The title tells the “story” of this very odd and very gross mini-feature from Australia’s Philip Brophy, of the cult horror-comedy BODY MELT (1993). Brody’s unique vision was announced in the 47-minute SALT, SALIVA, SPERM AND SWEAT (1987), which played on various TV stations throughout Australia and the UK but never became terribly well known. The film is currently streaming on YouTube, and should you choose to view it, I guarantee you won’t be forgetting the experience anytime soon.
SALT, SALIVA, SPERM AND SWEAT (1987) Film
The film is divided into four sections, each set on a different day, and each headed by one of the words of the title. The main character is “The Man” (Phillip Dean), an office worker who spends his days staring into a very 1980s-era computer screen, on which he finds himself proffering typed wisdom like “In these moist times, bodily fluids become increasingly vital,” “We are never what we eat. We are always what we just ate” and “Listen to your body. Talk to plants. Ignore people.”
In “Salt” The Man awakens in his strikingly sterile and impersonal home, where he lathers toothpaste on his teeth and chugs mouthwash. Further ingestion occurs at his workplace, where he and his co-workers chew on candy, chips and, in the lunchroom, mashed potatoes. Back home The Man gives his kids candy to snarf and makes himself a booze and milk cocktail, which he then vomits up.
“Saliva” sees The Man greeted by nasty graffiti in a toilet stall at work. At dinner a waiter (George Huxley) calls him a “fuckbrain,” and at home he’s confronted with obscene words on a Scrabble board.
The grossest portion, “Sperm,” begins with The Man having a wet dream, and continues in a carnal vein, with The Man becoming cognizant of his scantily clad female co-workers, including a randy secretary (Jean Kittson) who (it’s suggested) sodomizes him with a dildo in an empty office. He also masturbates in a bathroom stall and, later that night, phones an escort service.
In “Sweat” The Man gets into a slapping match with a female superior and shoots her in the head with a pistol; she responds by shooting him in the back, to which he has no response. Instead, The Man enters the bathroom and gets freaked out by a tampon in a toilet that he can’t seem to flush away. This doesn’t stop him from going out to dinner that night and jabbing a fork into a hand belonging to that annoying waiter and getting into a play-fight with his daughter, which ends in a not-at-all-playful manner.
Polite this film isn’t, with Brophy evidently looking to push the material as far as he possibly could (and, in a couple of wholly inappropriate scenes involving The Man’s children, cheerfully stepping over the line). Logic and “reality” are jettisoned (bullets and brutality have very little effect in this film’s reality), with an absurd logic taking precedence amid an overpowering concentration on appetite and desire.
Sound is all-important to this film’s warped universe, with eating and drinking accompanied by exaggerated slurping and sucking, the workspace by ever-present typing and the sexual content by squishing and splashing. Amid such a rich and varied soundscape, it’s hardly surprising that dialogue is kept to a strict minimum, and that there’s no conventional narrative to speak of—but what’s offered up in its place is brilliantly bizarre.
Vital Statistics
SALT, SALIVA, SPERM AND SWEAT
Dumb Films
Director/Screenplay/Editing: Philip Brophy
Producer: Rod Bishop
Screenplay: Philip Brophy
Cinematography: Roy Argail, Mandy Walker
Cast: Phillip Dean, Jean Kittson, Lyndai Barry, Robert Chuter, Daniel Scharf, Cheyanne Armitage, Nicholas Hanigan, Martina Murray, Jeff Kovski, George Huxley, Chris Barry, Lisa Ferguson, Tom Fitzgibbon, Daniel Pollock, Debra Force