Editorials
[Butcher Block] Splatstick ‘Body Melt’ Tests the Gag Reflex
Butcher Block is a weekly series celebrating horror’s most extreme films and the minds behind them. Dedicated to graphic gore and splatter, each week will explore the dark, the disturbed, and the depraved in horror, and the blood and guts involved. For the films that use special effects of gore as an art form, and the fans that revel in the carnage, this series is for you.
Somewhere at the crossroads of splatter and body horror exists what can only be referred to as “melt horror.” Horror where the victims ooze and dissolve, literally melting, from the inside out. Movies like The Incredible Melting Man, Street Trash, and Body Melt. Body Melt is an Australian horror comedy that lampoons the period’s health craze in gruesome and over the top ways.
But be sure to go in with an empty stomach.
Writer/director/composer Philip Brophy, a musician and composer, wastes no time introducing the viewer to the baddies behind the health company experimenting with a new diet drug. They’re well aware that it has horrible side effects, but they decide to use the suburban residents of Pebbles Court as test subjects for their new product. There are three major phases to the gross-out side effects of the drug. First comes the hallucinations, then a glandular attack, and finally full-blown body melt.
Save for one early victim, an employee who tries to warn the residents only to succumb to weird tentacled decay first, Brophy keeps emphasis on the wackiness of the cast of characters. Two horny teens on a road trip to donate sperm, only to run afoul of an inbred family at a service station. A neighbor who is plagued by multiple visions of the same woman, a sometime seductress and sometimes battered victim. It doesn’t make much sense, just go with it. There’s also a young, pregnant couple, the evil corporation villains, and a slew of other over the top weirdos, all mostly played by Australian soap and television stars.
Basically, you’re lulled into the comedy and forget all about the horror, which doesn’t really start to ramp up until a little more than halfway through the run time. Then it becomes a no holds barred splatstick affair with mutations, killer mutated placentas, exploding penises, every possible bodily fluid you can think of, and of course a ton of melting. There’s not as much blood as you’d think, but it more than makes up for that in the sheer volume of pus, snot, and slime green vomit. Released just a year after Peter Jackson’s Braindead (Dead Alive), the influence is clear.
Of course, there’s also one major connection between the two; special makeup effects supervisor and creator Bob McCarron. McCarron also worked on the gruesome special effects for Braindead, which still remains arguably the goriest film of all time. What’s interesting about McCarron is that he’s not just an award-winning special effects and prosthetic artist, but a medic with four degrees in paramedicine, nursing, pre-hospital medicine and wildlife biology. So, he’s well versed in anatomy and the extremely repulsive things the human body is capable of, and puts that on full display in Body Melt.
Brophy wasn’t just content to compose the soundtrack and score for the film he wrote, directed, and storyboarded, he’s even got a special effects credit – “testicles.” This singular word aptly sums up the type of humor that saturates this icky satire. The horror takes a while to kick in, but man is it the precise type of gooey, slimy, melty practical effect driven Ozploitation that will threaten even the steeliest of stomachs.
It’s been 75 years since The Thing From Another World first warned us to “watch the skies”, and filmgoers have done just that by showing up to multiple instances of extraterrestrial contact on the big screen. This makes sense, as a recent CBS news poll estimated that 63% of Americans believe in intelligent life on other planets, and the ongoing disclosure movement aims to raise that number with each passing day.
With Steven Spielberg’s Disclosure Day leaving many genre fans hungry for more alien footage (preferably of the spooky variety), today I’d like to share a list recommending six underrated alien invasion thrillers for your viewing pleasure. After all, regardless of whether or not you believe that we’re alone in the universe, it can be fun to dream about the worst-case scenario if our cosmic neighbors ever decide to visit.
For the purposes of this list, we’ll be focusing on lesser-known invasion stories rather than the popular extraterrestrials of franchises like Alien and Close Encounters of the Third (or even Fourth) Kind. That being said, don’t forget to comment below with your own alien favorites if you think we missed a particularly thrilling movie.
While it won’t be featured in this article, I’d highly recommend checking out Dean Alioto’s UFO Abduction/The McPherson Tape if you’re up for some ufology-inspired found footage thrills.
With that out of the way, onto the list!
6. The Arrival (1996)
Not to be confused with Denis Villeneuve’s Academy Award-winning Amy Adams vehicle about learning to communicate peacefully with extraterrestrial life, David Twohy’s The Arrival is a much more straightforward (but no less entertaining) genre romp where Charlie Sheen faces a global conspiracy involving hostile alien invaders.
It’s not exactly up there with Close Encounters or even Independence Day, but Twohy’s conspiratorial thriller plays out like an exceptionally fun episode of The X-Files that I’d recommend to sci-fi/horror fans who don’t mind a little bit of wonky CGI and 90s excess alongside their alien thrills.
5. Extraterrestrial (2014)
The Vicious Brothers made a name for themselves with the success of 2011’s Grave Encounters, but that was far from the Canadian duo’s only collaboration. And while it’s not exactly a fan favorite, I always point out 2014’s Extraterrestrial as one of their most underrated projects simply because I agree with the filmmakers’ opinion that there aren’t enough ‘cool alien abduction movies’ out there.
Admittedly, the majority of the picture functions like a run-of-the-mill creature feature with paper-thin characters and familiar horror tropes, but I’d argue that the cosmically-terrifying final act elevates the experience to new and memorable heights. The movie also boasts great performances by both Michael Ironside and Emily Perkins – a combination that more than makes up for the occasionally janky CGI.
4. Alien Raiders (2008)
Director Ben Rock has gone on record lamenting how his John-Carpenter-inspired creature feature was forcefully renamed from Supermarket to the painfully obvious Alien Raiders (a change which likely resulted in many potential viewers skipping out on the experience), but the new title doesn’t change the fact that this single-location thriller is something of a hidden gem.
Taking place entirely within a supermarket, Alien Raiders tells the story of an ensemble of customers and employees who are taken hostage by a group of armed men looking for something far more dangerous than an easy payout. I won’t get into details in order to avoid spoiling the experience, but I’d highly recommend this criminally underseen flick to fans of John Carpenter and the Resident Evil games.
3. Phoenix Forgotten (2017)
You’d think that a Ridley-Scott-produced retelling of one of the most infamous real-life UFO sightings of all time would have a bigger following, but I rarely see Justin Barber’s Found Footage period piece brought up during discussions about extraterrestrial-focused horror movies.
This is a huge shame, as Phoenix Forgotten is just as spooky as it is convincing, with this well-researched dive into the Phoenix Lights incident benefiting from surprisingly believable special effects as well as an appropriately horrific finale.
2. Communion (1989)
I wouldn’t blame you for disregarding Whitley Strieber’s controversial book about his alleged close encounter as sensationalist slop, but I’d argue that Phillipe Mora’s 1989 adaptation of these events is much better than the source material. After all, the movie works as a standalone piece of speculative fiction while also benefiting from an incredible performance by the one and only Christopher Walken!
Mora’s take on Communion may not be particularly scary, but the film is still an unforgettable character study regardless of whether or not the abduction really happened. Not only that, but the flick also paved the way for plenty of future sci-fi stories where the extraterrestrial invaders aren’t as evil as they initially appear.
1. Altered (2006)
Originally envisioned as a Sam Raimi-style horror-comedy titled Probed, Eduardo Sánchez (of The Blair Witch Project fame) eventually realized that it would be much more interesting to turn the film into a serious exploration of the emotional aftermath of a traumatic abduction incident.
That’s how we got Altered, a clever inversion of the standard abduction narrative that follows a group of troubled friends as they capture and experiment on an alien in order to enact revenge for their own abduction years prior.
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