You probably know the drill by now. See, there is this evil genius of a scientist, Dr. Howell (Gary Day), who is working on a way of making people immortal by poking around in their brains. But his colleague Professor Tucker (David Weatherley) doesn't like his methods and threatens to be even less nice to him than he already is. Dr. Howell can't accept that, so he brainwashes Howell's son Michael (Michael Hurst) to kill his parents and the lamp on their nightstand.
Seven years later the good doctor has a private institute on a barely populated island. His experiments are progressing well. Sure, we never see anyone who is immortal, but that most of Howell's subjects end up as psychopathic mutants whose fashion sense is derived from watching Mad Max surely is worth something.
Unknown to Howell, Michael, now a peroxided thug who looks as if he belongs in the Hitler Youth, his even more thuggish friend Lucas (William Upjohn) and their girlfriends, visit the island. How much the others initially know of Michael's story and his plans for revenge is (of course) never made clear. As far as I could make out, not everyone knows everything and even Michael doesn't know what he is planning. Or something.
Soon our "heroes" meet said mutants, and much bloodshed, running around and screaming ensues.
After hours of fun, everyone but Michael and his girlfriend Sandy (Margaret Umbers) is dead. Finally, Michael is inexplicably struck by a power supply line. The end.
As my love of Italian exploitation movies proves, I don't have a problem with films that try to shovel every damn thing that comes to mind into their running time, disregarding puny things like sense, logic, or tradition. But a good Italian exploitation film works with these things and obtains a peculiar sense of wholeness and a style all of its own through it.
New Zealand's Death Warmed Up on the other hand, stops at throwing shovels full of shit at the wall (or the viewer). Director David Blyth seems to be afraid of connecting one scene of his film to the next. The second half would be incomprehensible if not for the fact that it consists only of (boring) gore and (not much more exciting) explosions. The many, many action scenes are filmed in a way that predates modern fast cut styles in its unwillingness to show anything that happens clearly. Oh, someone got something red ripped out by some guy we didn't see, but who must have been standing directly in front of him.
All this is my long-winded way of saying: Boring.
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