Death Warmed Up (David Blyth, 1984)

Death Warmed Up, a splatter-punk new wave sci-fi/horror oddity from New Zealand, is possibly the most incoherent movie I've ever seen. Not a second of this thing makes sense. The characters' motivations, goals, decisions, and behaviors, with a few exceptions, are completely baffling. You usually know what is happening, but you almost never know why. This is mostly alright with me. I like to get nuts.

Like so many of the Australian and New Zealand exploitation movies of the era, Death Warmed Up has style, propulsive energy, offbeat humor, extreme violence, and an aggressive yet graceful approach to camera movement. The filmmakers are clearly dealing with a small budget and some shots are reused several times in the same scene, but, for the most part, the images are executed with ingenuity and skill. This is a visually memorable movie, even if the narrative is just throwing anything and everything at the wall and hoping something sticks.

So, what the hell is this movie about anyway? The writer or writers of the Wikipedia plot synopsis did an admirable job of making Death Warmed Up sound like a normal sci-fi/horror movie with a conventional narrative, but they really just sane-washed an insane experience in the same way the mainstream media convert Trump's speeches and statements into conventional policyspeak instead of accurately depicting the barrage of non-sequiturs, tangents, threats, and gobbledygook. I'm going to try to untangle the narrative while also relaying some of the insanity, though that's a semi-impossible task.

We begin with a young man, Michael (Michael Hurst), intensely jogging through the New Zealand landscape. He eventually jogs his way to a hospital, where he inexplicably smashes his way through groups of doctors, orderlies, nurses, and visitors despite there being much room in the large hospital to simply go around them. He makes his way into an elevator where he calls out for his father, a surgeon/medical researcher at the hospital. The elevator opens onto a mostly isolated floor, and Michael peers through some blinds that are inexplicably on the outside of a lab window while an equally inexplicable neon light blinks off and on.

Inside that lab, Michael's father Dr. Tucker (David Weatherley) is arguing with his research partner/full-blown mad scientist Dr. Howell (Gary Day) about mellowing out on the mad scientist biz. Dr. Howell responds by choking Dr. Tucker, presumably to death, and giving some kind of intense telepathic look to Michael. Michael runs away, but when he turns a corner, Dr. Howell is there (this is the only instance of Dr. Howell seemingly being able to teleport to locations). The evil doc tells him to clean his sweaty body and pushes him into a shower, where we see Michael scrub himself and gaze up at the shower head with an open mouth in a weirdly sexual way. Dr. Howell reappears and spends a long time gazing at Michael's muscular buttocks before jabbing said buttocks with a needle containing a mystery liquid (we never learn its contents). He then drives a dazed Michael to Michael's house.

Inside the house, Michael's very much alive and not at the hospital (what the fuck?) father is in his large bedroom watching a television interview with Dr. Howell, where the crazed doc says a lot of menacing, mad scientist nonsense on national television. Inexplicably, both docs are receiving a scientific award at a banquet that night. Dr. Tucker's wife Netty (Tina Grenville) appears in sexy lingerie and tries to make Dr. Tucker horny. Horny for sex. Too bad Dr. Tucker is too obsessed with his mad scientist research partner to stop talking about it and sex his lady down. She keeps trying, and they have weird partially clothed semi-sex, in which the good doc remains in his awards suit. Michael shows up. His mom puts a robe on. Michael blows both his parents away with a shotgun and is dumped in a really weird insane asylum. We're not even fifteen minutes into this thing.

Seven years later. Michael is released from the insane asylum. Dr. Howell has left mainstream New Zealand society behind for a really weird island where he runs a clinic called Trans Cranial Applications. The mad doc is attempting to make humans immortal by giving them splattery brain surgeries, assisted by sexy new wave nurses wearing masks that don't seem up to code and orderlies/hired muscle who have no qualms about breaking the law or breaking heads, if the island indeed has any laws. His surgeries may not have created immortality, but they have created a bunch of mutant-zombies and non-zombie dudes with mutations, including Tex Munro (veteran character actor Bruno Lawrence) and Spider (David Letch). Letch gives some incredible line reads as Spider, especially his oft-repeated, "I'll get you! I'll get you aaaaaaaaaaaaallllllllllllll!"

