From director Peter Brophy and co-writer Rod Bishop comes Body Melt, a goofy, goopy Australian body-horror splatter fest that plays like the unholy love child of Peter Jackson’s Dead Alive and David Cronenberg’s Rabid, with some Lynchian weirdness and a throbbing techno score thrown in for good measure.

It follows the citizens of Pebbles Court in Homesville, Melbourne, who all fall victim to an experimental body-enhancing vitamin sent to them in the mail by an unscrupulous pharmaceutical company. The filmmakers are concerned less with character and plot and more worried about grossing the audience out, which they achieve in spades. True to its title, the film is a smorgasbord of nasty death scenes as hilarious as they are disgusting.

There’s not a single protagonist in Body Melt. Rather, the film is comprised of several characters who almost all meet gnarly ends. There’s a detergent-guzzling man whose throat opens to sprout tentacle-like growths. Another resident of the quaint Pebbles Court suffers hallucinations from the drug until his face melts away, leaving only his bloody skull. A family vacationing at the very health spa that produced the vitamin suffers all matter of slimy, mucus-dripping indignities, while one of the spa’s workers — an oversexed muscle man — gets an erection so turgid his penis explodes. But perhaps the most vomit-inducing scene involves a pregnant woman, whose fate is best left for sick viewers to see for themselves.

In addition to all the madness listed above, Body Melt features a clan of possibly inbred service-station workers who torment two teen boys from the court, a clear nod to The Texas Chain Saw Massacre. To say that the film is bonkers is an understatement. It can be a bit tricky at first to follow all the seemingly disparate storylines, but then again, the stories aren’t exactly the point. The practical effects are the true star here, and they are every bit as convincing now as they were in 1993.

Body Melt is a perfect midnight movie — just be sure to watch it on an empty stomach. —Christopher Shultz

Get it at Amazon.

From Robert Morgan, the creator of the wonderful animated horror short The Cat with Hands, comes the feature-length debut Stopmotion, a film exploring the unraveling mind à la Videodrome or Possession. The film centers on Ella Blake (Aisling Franciosi, The Nightingale), a stop-motion animator helping her arthritic and overbearing mother, Suzanne (Stella Gonet), finish what will likely be her final film.

Ella’s tumultuous but structured life gets thrown for a loop when Suzanne has a stroke and falls into a coma, leaving Ella to potentially finish the film on her own. The problem is, she struggles to come up with ideas — she’s a brilliant animator, but not much of a storyteller. So when a mysterious little girl begins showing up at Ella’s apartment and dictates a new story about a girl lost in the woods being chased by a grotesque figure called the Ash Man, Ella reluctantly listens, and begins making the young one’s narrative.

The new story is much darker, with figures made of mortician’s wax and spoiled meat, creating visuals that give ’90s-era Tool videos a run for their money. The little girl proves to be just as demanding as Suzanne, and this combined with the disturbing nature of the work begins to effect Ella’s sanity and her already fraught relationship with her boyfriend (Tom York).

Featuring stunning stop-motion animation from director Morgan, appropriately moody cinematography from Léo Hinstin, and a skin-crawling score by experimental sound artist Lola de la Mata, Stopmotion is a masterful slow-burn horror film with genuinely creepy imagery and a thoroughly shocking explosion of violence in its third act. Franciosi delivers yet another psychologically complex performance, proving herself to be one of the most dynamic actors in the horror landscape right now. Fans of Cronenberg, Zulawski and the eerie stop-motion films of Jan Svankmajer will not want to miss this one. —Christopher Shultz

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Adapted from an 1841 novella by Aleksey Konstantinovich Tolstoy, The Vourdalak marks the directorial debut of Adrien Beau. The Gothic vampire tale set in 18th-century Eastern Europe centers on a wayward Marquis (Kacey Mottet Klein) who finds himself at the mercy of a strange family living in a rural manor.

The old patriarch Gorcha has disappeared, leaving his kin to fight a band of Turks plaguing the area. He told his children, the effeminate Piotr and mysterious Sdenka (Vassili Schneider and Ariane Labed, respectively), that if he is gone longer than six days, but returns, he should not be let back into the house, as he will have transformed into a dreaded vourdalak. Gorcha’s eldest son, Jegor (Grégoire Colin), dismisses such concerns as mere superstitions, but Piotr, Sdenka and Jegor’s wife (Claire Duburcq) aren’t so certain. The Marquis isn’t sure what to think, and he is distracted by his sudden and insatiable attraction to Sdenka.

Gorcha returns just after the hour marking his sixth day gone, and he is very obviously no longer human. So much so, the character isn’t portrayed by a human at all, but rather a ghoulish puppet voiced by director Beau. Everyone can plainly see Gorcha is a vourdalak, except for Jegor, whose patriarchal stubbornness keeps him from seeing the truth the women and sensitive Piotr plainly see. He brings his father inside, and naturally, mayhem follows.

But this is mayhem of a more quiet sort, as the film is indebted to the atmospheric European horror films of the 1960s and 1970s. It also was shot on Super 16mm, giving its images sumptuous grains and ever-so-slightly faded colors, furthering its connection to cinema of old. The Vourdalak is quietly and grotesquely funny, especially in scenes involving Gorcha, whose blatant inhumanity is both perverse within the universe of the film and a practical effects marvel. It’s overall a stellar debut for Beau, one that feels more like the work of an old master than a relative newcomer, and a gloriously oddball entry into the vampire canon. —Christopher Shultz

Filled to the brim with incomprehensible horror, The Church is director Michele Soavi’s follow-up to his feature film debut, Stagefright. Billed in some areas as the third Demons entry, the film has more in common with Rosemary’s Baby and John Carpenter’s Prince of Darkness, released only two years prior, than it does with the series.

There is some connective tissue between the two, namely the presence of producer Dario Argento and the premise of people trapped together fending off supernatural entities. But while Demons and its sequel features superb creature makeup and tons of gore, The Church trades in surreal imagery and set pieces that form a somewhat cohesive but altogether disjointed story. 

The narrative begins in the Middle Ages, where a group of knights slaughter an entire village based on the assumption one of its citizens is a devil-worshipping witch. The knights bury the corpses in a mass grave and construct the titular church atop it, as a means of keeping the supposed evil trapped within.

Fast-forward to present day, where Evan (Tomas Arana), the church’s new librarian, arrives for his first day at work. A wannabe archeologist, Evan loathes his new job and seeks a project that will bring him fame and fortune. He thinks he’s found what he’s looking for when Lisa (Barbara Cupisti) discovers a parchment in the church’s dilapidated catacombs that appears to be hundreds of years old. Evan obsesses over the document, eventually discovering hidden passages in latin that speak of a stone with seven eyes.

This leads Evan to return to the church in the middle of the night to search for the stone. He finds it in the catacombs, affixed to a large cross on the ground, and when he moves it aside, naturally, all hell breaks loose. It becomes up to a friendly archer priest (Hugh Quarshie) and the young daughter of the church’s sacristan (Asia Argento, in one of her earliest film roles) to restore balance and keep the evil contained. 

While not much more can be said of the story, the film’s visuals and special effects deserve special recognition, in particular a shot of a winged creature embracing a nude woman — a direct reference to Boris Vallejo’s Vampire’s Kiss painting Also of note is the music, alternately by Keith Emerson (of Emerson, Lake & Palmer fame), Philip Glass and Goblin. The Church is overall a splendid audio/visual experience that’s a must-see for fans of surreal horror. —Christopher Shultz

Get it at Amazon.