WORDS AND MORE
**The strange history of DEATH WARMED UP
DEATH WARMED UP
Dir : David Blyth
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)
Before being expelled from Otago University in 1984, I saw a New Zealand film that was profoundly influential on me. That brief period in Otago provided many fond cinema memories. Two double-features that cemented my love of offbeat cinema that screened to this 17yr old were SALON KITTY & JOYSTICKS and THE BURNING & SHOGUN ASSASSIN, but it really was the kiwi film DEATH WARMED UP that ripped my eyes to what could be achieved locally.
The first 10 minutes of DEATH WARMED UP set the loopy parameters for this deranged answer to the more established international genre scene. Blyth’s grungy (16mm blowup) film engages immediately with ravings about immortality from Dr Archer Howell, a mad scientist played by Kiwi born Aussie Gary Day. “We are the new messiahs!”, he screams to a shocked colleague who wants no part in his madness and soon departs. Howell then brainwashes that colleagues son (a very young Michael Hurst) turning him into a teenage terminator who shotguns both his parents to smithereens. Hurst ends up in an asylum for years while Howell slips away to a deserted island and launches Trans Cranial Applications.
Cut to a title card reading ‘NOW…’ with an aryan looking Hurst, his hot girlfriend and a freckly ginga couple all heading to said deserted island on a ferry skippered by jovial chubby Ian Watkins. The diminutive Hurst has nothing but revenge on his bleached blonde mind as he seeks to settle the score with Howell and his growing army of zombie psychos.
There’s a good case for DEATH WARMED UP being more seminal to kiwi genre fans than Jackson’s Bad Taste in that it was New Zealand’s first film to heavily borrow exploitation elements from the international horror scene and package them up with enough antipodean flavours to energise a generation of movie mad kiwis. Whereas BAD TASTE’s brilliant home movie aesthetic appealed to the backyard sensibilities of the nations burgeoning home movie revolutionaries, DEATH WARMED UP had previously stuck a inspirational hypodermic into Aoteroa’s collective horror heads that we too could make gleefully gory genre films.
Blyth’s solid direction showcases his penchant for fetishism (Hurst budgie smuggling and shower scenes) and enthusiasm for anarchy (Jonathan Hardy’s completely inappropriate blackface cameo) in a briskly paced tale that fuses themes from Dr Moreau, Amicus pics and covers them with a punky new wave giallo veneer. The film was called a ‘depraved waste of taxpayers money’ by those wishing to take the New Zealand Film Commission down a peg or two. Blyth left NZ to more accepting climes in the US/Canada where he was attached to a couple of major horror sequels that ended rather poorly and one title called NASTY HERO that remains missing to this day.
Many years before making DEATH WARMED UP, a young Blyth had had his mind completely blown by witnessing the midnight cult classic El Topo at the NZ Film Festival. Fueled by the madness of the film, he traveled to London and through various friends found out that his new idol, El Topo’s legendary director Alejandro Jodorowsky was living in Paris. After walking the streets of Paris he came across a shop called Arcane 22 where inside Jodorowsky performed Tarot readings. Blyth spilled his heart out to the strange man, who then laid out the tarots and pronounced that the troubled Blyth to immediately return to New Zealand and make a movie. Blyth came home to New Zealand, collaborated with writer Michael Heath (who wrote one of Tarantino’s favourite films NEXT OF KIN) and made DEATH WARMED UP.
In a spooky turn of events the film was invited to the paris science fiction and horror Film Festival where it won the gran prix from the head of the Jury.
The President of the Jury was Jodorowsky.
The film has finally been released uncut on DVD in New Zealand through Mark Galloway’s Screenline New Zealand Cinema label which is releasing many back catalogue titles on DVD. I suggest you pickup a copy and own a killer piece of NZ history.
Visit the site Screenline
The film’s history to DVD would make an interesting documentary. Very quickly it goes something like this:
The film was made for $800,000. It quickly had its international rights picked up by Skouras International for $100k who eventually went bankrupt resulting in the films interneg going missing. The film was then released locally by Endeavour (John WHALE RIDER Barnett) Entertainment who apparently cut the film to R13 for homevideo. Unfortunately no uncut elements survived the process, this includes any 35mm prints. The original 16mm elements were accidentally burnt by an intern in Wellington. The NZ Film Archive never kept a 35mm print. The DVD released by Screentime is the only uncut DVD, as its a composite of elements from a 1” master with uncut vhs inserts.
It all sounds like something a Mad Scientist would love.
**End Story