Death Warmed Up (1984)

AKA Death Warmed Over

New Zealand has a pretty interesting pedigree when it comes to horror films. In recent years the island nation has become a hotbed of horror/comedy hybrids with the success of films like What We Do in the Shadows (2014), Housebound (2014) and Deathgasm (2015), all gaining major worldwide film festival accolades. Of course there are other types of Kiwi horror to win international praise such as the serial killer themed The Ugly (1997), which won several awards abroad. Naturally the early films of Peter Jackson immediately spring to mind as films like Bad Taste (1987) and Dead Alive/Braindead (1992) are often the very first titles many think of whenever New Zealand is mentioned within the context of horror films, but just as he was the first in line to put New Zealand on the map as it relates to cult films in general, it was David Blyth who beat everyone to the punch in delivering New Zealand's first homegrown horror film and over the years has proven himself to be the king of transgressive Kiwi horror with more recent films like Wound (2010) and Ghost Bride (2013) being worlds removed from the lighter, more comedic films that the countries horror films have become synonymous with. It all began however in 1984 with Death Warmed Up, a landmark film that served as an unforgettable introduction for Blyth and New Zealand to the horror world.

Michael Tucker, the teenage son of scientist is injected with a serum by Dr. Archer Howell, effectively brainwashing him after Michael's father, a college of Howell's, confronted Howell about his radical brain experiments, Howell's end goal being immortality. Under Howell's control, Michael is ordered to murder both his parents and is sentenced to an asylum. Seven years later, Michael is released and sets out for revenge, taking along a group of friends to a remote island where Howell has been continuing his experiments. An unfortunate encounter with Spider, a henchman of Howell's sets off a chain of events with Spider pursuing Michael and his friends across the island, unleashing a group of Howell's zombied test subjects who wreak havoc on the island and ultimately Howell's clinic.

One of the most inventive and stylish horror films of the 80's, in a lot of ways Death Warmed Up could be seen as a deranged concoction of various horror subgenres all rolled up into one, the end result being something wholly original and Blythian. It's a film that works on a multitude of levels. The first and perhaps most obvious way to read the film would be as a revenge film and on that front it works for the obvious reasons, Michael's quest for revenge against Dr. Howell being engaging enough. The character of Dr. Howell gives the film a science fiction bend and also puts the film into the classic mad scientist subgenre but Blyth takes that a step further with the end results of Howell's experiments. While not “zombies” in the classic sense, the horde of test subjects unleashed later in the the film exhibit enough zombie-like symptoms to place the film into its own unique corner of the zombie subgenre. Howell's clinic and a good portion of the island give the film a very Cronenbergian feel in the vein of Shivers (1975) and Blyth's penchant for kink makes an appearance with Howell's nurses sporting very fetishistic mesh surgical masks. The film also exhibits certain aspects of the teen slasher craze that was hot at the time and Blyth doesn't hold back on the gore either with the films final third containing several displays of blood splatter and a few gruesome brain surgeries are seen up close throughout the film.

The film won the grand prize at the 1984 Paris International Festival of Fantasy and Science Fiction Film where it made a fan out of jury president Alejandro Jodorowsky who gleefully said of the film “It would not be an exaggeration to say that Death Warmed Up has been the shock event of this Festival. It is an apocalypse of slaughter!” The films history on home video is a pretty interesting one. As the story goes, due to a mishap from an intern at the New Zealand Film Commission, the can containing the original film elements ended up being burned and rumors of a print stashed away somewhere in a vault in Los Angeles led to dead ends. The film did become a VHS favorite, however due to censorship several releases were cut and Blyth himself has admitted to spending years haunting video stores and second hand shops snatching up used VHS copies, looking for the best looking tapes in order to splice together a complete, uncut version. Many budget, unofficial DVD's have been released internationally as well. Finally in 2018 the film was restored by the New Zealand Film Commission and hopefully finds itself a new audience as not only is Death Warmed Up one of the finest examples of what made the 80's such a great decade for horror, but given its history, it's an incredibly important film for the genre.