It’s time for another shambling review here at B-Movie Enema!

We don’t cover New Zealand enough around here, if I’m being honest. The islands that make up the southern hemisphere nation have made quite a splash in film over the last 40+ years. While it’s unfair to tie New Zealand’s film legacy to Australia’s, it might be fair to say that after the rise of Australian cinema in the 70s, New Zealand was able to follow suit and offer its own blend of plots, concepts, and quirks to film audiences.

What’s kind of interesting, this site has been full of Kiwi products over the last year and a half. In March of last year, I looked at Peter Jackson’s adult take on The Muppet Show, 1989’s Meet the Feebles. The wonderful 1985 science fiction drama, The Quiet Earth, came to the site in the form of a review in July. Then, in August of last year, the 70th episode of B-Movie Enema: The Series hopped in our Battletruck to watch Warlords of the 21st Century. All three of those movies have their own qualities that are fun, thought-provoking, or just outright weird. Now, it’s time to discuss another Kiwi film of note – David Blyth’s 1984 sci-fi zombie flick, Death Warmed Up.

You know what? It’s been a bit since I’ve done a review of a zombie movie. The last one that I classified as such was One Dark Night back in April of last year. That’s probably hardly the first zombie movie anyone thinks of when asked to name their favorite in the horror subgenre. To find a true “zombie” movie, I have to go back a couple of years since I reviewed Zombie 5: Killing Birds. So, I guess I’m both returning to New Zealand for another of their curiosities AND revisiting the world of zombies. This is a nice little two-for-one review.

Death Warmed Up is a cult classic. I think it’s one of those classic “how the hell do we market this?” types of movies. Yes, it was a zombie movie, but, inexplicably, it was sold with a poster of a skeleton about to operate on some poor girl’s fucking face. That doesn’t happen in this movie. While the movie ultimately won the Grand Prix at the 1984 Paris International Festival of Fantastic and Science Fiction Film, audiences weren’t super warm to the movie. The mixed reaction didn’t really slow the movie down from being released.

Well, that is until it got banned in New Zealand due to excessive violence in 1985. This forced producers to re-edit the film and take out as much of the violence as possible. In May of 1987, the film got a Philippine release. However, the title given to it kind of cracks me up. It was released as Dr. Evil: Part II. I mean… The poster had a doctor on it. He’s gonna cut into that girl’s fucking face. So that means he’s evil! The Part II, though… Hmmm… I dunno. He’s got a hypodermic needle and a scalpel! There we go! Part I is that fuckin’ needle. Part II is that shittin’ scalpel! Give ’em a little part I then give ’em a little part II.

Meh…

Alright, so this early body melt horror flick begins with Michael Tucker, a teenager whose father, Professor Tucker, is working alongside Dr. Howell on an experiment. Tucker and Howell have developed a drug that works on the mind. Thus far, the tests have only been done on rats. Howell believes they are ready for human testing based on the more recent results. Professor Tucker does not agree. Some of the rats didn’t survive the testing. This leads to a very heated argument between the two scientists that Michael witnesses and eavesdrops on.

When Michael runs away after seeing Howell wrestle Professor Tucker to the floor and make quite obvious threats, he runs right into Howell, who suggests he take a shower to clean up from his morning run. As Michael showers, Howell approaches with a big ol’ syringe full of juice. The drug, along with some other pretty intense physical experimentation, has made Michael something of a mind-controlled zombie of sorts.

Dr. Howell drives Michael home, where his parents watch an interview with Dr. Howell saying some stuff that does come off as pretty dang nefarious sounding. He says something about how “We are the generation of the end. And nothing is going to stop me.” That last part? He says directly into the camera. You know, like a crazy mad scientist villain. Professor Tucker, watching in horror, exclaims that Howell is a fool and seems pretty irritated with how mad his partner is sounding.

But also, his wife, Michael’s mother, is a serious MILF.

Professor Tucker especially doesn’t like Howell’s vision of a world where “death is obsolete.” Mrs. Tucker is just pleased at the science award that he won with Howell and wants to sex him up but good. That gets the professor’s mind off the weirdo evil shit that Howell had to say on national television.

