Salt, Saliva, Sperm and Sweat : the title while alliteration of the medium film of Philip Brophy out in 1987 carries in him all the germs of what will make sporulate Body Trash (or its original title no less anglophone Body MeltA few years later. A pinacle of the "aussie" horror of the 1990s, which came out of it Rimini Time to go! In fact, this Australian film is the very dirty matrix of The Substance Coralie Fargeat, whom we loved last year...
Fluids of anxiety
Welcome to Pebbles Court, Homesville, in the suburbs of Melbourne. Enith pavilion area built in ass of bag, where the smiles of some and the clean lives of others sound as false as the fronts of villas of the opening Blue Velvet. None of the inhabitants of this too quiet neighborhood realize that they are actually the laboratory rats of a pharmaceutical conglomerate determined to sell their vitamins that grow human bodies beyond their limits. Yet when the megalomaniac boss Shaan (Regina Gaigalas) tries to kill a lover caught with remorse and ready to denounce her, she inadvertently launches into nature a real deadly pandemic...
Mushrooms on the still smoking corpse of the Ozploitation which was born in the early 1970s with the introduction of the R Rating, Body Trash Throat of all the miasms of this blessed period for Australian horror. By taking back the poncifs (kangaroo hunt, wandering in the rednecks of the outback) to pervert them, Philip Brophy This is in line with its predecessors, while injecting a good dose of the essence of punk: conciseness, anarchism and political impulse...
Everything in the muscles, nothing in the brain
In an hour and twenty, Body Trash surf on its invading B.O. but extremely connected with the atmosphere of the film. Techno, industrial sounds, noises mix in a strange musical ride composed by the director himself and which drowns the film in a super-stimulating sound atmosphere like a compilation of fitness beats. The difference is that it is not Cher or Véronique & Davina that we have on the screen, but a skewer of supermen swollen with the "Vitamin" whose turgescent impulses will soon lead them to implosion.
Let us not be mistaken. So already in Salt, Saliva, Sperm and Sweat Brophy strung this society of appearance where physical performance is placed at the center of a true cult of the body boosted to chemistry, Body Trash First and foremost is a well-crado entertainment that sucks from all pores. Recalcitrant bastard of a Cronenberg who allegedly mixed his film gametes with the craze of a John Waters or Frank Henenlotter, Body Trash fear neither bad taste nor exaggeration. In a carnival of flesh constantly brought back to their liquid state, the film coughs, spits, gimps and stains.
Even better, it offers us several tentacular segments (again as its medium-film already quoted above and available on YouTube) of which one will remember the most salient : the encounter between a duo of city dwellers and a family of rednecks burned from the bulb. If you thought you had touched the bottom of the horror with Rob Zombie's inbreedings or in the guignolesque faces of Massacre at the Tronçonuse 2, fasten your belts. This segment will offer you for sure a well gratined dose of malaise and moments of fear rather very mastered...
Substances
Yet what will surely hit the most the spectator of 2025 will be the congruences between Philip Brophy's film and The Substance Coralie Fargeat. From his opening scene where naked and sexualized bodies inject the strange fluid yellow fluo promise of an overpowering physics, the parallel between the two works is flagrant. He doesn't stop there! Body Trash wears the same passion as Fargeat for the a-natural bodies, whether they are pure freaks (rednecks) or superpowerful (the bodybuilders of Vimuville), and who will eventually mix and indifferentize in a fatra of flesh and viscera worn in a final bouquet.
Coralie Fargeat will also have piqued this Australian film well its ability to create disgust by immersion: ultra-efficient sound design, gogo close-ups, tics and mimics embraced by the camera... Definitely, everything that makes Dennis Quaid's salt in The Substance is found in germ in Body Trash.
You will understand, Body Trash is not an anecdotal film, far from it. A true cult work of Australian horror, punk, subversive and outrageously entertaining, which has been able to swarm into the latest audiovisual productions. A film where laughter is yellow, like the pus d'un abscess that would have fermented too long under the smooth skin of contemporary ideals!
If you want to discover it in the best conditions, Rimini offers a beautiful reissue* accompanied by a booklet designed by Marc Toulelec and a long video bonus offered by Lilyy Nelson.
* The box contains the video supplement Body Horror and fitness in Kangaroo Country (16 min), by Lilyy Nelson, genre movie columnist, and 13 deaths on prescription : 24 pages booklet designed by Marc Toulelec.
Data sheet
Blu-ray Region B (France)
Publisher: Rimini Editions
Duration: 83 min
Release date: May 16, 2025
Video format : 1080p/24 – 1.77
Soundtrack : English DTS-HD MA 5.1 (and 2.0), French DTS-HD MA 2.0
Subtitles French
I laughed when I read you. It looks great-guignolesque, I love it. 😱