Michael decides to go to the really weird island and get his revenge on Howell for brainwashing him into blowing away his doctor dad and sexy mom. That makes sense narratively, but Michael has inexplicably brought his girlfriend Sandy (Margaret Umbers), best friend Lucas (William Upjohn), and Lucas' girlfriend Jeannie (Norelle Scott) to the really weird and extremely dangerous island for a little beach rest and beach relaxation before the doctor-killing and mutant-fighting shenanigans. Even more inexplicably, Jeannie has no idea about the revenge plan, Lucas may or may not know, and Sandy does know. My hot take: Michael loves drama.

They take a ferry to the island while wearing bathing suits and beachwear. Jeannie and Lucas even have sex in their car despite the ferry driver and the other vehicle on the ferry having a clear view of the action, but they're fit and attractive people so maybe they don't mind giving the ferry a show. (There's a lot of weird sex-related business in this movie.) Unfortunately for our two young couples, that other car is a Trans Cranial Application truck occupied by Spider and some other freaky mutant-man. Tex Munro is on the ferry, too, for some reason. When Lucas takes a whiz on the truck (hilarious but why?), the mutants get out and have a fistfight with Lucas and Michael. The mutants take most of the beating and vow painful revenge on our four heroes.

When we finally get to the island, we learn that a little town has sprung up around the clinic. Unfortunately, this is where we get a racist comic relief scene with actor/comedian Jonathan Hardy in brownface as shopkeeper Ranji Gandhi. Fortunately, this character never appears again. After taking in some of the town, our four heroes hit the beach for swimming and sunbathing before heading to a country house near the town that Michael somehow knows about even though some earlier dialogue referred to a hotel. The property is located near a maze of underground tunnels. Our gang goes into the tunnels, the boys get separated from the girls, mutants on motorcycles go after them, and all hell breaks loose for the remainder of the film.

My synopsis allows for some of the insanity Wikipedia leaves out, but rest assured, my description is still much more normal than the actual movie. This is some weird, weird shit. Is it a good movie? That question has no meaning here. You either roll with Death Warmed Up or you get left behind. It's not a top shelf Antipodean classic like Dead End Drive-In, but it looks cool (except for a couple overly dim scenes), you will not be able to guess what will happen next at any given moment, and it's completely berserk from beginning to end. Shitcan the racist scene and improve the lighting in the dim scenes, and you'd really have something here. Have what exactly, I really can't tell you, but you'd have something.

Director David Blyth has had an odd career. Co-writing Death Warmed Up with Michael Heath (who co-wrote the incredible and far more coherent 1982 horror film Next of Kin), the project was his third feature as director after the punk and bondage-themed sci-fi/fantasy Angel Mine and, in a real curveball, A Woman of Good Character, a costume drama about a servant girl in the 19th century. He followed Death Warmed Up with two vampire movies, Red Blooded American Girl and My Grandpa Is a Vampire (starring The Munsters' Al Lewis) and several Mighty Morphin Power Rangers-related projects. Recent films include David Blyth's Damn Laser Vampires, Ghost Bride, and Night Freaks, the latter a pandemic-filmed mockumentary about alien abduction.

The Ape (William Nigh, 1940)

The silent film and early sound eras (and late 19th and early 20th century live theater) were primate-crazy. You couldn't throw a rock without hitting a film print containing an ape-runs-amok or a man-in-gorilla-suit-pretends-to-be-a-gorilla-to-commit-nefarious-deeds movie (or a theater putting on a primate-related play). I've reviewed at least six of the damn things just for this site. People went mad for monkey business back then.

The fad had mostly run its course by the mid-1930s, but it didn't die out completely. I reviewed 1939's The Gorilla (a tired vehicle for the Ritz Brothers directed by a too-good-for-the-material Allan Dwan) back in January, and I'm closing the year with The Ape. The Ape's director, William Nigh, also directed the 1934 ape-runs-amok movie The House of Mystery, reviewed on this site back in 2021. It's like the Hotel Ape-afornia up in this piece. You can watch other movies anytime you like, but you may never be entirely free of gorilla-suit flicks (guitar solo).

