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August's Horror Spotlight DVD is an 80's horror/comedy worth resurrecting in your ![]()
DVD player - Dead Heat. Read below for why Ryan Daley from Bloody-Disgusting.com thinks this witty cop and zombie movie is worthy of this month's pick, and pick up a copy of the DVD at 40% off all this month and have a movie night to decide for yourself. Enjoy! -- Lisanne
The buddy-cop movie tradition is rich with ingeniously cast police partnerships: Stallone and Russell, Gibson and Glover, Murphy and Nolte, Williams and Piscopo. Hold the phone, Williams and Piscopo?!? Yeah, you heard me. In Dead Heat, a long forgotten horror/comedy from 1988, Treat Williams and SNL’s Joe Piscopo banter incessantly as avidly witty cop partners investigating a string of zombie robberies.
Piscopo is Detective Doug Bigelow, a bug-eyed beefcake who, when he’s not lifting pumping iron or applying thick, lustrous coats of hair gel, loves to toss out randomly bizarre comments from beneath his shiny mullet curls (while strolling past a nun he inexplicably murmurs “Call me Thursday”). Seemingly riddled with Attention Deficit Disorder, Piscopo peppers his conversations with the kinds of spontaneous questions (“Hey, what’s this?”, “What’s in here?”) you might expect from a 4-year-old visiting the zoo for the first time. On the outside, Piscopo may come across like a jittery chunk of caffeine candy, but rest assured, he’s also a cop who cares. He develops a surprisingly easy chemistry with Detective Roger Mortis (Williams), his well-groomed, laid back partner. Not unexpectedly, they’re a couple of loose cannons who refuse to play by the rules, and now their badges and butts are on the line. Their enraged police captain gives them “one last chance”, charging them with the unenviable task of apprehending the dangerous Cash N’ Dash Gang.
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Opening with a jewelry store shoot out that’s about 50 times more harried and reckless than the bank heist centerpiece of Michael Mann’s Heat, the detectives of Dead Heat discover that the leather-masked robbers from the Cash N’ Dash Gang can’t be killed by mere bullets. Filling the air with shattered glass and gun smoke, the coppers empty their guns into the bad guys, but it appears they can only be killed by grenades or the crushing power of fast-moving sedans driven expertly by Treat Williams.
Once the bodies of the mutilated Cash ‘N Dash gangstas have been delivered to the morgue, smooth-talker Treat calls in a favor in order to find out the perp’s cause of death. The pathologist confides that the corpses were autopsied on a previous occasion…the detectives had been involved in a fire fight with dead bodies!
The insatiable detectives follow a set of clues to Dante Laboratories, a shady establishment conducting some even shadier subject testing. While in the lab battling it out with a triple-faced Viking gnome (!!!), Treat is locked in a decompression chamber and inadvertently killed. Utilizing the unethical methods on hand at Dante Laboratories, Piscopo unselfishly brings Treat back to life so he doesn’t have to work the case alone. The downside: Treat only has 12 hours before he starts to decompose altogether.
Featuring plenty of grimly amusing set pieces, Dead Heat succeeds primarily as “check your brain at the![]()
door” cinema. Working from a dumb-yet-amiable script by Terry Black (Shane’s brother), both Piscopo and Williams embrace their lead roles with infectious enthusiasm. Seeming to recognize Dead Heat as a once-in-a-lifetime opportunity to carry a major studio film, the actors breeze through the flick like a couple of old pros. Esteemed make-up veteran Steve Johnson (Blade II, Night of the Demons) provides some pleasingly sloppy gore effects. Even Vincent Price swings by for a negligible cameo appearance. Nobody is going to accuse this frequently silly movie of being the smartest kid on the block, but as far as brainless genre mash-ups go, you could certainly do a lot worse.
DVD Extras: Anchor Bay’s Divimax DVD is packed with a surprising amount of extras. Lacking only a making-of doc, the disc features a theatrical trailer, some deleted scenes, original storyboard art, a poster and still gallery, the original screenplay on DVD-ROM, and an audio commentary with the director, a couple of producers, and screenwriter Terry Black. -- Ryan Daley, Bloody-Disgusting.com
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