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DEATH WARMED UP
aka
DEATH WARMED OVER
Rating: 
New Zealand. 1984.
Director – David Blyth, Screenplay – David Blyth & Michael Heath, Producer – Murray Newey, Photography – James Bartle, Music – Mark Nicholas, Special Effects/Makeup – Kevin Chisnall, Production Design – Michael Glock. Production Company – The Tucker Production Co/The New Zealand Film Commission.
Cast:
Michael Hurst (Michael Tucker), Margaret Umbers (Sandy), William Upjohn (Lucas), Norelle Scott (Jeannie), David Letch (Spider), Gary Day (Dr Archer Howell)
Plot: Teenage Michael Tucker is brainwashed by the evil Dr Archer Howell into taking a shotgun and blowing his parents away. He is released from an asylum three years later. Along with his girlfriend and two other friends, he travels to the offshore island that houses Howell’s Trans Cranial Applications hospital in pursuit of revenge. But to get there they must first deal with Howell’s zombie creations and the various crazies loose on the island.
Death Warmed Up has the distinction of being New Zealand’s first horror film. (Well there was Sam Pillsbury’s dark Gothic The Scarecrow (1982), but Death Warmed Up was the first full-blooded, genre-identifying horror film). It came from David Blyth, an ingénue director who had previously made the interesting-sounding Angel Mine (1977) about suburban kinkiness.
With Death Warmed Up, Blyth was clearly inspired by the cult success of George Romero’s Dawn of the Dead (1979). There were anormous number of copies of Dawn made in Italy. And Death Warmed Up is really when you come down to it an Italian horror film in tone – the garish lighting effects and experimental camerawork recall Mario Bava and the level of full-guts-ahead energy recalls Lucio Fulci and a lot of Italian Dawn of the Dead copies. The film is highly inventive in its enterprising low-budget and looks and moves a lot more slickly than many American counterparts on similar budgets. There are some inventively el cheapo costumes and corrugated tin sheet hospital sets that amusingly suggest something like a New Wave version of The Rocky Horror Picture Show (1975).
But it is a deeply problem ridden film. Particularly noticeable is the absence of anything remotely resembling a plot or rational imposition of narrative. There’s no explanation of what Howell is doing or why. The film’s level of energy manages to carry it for two-thirds of the running time before it becomes more and more noticeable at about the point the action arrives at the hospital that nothing is really holding it together. Particularly annoying is the ending that promises a big showdown between hero Michael Hurst and villainous Letch, but which fades out before anything happens and Blyth cuts away to a meaningless epilogue. Blyth sometimes also doesn’t quite know when to call it a day. The film’s most nauseating and funny scene – a brain operation wherein the medical personnel get splattered – gets a laugh so he repeats it all over a second time. Worst moment is a genuinely appalling cameo from Jonathan Hardy as an Indian grocer.
The film was enough to announce Blyth’s presence to the world and was well received at various horror festivals, although Blyth has failed to quite make use of the opportunity since. He went onto direct The Horror Show (1989) for Sean S. Cunningham but quit a few days in. He next made the interesting medical vampire film Red Blooded American Girl (1991), returned to New Zealand to make the children’s vampire film Grampire/My Grandfather is a Vampire (1992) and then the cable thrillers Red Blooded (1996), unrelated to Red Blooded American Girl, and Exposure (2000). Blyth’s only other work since has been directing episodes of tv series such as Eerie, Indiana (1991-2) and Mighty Morphin Power Rangers (1993-6), as well as Bound for Pleasure (2002), a very interesting documentary about BDSM for New Zealand tv. Among the cast, Norelle Scott has gone onto become an acclaimed playwright and NZ tv writer, while Michael Hurst of course became the sidekick Iolaus on Hercules: The Legendary Journeys (1994-9).
Copyright Richard Scheib 1990
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