Viewer Advice: Contains high-level violence and sex scenes.

Philip Brophy’s hilariously bonkers debut feature makes an oozing, suppurating, bloody mess of Melbourne suburbia.

Everybody needs good neighbours. But if they don’t arrive in time with their warnings about those dietary supplement pills found in your letterbox, you might lose more weight than you bargained for – as the unfortunate residents of Pebbles Court discover. That tardy alarm-raising good Samaritan’s message? “The first phase is hallucinogenic. The second phase is glandular. The third is … arrgghhh!”

First screened at MIFF in 1994, Brophy’s long-form debut gleefully satirises our obsession with body modification. In the early 90s, its targets were diet and fitness fads; three decades on, the booming cosmetic-surgery industry – and its newsworthy blunders – could just as easily be implicated. Starring a who’s who of Aussie TV actors including Lisa McCune, William McInnes and Andrew Daddo, Body Melt takes its cues as much from Brophy’s earlier short Salt, Saliva, Sperm & Sweat (MIFF 1988) as from Bad Taste–era Peter Jackson, Ozploitation, infomercials, soap operas and music videos. With impressively gross SFX and make-up, a pitch-black (and poo-brown) sense of humour, and a cheesy, synthy soundtrack courtesy of Brophy (better known at the time as the founder of art-rock group → ↑ →), Body Melt is an absolute riot.

“One of the best movies of its type – a cool, sexy, gory, funny horror film.” – Quentin Tarantino, The Movie Show (2003)