FEATURE FILM – Developed / Financing
Based on Philip Brophy’s the cult horror film Body Melt (1993), Body Melt 2 Unwellness is a ‘health horror’ feature film. True to the original film, this update maintains a mix of queasy parody and icky satire. Alternative medicine scams, deceitful health insurance, online community support groups and healthy lifestyle marketing are all targeted. Body Melt 2 luridly fantasises the worst of these people and their actions.
Bernard, a pushy entrepreneur, running the tech start-up Beta Bods, specialises in bio-apps for smartwatches that falsify data, making wearers think they are transcending their performance goals. To enhance this fraud, his young assistant Dominic, a specialist in fabricating bio-app data, suggests they re-brand cheap Nigerian skin crème as a haptic gel to “aid data precision”. This will allow them to deflectdata scrutiny.
Bernard markets the crème, now branded Velvet Vibe, to the Melbourne Tornadoes football team and their eager coach Gary. But unknown to everyone, the Nigerian crème has been laced with a destructive substance. This sets off a bizarre and chaotic chain of events where scammers are scammed, and exploiters become exploited:
Beta Bods is shut down after the malfunctions and Bertrand absconds to Broadford where he runs Uber Meds – a custom online apothecary. Its products are cheap bulk purchases from third world countries which he doctors and rebrands. But even this company falls foul of external manipulation. The deaths keep piling up.
How do all these events connect? Only Carrol knows – fronting as a director of a pre-school crèche franchise. She has been manipulating everything by planting destructive bait for her nihilistic scheme. She is none other than the daughter of Dr. Carrera (from the original Body Melt movie), bent on avenging her father whose original dream of “a better you” would now be realized in terrible ways.
Mirroring the unchecked spread of e-commerce that feeds the current mania for wellness and a better world, Body Melt’s 2 story is wildly stretched across a network of unpredictable situations. Like a bad virus, things start microscopically small and become grotesquely enlarged. It’s an all-round bad trip where health becomes horror.
Quentin Tarantino being interviewed in Fangoria, 2003
"I'm a real big fan of Australian horror films from the late 70s and the 80s. Ever see BODY MELT ? That was great! The best movie of its kind since RE-ANIMATOR. I thought that movie was fantastic! 'Wow, this movie is so cool!'""'