As his parents fuck, Michael is dropped off with a shotgun and a mission to kill them. He goes upstairs and blows them away.

This is immediately followed by Michael being thrown into an insane asylum where he’s locked up in a nasty padded cell in isolation. He claims he is innocent. He remained in the psychiatric hospital for seven years before being released. The way these early scenes are shot with closeups on Michael’s eyes, the angles used when he’s attacked by Howell in the shower to get a buttful of that goop in the syringe, and the general subject matter of the murder of his parents are all very effective to set the tone of this movie. It’s a very solid first 15 minutes.

Next, we’re told that Dr. Howell is on an isolated island where he operates on human patients. He’s working at a place called Trans Cranial Applications. I don’t know about you, but I think that sounds pretty nefarious to me. We’re told his first patient was someone named Tex Munro. In fact, we get to see him operating on that guy’s cranium with a whole bunch of sexy nurses like he’s in a Robert Palmer video, assisting him.

We now get to the present. We see Michael, now free from the hospital, with his girlfriend, Sandy, and their friends, Lucas and Jeannie. They are on a ferry-like boat on a hot summer day. Being that this is New Zealand, it’s probably like January 15th where it’s 90 degrees there and I’m up to my tits and in snow in Indiana, but I digress. They are headed to the very island where Dr. Howell is operating on brains at Trans Cranial Applications. He tells the boat pilot that he’s specifically wanting to look up an old colleague of his father’s.

He also specifically asks about the old World War II tunnels on this island. The boat pilot says he best not go into those. In fact, it’s best they not camp. They need to stick to the hotel and not adventure far beyond that. Sandy knows what Michael is up to. She’s concerned about dragging Jeannie into this whole revenge plot. She has no idea about anything that Michael dealt with in the past. He says that Lucas will handle her.

That’s exactly what he is doing. Without an ounce of shame, Lucas pulls Jeannie into the back of Michael’s car so they can fuck. I say this is without shame because there are two other guys in a second car on this ferry who can watch them have their sexy fun times. Plus, there’s the pilot too. They all get a good look at Jeannie’s boobs and what she looks like while she fucks, etc.

There’s more to some of the people on this boat too. There is a sort of hunchback type of guy who breaks up Jeannie and Lucas having their sexy fun times in the back of Michael’s car. He’s both kind of mentally impaired and physically odd. One of the guys in the other car talks sort of like Riff Raff from The Rocky Horror Picture Show. The other also seems kind of slow and physically odd. Both of the mentally and physically odd guys complain of a burning up inside of them, as it sounds like their guts are churning.

In fact, their guts may not just be churning… they might be melting!

When Lucas takes a piss on the other truck that the two guys watching him fuck Jeannie are driving, they start a fight with him and Michael. Michael and Lucas ultimately win the fight, but I doubt that’s going to be the end of that. Upon arriving at the island, Michael is ready to disembark, but the two creeps in the TCA truck bump them before aggressively passing them.

As they drive around the island, there are these creepy pictures of Howell for TCA on the sides of the road. Jeannie, having no concept of who this guy is and why they are there, believes they are election billboards. She even says, “He won’t win. He’s too creepy!” She also starts to get spooked when hearing strange noises in the countryside. The two creeps from the ferry try to wreck into Michael’s car head-on, but miss and get stuck on the side of the road.

I like this scene of Michael and his friends driving through the countryside of this island. It looks serene, but it also feels… off. It’s sunny, but the soundtrack and the general vibe are uncomfortable. It’s more uncomfortable than these two weirdo creeps seemingly hunting them down on the roadways. I think it’s just how empty everything is in this countryside location. There are no farmers. No livestock. It’s just fields and grass.

They get into the town and see mostly old folks walking around with nurses. Stopped at a crosswalk, Michael sees Dr. Howell walk across the street. The four friends continue to the beach. Howell goes into a restaurant where the Indian fella running the place seems to have a reaction to Howell’s personal pager. He calls it a “spiritual experience” once he snaps out of this daze.

