Death Warmed Up (1984)

(In French, On Cable TV, July 2020) It turns out that there was more than Peter Jackson making horror movies out of New Zealand back in the 1980s, but looking at Death Warmed up and comparing it to (say) Bad Taste, it’s obvious why Jackson became an international sensation and writer-director David Blyth didn’t. Working from a script that has two prologues and welds together a bunch of familiar splatter/slasher horror tropes without necessarily saying anything more interesting about them, he delivers a workmanlike horror film, a bit better than the norm at the time but still not quite good enough to be particularly memorable. Production values are on the low side, and the elements of the story aren’t handled with any kind of flair. A gratuitously mean ending causes little reaction, reflecting the lack of interest in the rest of the film. It’s interesting in that Death Warmed Up is clearly inspired by the American horror movie craze of the early 1980s while being just different enough to be distinctive, but it remains more a curio for horror fans looking to expand their knowledge of New Zealand cinema beyond the essential.