies. It is excessive and absurd, with meaty melting tentacles and body fluid spraying demises. Imagine the defibrillator scene from The Thing, but repeatedly over roughly 80 minutes. People get inverted, imploded, and expanded, and then it happens again. And again. And again. And if it seems like I just keep talking about how insane the effects are, that’s because that’s really its main move; Body Melt is a circus of completely bad taste endings for each of its stars.

It’s Itchy and Scratchy’s idea of a public safety advertisement about checking with your doctor before taking a new medication. Ultimately, the story is sparse; you’re here to see Carron flex his skills with liquid latex and mixtures of lubricant and corn syrup. Which is quite fine, the movie is worth watching just for that. However, those looking for more than a highlight reel of splatter movie kills will be disappointed, and rightfully so.

WHAT DOES IT MEAN? (WHEN YOU BLOW UP YOUR SPLEEN?)

Which leads to the primary question that had me wrestling with how I would talk about the film: can a film be too irreverent to send a message? What is the goal here? I plumbed Australian pharmaceutical history to try and see if there was some sort of contemporary counterpart to events in the film, any inspiration that tracked.

The closest I could find was Australia’s slow and lacking response to the thalidomide scandals of the 1950s and 60s, but the ties were tenuous at best. The film’s goal of being a pitch-black horror comedy, mainly meant to skewer the fitness crazes of the 80s and 90s, are subsumed by its technical achievements in making the audience sickly with slime, and leave you mostly numb to the horrific things that happen in it.

I think on a rewatch, the film’s philosophy was made clear by that numbness. As the vitamins take their last victim during a shootout– I won’t spoil how it happens, but I will spoil the reaction its witnesses have: being rapidly underwhelmed. It was at that moment that I realized what I feel is the real approach of the film. Body Melt does not try to convey a message about bioethics, but rather an approach to violations of bioethics. An approach, albeit a passive one to living with corrupt companies and the exploitation of people for profits.

AN ODDLY EXPERT SATIRE OF OUR APPROACH TO FEAR

Body Melt is a satire that plays in excess to make a point about how people become inured to the horrors they’re exposed to. In a surprisingly smart way, Body Melt becomes an absurdist shrug towards being turned into a lab rat, a rising and ever-related fear as companies push to gain ever increasing powers to skirt consequences for violating laws and human rights. When companies hide behind dozens of proxies of legal protection and walls of money to surround themselves, how do you keep from going insane as they mistreat swathes of the population and force you to watch? You sort of just learn to live with it.

And as bleak of an idea as it is, Body Melt’s ultimate dark humor stems from this. The joke is ultimately on the viewer; it mocks our own ability to turn a blind eye to them, turning the experiment gone wrong into an uncomfortable laugh through its extreme execution.

“How silly. That wouldn’t happen to us! Someone would stop them!”

“…Right?”

Body Melt is streaming on Shudder.

The film forums, threads, and pages I follow have recently been abuzz with talk about a film called Tesis. Usually, when older films are hyped out of nowhere, it means a new physical release is coming, or a new cut of the film has been assembled. To my surprise, Tesis returned to the conversation when Shudder released it just a few weeks ago. It should be noted that discussions around Tesis probably started when Umbrella Home Entertainment released a gorgeous collection around October of 2024. Still, I hadn’t seen much talk about it until its Shudder release. Does the movie hold up to the hype? The title of this piece might just give it away…

Tesis follows Ángela Márquez (Ana Torrent), a student working on her thesis project on audiovisual violence. Professor Figueroa (Miguel Picazo) and fellow student Chema (Fele Martínez) assist Ángela with finding gnarly films to further her studies. Ángela finds her professor dead in one of their university’s screening rooms. She takes the tape he was watching when he died and watches it with Chema. They soon realize the subject of the tape is none other than Vanessa (Olga Margallo), a student who went missing from campus roughly two years ago. After subsequent viewings, Ángela and Chema realize the tape they’re watching isn’t a film…it’s a snuff tape.

Comparing Tesis to A Serbian Film

Personally, I would never recommend A Serbian Film to anyone. And it’s not because the subject matter is “too offensive” but because it’s not a good film. Even though it deserves to be on disturbing movie lists, there’s little substance to it other than the political commentary that lightly shades the film in a positive light. Tesis is a film I would recommend to someone looking for a Serbian Film-like film. It may not have the same amount of gratuitous blood, violence, and sex that Serbian does, but it does not fail at being disturbing, raw, and well-made.

Besides Joel Schumacher’s 8MM, there is very little modern media set around snuff in general. Alejandro Amenábar’s feature directorial debut broke the mold of good taste with this 1996 instant classic. Amenábar’s freshman film tackles not just the idea of snuff within the genre, but the human condition and how violence in media affects everyone differently. Ángela is fascinated from an educational standpoint, while Chema is more enthralled in a way that feels a bit too personal. Each character approaches the idea of snuff/ultraviolence in their own unique way that feels more personal than anything Schumacher attempted to do in 8MM.

Much of Tesis is more akin to a murder mystery, with Ángela thrust into the middle of this murderous game of cat and mouse. For a debut script, Amenábar finds impressive ways to keep the twists and turns coming without anything feeling forced or over the top. Each piece of information the viewer gets makes them feel like they know how it will end, until they get the next piece of information. The script feels like it could have only come from a seasoned professional. It’s almost as twisty as David Fincher’s The Game, only with a much better payoff.