Howell was called away from that Indian fella’s restaurant because the sorta hunchback dude on the ferry who was puking his insides out to his outsides is in the clinic. His head is pulsating, and he says he is feeling pretty bad. He also doesn’t look very good. As Howell looks the guy over, he decides his nurses need to “dispose of him.” Barely after a nurse responds that this guy isn’t dead yet, his head explodes into a bloody mess.

Against the advice of the ferry pilot, the four friends get into the old World War II tunnels. Pretty quickly, they find a wall that has a TCA sign hanging on it with “DEAD” spray-painted over it. I’m sure that’s a good sign of what they might see in the tunnels. The guys go looking for the bunkers in the tunnels, but they walk too far ahead too quickly, leaving the girls behind. The girls think that the guys are playing a prank on them, but they are met by the sorta hunchback guy from the ferry’s body dropping in front of them in a noose. The guys find the girls and agree they need to GTFO. Lights are turned on in the tunnels, and they are soon chased by a couple of guys on motorcycles.

This is another strange, but kind of intense scene. As the four friends run away from the motorcycles, you get some looks at what’s on the walls in certain places in the tunnels. It almost is laid out like altars or something, praising TCA. It’s strange, but also unsettling in the sense that you really do want to try to figure out what your eyes are seeing, but also totally engrossed in the shaky, quickly edited action of being chased by the bikes.

Lucas sets a trap for the bikers as the other three leave by leaving a rebar pointing upwards in a part of the tunnel where there are several blocks of concrete that will cause the bikers to fall off their bikes. He taunts the bikers to come at him, and one of the bikers gets tossed from his motorcycle and impales himself on the rebar. As they drive away from the tunnels, Sandy begs Michael to take Jeannie to the hospital. During the chase, she was hit by both of the bikers, and she has a head wound that won’t stop bleeding. Michael refuses to take her to the only hospital on the island… where Dr. Howell is likely on staff.

We find out that the two bikers were the creeps who were on the ferry with Michael and his friends. The guy who said to the other that he wasn’t feeling good was the one impaled on the rebar. The one who, for some reason, reminds me of Riff Raff takes his friend to Howell. His name is Spider, by the way. He says that something is “inside” him and begs for help. Howell wants him disposed of, but he is able to get away. He then kills another guy at the institute and releases a bunch of Howell’s other patients while he claims nothing will stop him now.

Michael stops so Lucas can make a call to the institute to get help for Jeannie. He’s told he can’t bring her there because they are trying to deal with a breakout of psychos from their mental hospital. As Lucas tries to understand what the guy is saying and tell them they are bringing Jeannie anyway, the guy whose phone they are using starts to worry. Apparently, this is not the first time the psychos have gotten on the loose. The guy says something about needing to hurry to safety, but that gets more or less ignored by Michael and Lucas.

The guy at the institute finds out that they are at a pub on the island and tries to tell Lucas to barricade themselves for safety until they can get to them. Before he can tell them this, Spider has arrived and tears the electrical wires out of the building, causing the place to lose power and the phone line. The bartender says that the psychos are like killing machines. They need to bring the girls inside right now.

Sandy runs inside to tell Michael someone’s outside. The psychos begin throwing things into the window and trying to attack the bartender and Lucas. They are also attempting to get to Jeannie in the back of Michael’s car. The bartender plays hero and says he’s going outside to try to get Jeannie. Why it’s not Lucas doing this because Jeannie is his girlfriend and all, I cannot say, but maybe he’s smart because the bartender gets a fucking bottle straight into his forehead, killing him.

The psychos break into the windows of both the pub and Michael’s car, but an ambulance from the institute arrives. The doctors from TCA subdue the psychos and load Jeannie into the back of the ambulance. It seems as though they are going to be the friends’ saviors, but not really. Jackson, the guy who answered the call from Lucas and a ranking member of Howell’s team, tells them they are taking them to Hell.

If it were up to me, maybe I’d rather take my chances with the half dozen or so psychos than to be taken to Hell, but what do I know?

