Death Warmed Up

"Death Warmed Up" is one of those movies that could either be utterly inept garbage, or some kind of surrealist masterpiece. I mean, it's clearly the first one, but you can't help but appreciate in on that other level, the one undoubtedly unintended by the producers, who probably just wanted to draw an audience with some gore, and tacked the rest of the movie together on the run.

From what I could gather, the movie is about a kid who is brainwashed into killing his parents by an evil doctor and goes to an insane asylum. When he is released from the asylum, somehow he is able to instantly recruit a few friends and takes them to an island where he intends to kill the doctor, but the friends seem to think they're just going for a holiday.

The mad doctor has some henchmen, who are sort of like zombies, so I guess that's where the title came from. It also has some surprisingly violent scenes, which stick out because you can tell they were the most expensive scenes to film. Footage is replayed a few times of a disgusting brain surgery operation, where the exposed brain pulses like a heart, and in the climax of this sequence, fingers reach into the brain matter and pull out a round, grey thing.

I'm not that surprised it was banned here, as that sequence is like something out of a Fulci or Franco movie.

I enjoyed "Death Warmed Up" despite, or perhaps because of, its ineptitude of creation, the fact that it never finds a cohesive tone and is frequently confusing and not very well shot. It's still entertaining, all over the place like the character whose head explodes.

Director David Blyth channels his inner Lucio Fulci as he creates what is described as "the ugliest, most repulsive film ever made in New Zealand." Ultimately though, it's an exploitation horror flick with copious amounts of blood and guts and an average storyline. I wanted to like it more but ultimately I could only manage to give it a 4 out of 10.

Personally I'm convinced "Death Warmed Up" was completed by a clique of people suffering from Attention Deficit Disorder (the infamous A.D.D. syndrome)… Either that or a bunch of mushroom-addicted guys with a permanent overdose of acid in their blood. How else would you clarify the film's total lack of narrative structure, the exaggeratedly high amount of nonsensical plot-twists, the overzealous editing, the demented characters and the copious number of grotesquely over-the-top grossness? "Death Warmed Up" is a wildly incoherent and thoroughly bizarre horror effort from New Zealand – reputedly the country's first full-blooded genre outing – that more or less describes itself as a demented and very loose interpretation of the legendary "Island of Dr. Moreau" tale. But then again, Dr. Moreau at least had a clear mission he wanted to achieve whereas Dr. Archer Howell, the lunatic scientist in this film, seemingly just surrounds himself with a large collection of genetically altered freaks for his own personal amusement. Throughout the entire film, his motivations for performing medical experiments on random island people remain unexplained. He has freaky half-man and half-monster guinea pigs working for him, creepy guys without eyebrows running loose and an entire army of deformed abnormalities locked away in a basement. The predominant storyline, however, revolves on one of Dr. Howell's very first victims seeking vengeance for the agony he cost. As a teenager, Michael got brainwashed and shotgun-massacred his own parents under the malignant influence of Dr. Howell. He spent the following seven years in a mental institution, but now Michael's back (with a new and Blade Runner type of hairdo) and unstoppably furious. Along with his girl and a befriended couple, Michael ferries to Dr. Howell's island resort, but they'll have to face his creations first before they can get to him. "Death Warmed Up" is, well, shall I say … completely bonkers! The script makes very little sense (or even no sense at all) and leaps from one subject to another all the time. Michael & C° supposedly come for revenge, yet they start their trip by going to the beach and during several situations it's actually Michael's friend Lucas who proves to be the most courageous one of the bunch. There are plenty of odd homosexual undertones in the film, as well as some misplaced attempts at humor (the Indian store clerk) and a bizarre type of ambiance I can't possibly categorize. One thing "Death Warmed Up" does deliver plenty of, however, is gore and bloodshed! The aforementioned shotgun killings are supremely nasty, and they're just at the beginning of the film. Furthermore, there are repugnant brain surgeries, impalements and gooey zombie make-up effects aplenty. The zombie creatures are quite menacing, particularly the bloke without eyebrows (displayed on the cover-image) and the typical New Zealand accents and slang are a joy to listen to. The acting performances are below average and insignificant, still devoted horror fans should keep an eye open for a brief appearance by Ian Watkin (awesome, arse-kicking uncle Les from "Braindead") as Bill the ferryman. "Death Warmed Up" is far too unbalanced to be considered as a worthwhile horror outing, but it's still a fun and gore-soaked excuse to spend 85 minutes of your time.

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.