The Ape is not one of your cinema classics, but it has a couple things going for it: the story is a little more interesting than the typical primate fare and the movie is only an hour long. Your usual monkey-suit movie follows one of two plots: (A) a mad scientist has a gorilla or ape or chimpanzee or orangutan in a cage as either a pet or a subject of experimentation; the creature gets loose and creates pandemonium, havoc, and/or mayhem; or (B) a group of people are assembled in an old dark mansion in hopes of acquiring a fortune through inheritance, scavenger hunt, etc., but one of the party puts on an ape suit to scare the rest of them off or kill them and get all the loot.

The Ape gives the old primate formula a tweak by having the ape encounter a semi-mad scientist by chance due to previous circus mayhem, but I'll get back to that later. Dr. Bernard Adrian (Boris Karloff, in a mostly subdued performance) is a doctor and medical researcher in a small town. He moved to the town when a series of mysterious paralysis cases spread throughout the area. Dr. Adrian wasn't able to solve these cases, and he's been experimenting on animals ever since, with recent breakthroughs involving injections of spinal fluid curing two gerbils and a small dog. 

He's not popular in the town, with his only fans being the local pharmacist (a fellow man of science) and a patient who is about to be his first human guinea pig for the spinal fluid injections, Frances Clifford (Maris Wrixon). Frances is a young woman in a wheelchair hoping to walk again who admires and trusts Dr. Adrian, and her doting mother (Dorothy Vaughan) is also convinced the doc can help her daughter. Frances' mechanic boyfriend Gene (Danny Foster) is more skeptical, doesn't like that the treatment will be painful, and is not so sure about all this science stuff, but he's willing to take a chance because Frances is so committed.

Hey, guess what? The circus is in town. Gene takes Frances after getting some wheelchair assistance from Dr. Adrian, and the couple have a great time. Frances is inspired by the woman trapeze artist to dream of graceful movements in her own future. The circus employees are having a great old time of their own playing cards and chatting with some locals after the performance, except for one surly trainer (I. Stanford Jolley, who has a memorable character actor face) who is antagonizing the ape (a guy in a big-ass suit that looks more gorilla-ish than ape-like). He gets the business from the other trainer for mistreating the ape, but he says he will never stop being mean to the ape because the ape killed his father. The other trainer replies that the ape killed the man's father because the man was always mean to the ape. Like father, like son. You'll ape-reap what you ape-sow. This proves to be an almost immediate ape-prophecy because the asshole trainer gets too close to the cage and the ape chokes his ass out. He drops his cigar in some hay, and the circus equipment catches fire. The ape escapes and causes total pandemonium in the town.

The sheriff and several local businessmen who like to hang out at the drugstore talking nonsense form a posse to search for the ape after bringing the injured trainer to the doc's house for treatment. The trainer dies, but his clothing attracts the ape, who busts through a window and attacks Dr. Adrian. The doc gets the upper hand and kills the ape, but, instead of reporting it, he gets a great idea. He accidentally dropped and smashed the tube containing the last of Frances' injections, and his obsessive determination to cure the woman has made him go full-on bonkers. He decides to skin the dead ape and wear its fur and head at night, choking out locals and taking their spinal fluid to inject in Frances. It's a great plan, and I can't see any complications ensuing.

Will Dr. Adrian continue his altruistic reign of ape terror? Will the sheriff and his posse catch the doc? Will Frances walk again? Will Gene learn to stop worrying and trust science? Will a couple local jerks get their comeuppance? Why is Dr. Adrian's elderly housekeeper Jane (Gertrude Hoffman) so cool? These questions may be answered if you watch the second half hour of this hourlong ape epic.

The Ape is hardly a desert-island choice, but it's got some charm, a reasonable sense of humor, and some decent bits of supporting character detail usually absent from this kind of movie. It may also be the only primate-run-amok movie to feature as its titular antagonist an actual ape that then becomes a man in an ape suit. It's usually one or the other, but the doctor turns the ape into an ape suit, so you get both for the price of one. Wild, man. I don't really have anything else to say about The Ape. You know what you're getting into with ape fare. This one's for the ape-heads.