Hell isn’t far off from how to best describe the scene at TCA. They get out of the ambulance to discover that the psychos are killing everyone everywhere. The entire place is just trashed, and people from the institute are all dying from slit throats. Michael decides to go ahead with his plan to find Dr. Howell and exact his revenge, leaving Sandy, Lucas, and Jeannie to fend for themselves.

Michael is knocked out while Lucas and Sandy try to find something that can help Jeannie. They find a cabinet with some drugs and a syringe, so they give that a shot. I think it was probably morphine, but I don’t know if I trust this pair’s medical expertise, but here we are. Psychos attempt to break into the room where the three of them are hiding while Lucas tries to hide Jeannie in the room’s storage closet. Lucas helps Sandy fight off Spider and the other psychos. Jeannie soon discovers she is not alone in the storage room. As the psycho stumbles toward Jeannie, she throws a flammable liquid against a radiator, lighting the psycho and her on fire, killing them both.

Ever dedicated to his profession as a crazy ass brain doctor, while all hell’s breaking loose in the institute, Howell is still digging around people’s heads. He’s operating on the brain of one of the psychos and discovering some sort of growth inside the brain that might be causing all the problems and turning these subjects into something akin to zombies. Michael is brought to Howell, who, despite Michael’s best attempts to disguise himself as Mark King from the “Something About You” video, is immediately identified by Howell.

And, seriously, I know we’re at the big climax of this movie, and I’ve already mentioned it once, but I really need to ask the questions I have about Howell’s nurses at TCA. Seriously, if they aren’t cute as hell or drop-dead gorgeous, they are all made up with a very specific “sexy” look to them. They wear masks that are more like fishnets. Their clothing under their nurses’ uniforms is the same fishnet material. They wear fetishized versions of nurses’ outfits. They’re all just… pretty. I feel like this is a very deliberate decision made by the filmmakers to dress them this way, but not necessarily in a titillating way.

I think part of the ultra-modern look of the facility, plus the near cultish personality of, and around, Dr. Howell, has attracted these women to become nurses for him. But they don’t have a normal personality either. They get splattered by blood whenever he operates on some poor bastard’s dome. I think it may sort of add to this concept around what he said on TV, which came off as diabolical and kind of cult leader-ish. Everything in the facility is white and pristine. It sells this idea of health and what would pass as being “right” from a mental health standpoint. But it also doesn’t have any personality. It’s like Howell sucks the personality out of people.

Maybe it’s simpler than that. Maybe all these nurses got a buttful of the same stuff that controlled Michael to kill his parents. Maybe that’s why they work here and don’t seem to mind getting a blood facial each time they assist with a noggin surgery. That could be too. But I dunno. I’m thinking it is more likely a satire of new age weirdo behavior and aesthetic.

Anyway, where was I? Oh yeah, we’re in the last eight minutes of the movie. Dr. Howell tells Michael there are already hundreds across the land who have undergone his procedures. There is a mutation in what he’s created that is causing them to melt. Many have already melted down. There are many more who haven’t even begun to go through the process. He tells Michael that only he can solve the mutation and make these people live again.

Michael is so unimpressed with the doctor’s experiments and quackery that he just stabs him with a scalpel, over and over.

Howell tries to tell Michael they’re all going to die when the melt starts to go widespread, but Michael doesn’t care. Fuck it. He’s got his revenge. Elsewhere in the institute, Lucas and Sandy are trying to find a way to escape. Spider finds them and axes Lucas to death. Spider tells Michael that he’ll get them all. Michael just grins as Spider retreats into the institute once again.

Then we see Michael and Sandy driving away from the institute in silence until she reminds Michael that both Lucas and Jeannie are dead. Jeannie asks Michael why they had to die, but Michael is just pleased with his successful revenge plot. She hugs him, saying she loves him, but he pushes her away with an unsettling smile on his face. They arrive at the hotel to find it on fire. Michael gets out of the car to investigate, despite Sandy begging him to stay, stating it’s over and they can leave alive. He tells her they haven’t even begun, almost as if he is as hellbent on violence and destruction as Spider is, and shoves her against the car.

