Death Warmed Up

"A deranged scientist is on a remote island working on his experimental brain procedures on human test subjects. Unfortunately, many of the patients suffer side effects from the procedure that transforms them into murderous zombies. Arriving on the island is a group of youths that include the son of the scientist's chief rival. Years before, the mad doctor had hypnotized the youth and had him murder his own father, so the young man has come to track down the scientist and make him pay," according to the DVD sleeve's synopsis...

If he'd only added some exposition, director David Blyth might have had something with "Death Warmed Over". It has style and promise - like in, for example, the scene where Michael Hurst (as Michael Tucker) and his friends are pursued by a couple of motorcyclists in the underground Australian tunnels. The story is way too distant, though. Villainous doctor Gary Day (as Archer Howell) and the arousable young Hurst seem to have had some past sexual relationship ("You're all sweaty, let's get you cleaned up"). Perhaps, since he strokes his walking stick while watching kids at play, the mad doctor started early with Hurst?

***** Death Warmed Over (11/84) David Blyth ~ Michael Hurst, Margaret Umbers, Gary Day

Seven years after gunning down his parents, Michael Tucker (Michael Hurst) is released from his padded cell and goes looking for revenge on the man responsible for turning him into a killer: deranged scientist Dr. Archer Howell (Gary Day), who now runs an island-bound institution where he operates on the inmates, turning them into crazed zombies.

I remember thinking that New Zealand horror Death Warmed Up was a pretty weird film way back when it was first released on VHS, with its all-over-the-place plot, oddball characters and gaudy, '80s 'plastic and neon' aesthetic; thirty years later, and the film's new-wave punk style and aimless story-line seem even more bizarre. There's a little fun to be had with the gore—an exploding head, some bloody squibs, random brain surgery, an impalement etc.—and we also get some gratuitous nudity and sex, but on the whole, this is way too shambolic to be considered anything but a failure.

Interestingly, Death Warmed Up was made three years before Peter Jackson's classic debut, splatter-fest Bad Taste, making me think that the Lord of the Rings director saw this back in the day and thought to himself, 'I can do better than that!'. And you know what? He could!

3.5/10, generously rounded up to 4 for Ranji Gandhi (Jonathan Hardy), the Indian character who looked and sounded like something out of '70s TV series Mind Your Language.

Ever go to one of those all-you-can-eat buffets that has virtually every kind of food imaginable, and you go in thinking it's going to be an excellent experience, a few of the foods you sample are fairly good, but you're left afterwards with a huge bellyache and the check? That's the way I felt after watching 'Death Warmed Up', from my now-infamous Mill Creek 50-film 'Nightmare Worlds' pack--it has a few interesting ideas, and some decent, though dated, atmosphere, but director Blyth doesn't know how to put it all together. In the right hands, this could have worked, but it definitely doesn't, and that's a shame, because it had potential...'it coulda been a contender!' The two young female leads that play Sandy and Jeannie are beautiful, there's good chemistry between them and the two male leads, particularly in the scene where they're on the ferry going to the island. The completely gratuitous nudity and softcore sex was a great bonus. In an interview that was a DVD extra for 'The Fog', Jamie Lee Curtis explained that she enjoyed starting out in horror and that it was a useful genre for an actor in that it gave one a wide range of possible behaviours to both utilize and show, and, by the end, Michael and Sandy proved to me they were good actors. It's just too bad they were in a nondescript, clunky script that had no idea what it was doing or where it was going. 'Death Warmed Up' is one of those films that doesn't have a climactic finale, or end, per se, it just simply stops or dies, as if the filmmakers simply had no ideas left and simply stopped when they ran out of film.

THIS is the type of film that should be remade, not the wildly successful and great film that has no need to have a different interpretation or chance at life, but the misfires or the should-have-beens--to show the world that these ideas had validity and meaning after all.

I was told about this site from a friend. I'm the guy who played SPIDER. As someone commented, no eyebrows. We did it way back when we were all in our twenties. It was a great amount of fun to do. The creative team came from both film and theatre industry. I'd just finished a pirate movie with Tommy Lee Jones, Michael O'Keefe and Jenny Seagrove and a lot of theatre. Michael (Hurst) was also a fellow theatre actor and we went on after this to do a couple of stage plays together. As was also noted, Michael went on to do 'Hercules'. At the time, Fangoria was the genre magazine of choice, and, with David (Blyth) and Murray (Newey - RIP) and the script by Michael Heath, with the 80's sex chic of the nurses, designed by Micahel Glock, we hit Auckland with all the energy that a 4 week shoot can muster. It's amazing to read comments from watchers/viewers some, what? 25 years later! Don't get too analytical....we just went for the jugular and hoped that somewhere along the line it'd all make sense! Along the way we shot stuff in a deserted and rather creepy abattoir, the tunnels on the island off Auckland city, and got right into ridged knives with back splatter.

These revenge, gore-fest movies are all a little the same. It starts with no real motivation for the initial actions. The mad scientist is just mad. Still, he seems to have plenty of money for his sick research. What is his product? A bunch of zombie characters. Do we really need some of these? Anyway, the hero(?) drags his pals into his effort to avenge his father and mother's murders (actually, he committed them under the doctor's influence). Then there's the agony and the pain that goes on and on and on. People are dismembered, stabbed, burned, one after the other. I don't get the attraction. Why do audiences want so much of this? In the end, we're left wondering about a lot of things. There are no real answers. Maybe it's just obsession. Who knows.