Dead Heat
The 80s if nothing else was a period where any idea that a screenwriter could come up with that was at least partially original would be treated with deference by somebody in the industry and usually get made even if a lower budget was assigned to it. This 1988 release seemed to be a surefire winner to many, an action / horror / comedy with the concept being what if a dedicated cop was killed in the line of duty only to be resurrected as a zombie so that he could continue tracking the bad guys responsible for his death? It certainly sounded good to some executives so that is how this one got made and with no less than Treat Williams (an extremely underrated actor who has given some good performances in some quality movies without ever really getting his due) in the starring role. Williams plays Detective Roger Mortis (a corny take on the term rigor mortis) who in many ways would seem to be your typical non conformist movie cop except that Williams underplays him to the point of almost seeming mild mannered despite him driving around in a gaudy red convertible and taking matters into his own hands in tense situations. One day when called to the scene of a jewel robbery and finding the suspects more than willing to open fire rather than drop their weapons, Williams and an entire army of his fellow cops pump more lead into these guys than was fired in The Iraq War, but they refuse to drop until Williams commandeers his Lieutenant’s vehicle (while leaving his own Convertible safely parked) and literally splatters them all over the road. After getting chewed out by his commanding officer, Williams goes to see his ex girlfriend who is also the coroner (Clare Kirkconnell) and she tells him the shocking truth: these two thugs are actually making their SECOND trip to the morgue, having apparently died once before, received an autopsy and then sent off for burial. She also tells Williams about a rare chemical that she found in the bodies for which tracking down the source is rather easy but once there Williams finds himself under fire and eventually winds up being killed. Fortunately, once his ex girlfriend arrives at the scene, it is discovered that the place also has a so called “Resurrection Machine” and with little to no resistance from either the cops or the employees at the company Williams’ body is placed on the power grid looking machine and brought back to life but the catch is that the resurrection will only last for about 12 hours before he starts to decompose completely so now that becomes the time limit for him to catch the bad guys and bring the whole thing down completely (although it is implied that the bad guys have the means to prolong the resurrection indefinitely and thus have eternal life). In the role of Williams’ supportive cop partner we get one Joe Piscopo, a virtual comedy god during his Saturday Night Live salad days who later became the butt of more has been and whatever happened to jokes than almost any faded celebrity in the history of entertainment but who at this juncture in the late 1980s still had enough name value to warrant starring in a movie of this level. Unfortunately, since Williams is playing his character straight and narrow that means that Piscopo is assigned the role of the constantly wisecracking sidekick who always comes up with all of the cool one liners and despite his very basic alpha male persona onscreen, most of the supposed funny bits that come out of his mouth are really not very funny at all although it is unknown if Piscopo’s lame dialogue was in the script to begin with or if he was actually allowed to ad lib on set. Nonetheless, with the knowledge that his partner is now an undead zombie (and whom unlike him can absorb multiple bullet hits without going down) they set out to crack the case starting with the public relations girl (Lindsay Frost) at the corporation where they found the machine (who of course claims at first that she doesn’t know anything) and then it’s on to a secluded Chinese butcher shop owned and operated by Professor Toru Tanaka and the legendary Keye Luke where Luke fires up his own machine to reanimate most of the dead and chopped up animals in his place (including a headless cow) to attack Williams and Piscopo and then finally finding the trail leading back to the ex girlfriend’s boss at the LA morgue played by Darren McGavin (a great actor by the way) who plays his pseudo mastermind villain just a tad too broad even by horror / comedy standards, always acting jovial (even if it’s a front) and when confronted with the evidence of his guilt acting as if Ralphie’s father got caught taking a bite from the turkey. There’s one other master villain (of sorts) on display here and that turns out to be none other than Vincent Price as the head of the corporation from which this whole thing started who had just recently died himself and had not only been successfully resurrected, but was still moving around pretty well after what appears to be several days without showing any real signs of decomposing. Price’s master plan (unlike McGavin who apparently was merely conducting experiments which explained the jewel heists and most of the other illegal activity) is to ensure that anyone who is rich and powerful enough to sit with him at his table need only give up half their fortune to him and he can guarantee them eternal life with no strings attached using both the machine and whatever other unexplained means available to prevent the decomposition process from taking place. The film has received some minor criticism from certain cult Vincent Price fans for supposedly reducing him to barely a cameo when the truth is that even though he doesn’t really come onscreen until nearly the end, he definitely makes the absolute most of his screentime, delivering a big, grand speech to a roomful of his fellow millionaires about such things like how only poor people should have to die and not ever come back while rich people can literally use their wealth to outsmart both God and Mother Nature to keep on living longer than anybody else. Considering what we’ve seen up to this point, it’s probably the best piece of acting in the entire film and pretty damn memorable considering it’s such a “minor role”. The real interesting thing storywise is in how at a certain point the film takes a complete left turn in terms of tone and becomes incredibly dark considering how goofy and lighthearted that it had been up to that point. Several major characters start getting killed almost indiscrimately (in a couple of cases offscreen) and the general attitude of the whole thing is that (at least in the case of this particular story) death itself is nothing more than just a joke or even a punchline. This becomes clear when Williams (who starts out by wearing women’s makeup to hide the signs of his decaying nature) emerges for the final showdown with not only a half deformed face, but also tricked out rock star hair and an all black outfit mostly on the idea that he already knows and has accepted that he will be dead for real in a very short time and that nothing is going to stop it anyway so he might as well go all out in his appearance and demeanor. The impression that one gets from this is that death is basically no big deal which explains why all of the major characters (good or evil) start dying themselves since we as viewers were never expected to become too attached to any of them anyway (and in Piscopo’s case that’s not too difficult) so as long as you like your comedy pitch black then you shouldn’t have too much trouble with the second half of the movie provided you get through Williams’ existential crisis scenes and Piscopo doing some really bad philosophizing to help his partner get through this. The film does boast some nice gore and makeup FX mostly from Steve Johnson with the Chinese butcher shop battle being the highlight but in the end the knowingly blasé attitude towards the concept of death which even saw screenwriter Terry (brother of Shane) Black approached to do a sequel by an executive, only for Black to tell the executive that all of his characters were dead so there was no reason to, a reply that really blew the executive’s mind considering the story’s use of a Resurrection Machine, only reinforces the idea that there was a limited audience for this material back then just as there is now, but for those who respect the career of Treat Williams (as I do) or find Joe Piscopo to be one of the funniest people on the planet, there might be some real entertainment value in giving this one a chance…
5/10