As Michael falls to his knees, weeping, a power line comes down and falls on Michael, electrocuting him to death.

And so comes the end of this uplifting tale of lovers on vacation. On balance with the horror that was made during this same period here in America, Death Warmed Up is not really on par. That said, this should not be discounted. It’s not really a straightforward movie like, say, Day of the Dead or The Return of the Living Dead. You can’t even compare it to the American slashers of the era either. But what all these movies do try to fit is a particular aesthetic. There is definitely an aesthetic to this movie that makes it come off as unsettling for the entire 80-minute runtime, and, at times, even touching upon experimental.

But the best horror movies will not just have some themes but stick the landing of their themes. Death Warmed Up starts off with the obvious theme of revenge, but also seems to build on it with new wave, experimental advancements in medicine and surgery. I can’t speak for how Kiwis approached the general concept of these new advancements, but there does seem to be a definite theme of radical science as almost a religion. Dr. Howell is an award-winning neurobiologist. Early on, one of the earliest lines of dialogue spoken in the entire movie is someone commenting to Michael about his father and Howell winning an award. Howell is interviewed on television about his work and even says something littered with red flags directly to the camera. Yet… he’s still hailed as a brilliant man who can do no wrong. He practically runs an entire island and can experiment on anyone he wants. Nothing and nobody can stop him. That’s even a concept that is, for lack of a better term, bred into his subjects like Spider.

Often, there will be whole groups of people who will sway from one miracle treatment/cure to the next to the next and so on as they chase after the best possible way to stay fit or be positive or have the best quality of life. They often jump to these ideas and treatments before there can ever be a widespread understanding of what the side effects might be. We always hear about all these different diets that will boost your ability to burn fat, or lose weight, or build muscle, or drinks that will cure memory loss, or keep you sharp, and so on. Every few years, a new diet or miracle food will come along based on cherry-picked data that will become all the rage until, one day, it isn’t anymore, or it’s completely debunked and actively warned against. Death Warmed Up takes that to the extreme. No, I’m not talking about the psychos. I’m talking about literal brain surgery. It still creates a cult of personality around Dr. Howell.

All of these ideas and themes are interesting, and the movie is presented in a very punk rock sort of way. It’s edited very sharply. It’s written completely outside the mainstream approach. It’s at least an interesting movie that has an attitude that sets it apart from the largely homogenized American aesthetic of 80s horror.

I think some might get tripped up over the idea that, according to how this movie is typically advertised or marketed, the zombies aren’t really the zombies we typically think of. These aren’t really the undead or the reanimated dead. These are more accurately the living dead than the movies that use the term “living dead” in their titles. I referred to them, mostly, as “psychos” because that’s what the movie called them. They have something in their brains that will ultimately turn them from living people with their own minds about them to something more ravenously violent, but not all of them start to deteriorate the same way. Spider remains mostly intact. He just gets angry and very murderous. He rebels against his godlike figure, Dr. Howell. These almost seem more like the insects that get taken over by the fungus that turns them kind of into zombies, unable to do the things they instinctively do, but act in the best interest of the fungus instead. There is something mutating in the breakthrough that Howell is performing on his patients that is changing the course of their actions. I’m not sure they are truly dying and resurrecting. They’re just changing their actions and acting in something else’s interests rather than their own, or, I suppose, Dr. Howell’s.

Anyway, if you are curious to see what horror looks like from a different point of view or through the lens of a different country/culture, I’d recommend giving this a look. It’s an easy breezy 80 minutes. It’s definitely worth your time.

For next week, we’re returning to Tromaville as we look at the second movie in the series that recently inspired a fresh, new take on Lloyd Kaufman’s superhero creation. That’s right, it’s time to review The Toxic Avenger Part II! So be back here in seven days’ time and we’ll take a look at this sequel. Until then, I’m gonna definitely going to endanger my girlfriend by seeking revenge against a guy who shot me in the but with a mind control drug and made me murder for him.