About

'Philip Brophy'sBody Melt is a catastrophe narrative. One sunny day in suburbia, a hideously dying man crashes his car into Pebbles Court, Homesville. He's been brought to the point of meltdown by an experimental drug marketed as Vimuville vitamins, and he's arrived, too late, to warn the Court's inhabitants not to swallow the sample dropped in their mailboxes. So then the story scatters: a businessman, beset by increasing hallucinations, picks up a strange woman at the airport and takes her home; two rowdy teenagers get waylaid at a run-down farm of a seemingly inbred family; a yuppie family journeys to a sinister health resort; an expectant woman at home begins to feel mighty queasy. Brophy's key subject has long been the body and our experience of it: life seized as a calculus of bodily effects, stimuli, drives, mechanisms. Horror cinema offers an expressionist statement of what is, for him, a kind of base, physical reality — bodies that devour and decay, consume and expel, peel and ravage.' Adrian Martin,

Photofile 1995