Dead Heat (Mark Goldblatt, 1988)

Borrowing the premise of the 1950 noir film D.O.A., in which a fatally poisoned man has a limited amount of time to find his killer and the reasons for his murder before the poison takes effect, Dead Heat transplants it to the buddy cop, zombie horror, and smartass comedy genres and delivers an hour and twenty-four minutes of stupid '80s fun (depending on how much Joe Piscopo you can tolerate).

My introduction to Dead Heat was on a long weekend trip to Fort Collins, Colorado, to visit my uncle when I was ten. He had recently moved there, and the whole family crashed at his apartment for four days. My mother must have been in a relaxed mood, because she let me buy a Fangoria magazine at the mall without giving me any grief about the gore content. The cover story was about Dead Heat. In full horror mode, I also bought the soundtrack to The Return of the Living Dead on cassette on that mall excursion, which provided my first exposure to The Cramps, The Flesh Eaters, The Damned, and Roky Erickson. A formative childhood experience, for sure.

In between seeing the Colorado sights, I devoured that issue of Fangoria and became insanely pumped about Dead Heat. "This looks like it will be one of the greatest movies ever," I thought to myself. I was very wrong about that, but when it finally showed up at the video store in my hometown a year later, I rented it and watched it roughly four times in the two-day rental window that was the style of the time before five-day rentals became the norm. I loved it, and why shouldn't I have loved it? It was practically designed in a lab for ten- and eleven-year-old boys alive and undead in the late 1980s.

Dead Heat opens with a bang as a couple of beefy meatheads in leather masks rob a downtown Los Angeles jewelry store in broad daylight. An employee is able to push the silent alarm mid-robbery. Undercover detective odd couple Roger Mortis (Treat Williams) and Doug Bigelow (Joe Piscopo) ("honey, we have Riggs and Murtaugh at home") take the call and join the multitude of cops who are already on scene. The masked meatheads start blasting, and the cops and detectives blast back. The robbers take several bullets and keep on blasting. No one knows why these clowns won't die. They're finally subdued when one meathead accidentally explodes himself with a grenade and Mortis slams a car at full speed into the other one. This is how you open a movie.

Police Captain Mayberry (Mel Stewart) gives our boys the business. He may have to get their guns and their badges if they screw up one more time, but he reluctantly admits they get results, damn it. I'm glad the filmmakers found space to include a scene like this. It wouldn't be a buddy cop movie without it. That's like a BLT without the B, my friends. After the tongue-lashing, the captain instructs Roger and Doug to hit the streets and find out who's behind the crazy robbery, which is part of a whole string of crazy robberies where the always-different perpetrators nevertheless seem to be impervious to bullets.

The trail of clues begins at the coroner's autopsy of the perpetrators, performed by Roger's on-again off-again ex Rebecca Smythers (Claire Kirkconnell), and eventually leads the fellas to a pharmaceutical testing company, where they interview the company's PR person Randi James (Lindsay Frost, star of the 1992 TV movie Calendar Girl, Cop, Killer? The Bambi Bembenek Story). She gives them a tour of the facilities, tells them about the animal testing research, shows them the decompression room where they kill injured animals after testing, and stops them from entering a locked room where she says they dispose of toxic waste.

Hey, yo, you think that's gonna stop Piscopo? He breaks into the room and finds a weird, sci-fi contraption used for bringing dead people back to life. There's even the body of a big-ass biker dude in the contraption. After Doug moves the sheet covering the body, it springs to life and starts attacking everything in its path. For reasons never explained, the biker zombie has three eyes and two noses. Forget it, Jake. It's Pharmaceutical Town. These Dead Heat filmmakers do what they want. They don't give a damn about the usual amount of eyes and noses.

In the course of the melee, Roger gets locked in the compression room and dies. (Roger Mortis, get it?) Doug and Rebecca bring him back to life with the crazy machine, which Rebecca somehow knows how to operate even though that's her first time seeing it. Back in action but sans heartbeat, Doug has 12 hours to find his killers before his reanimated body fully decomposes. The zany, madcap, but existentially upsetting day includes encounters with Rebecca's boss Dr. Ernest McNab (Darren McGavin), a multi-millionaire who may or may not be dead named Arthur P. Loudermilk (Vincent Price), a restaurant owner/gangster named Mr. Thule (Keye Luke) and his butcher (pro wrestler Professor Toru Tanaka), police lieutenant Herzog (Robert Picardo), a newscaster played by MTV VJ Martha Quinn, a patrolman played by Lethal Weapon screenwriter Shane Black (whose older brother Terry wrote this movie) (semi-fun fact: I drove Shane Black's much younger girlfriend to and from the airport when I worked as a volunteer driver for the Austin Film Festival a dozen years ago), a shitload of zombies, the skull of a melting woman that keeps talking even after its vocal cords are gone, and reanimated animal carcasses at a Chinese restaurant, including ducks, pigs, and a huge side of beef. Linnea Quigley supposedly plays one of the zombies, but I think her scene got cut. Don't cut Linnea Quigley from your film, you fools!

This is solidly entertaining dumb fun, and the action scenes have real pizzazz, but it's hardly the near-masterpiece my eleven-year-old brain imagined. Piscopo's constant frat-douche one-liners are consistently unfunny (so much so that they almost become funny in a performance art kind of way), but whenever straight man (albeit a slowly decomposing straight man) Treat Williams gets to launch a zinger, he sells the fuck out of it. RIP Treat.

The directorial debut of film editor Mark Goldblatt, Dead Heat was the start of a short filmmaking career that also included the Dolph Lundgren Punisher movie and an episode of Eerie, Indiana. His work as an editor is much more extensive, and his resumé includes Piranha, Humanoids from the Deep, The Howling, Enter the Ninja, Halloween II, The Terminator and Terminator 2: Judgment Day, Rambo: First Blood Part II, Commando, Jumpin' Jack Flash, Nightbreed, Predator 2, The Last Boy Scout (another Shane Black screenplay), Super Mario Bros., True Lies, Showgirls, Starship Troopers, Armageddon, Hollow Man, Bad Boys II, Rise of the Planet of the Apes, and Chappie. Never forget Chappie.

 

Deadtime Stories (Jeffrey Delman, 1986)

Deadtime Stories is a low-budget horror-comedy anthology that's only intermittently funny, not too scary, and pretty damn stupid, but its goofy charm won me over. In spite of myself, I had a good time with it. It's silly, silly stuff, but it knows that and runs with it. I can't really recommend it to anyone but '80s horror completists and people who are able to tap into their inner 13-year-olds, but that's most of us, right?

The anthology's connecting story/conceit is about pervy, beer-swilling Uncle Mike, who's stuck babysitting his nephew, Little Brian. Uncle Mike is trying to pound some beers, eat some chips, and watch the Miss Nude Bayonne contest on cable TV, but Brian keeps waking up and demanding bedtime stories. This kid sucks, though kudos to actor Brian DePersia for playing the part like a regular kid instead of giving one of those cloying child-actor performances. We then see the age-inappropriate stories Uncle Mike freestyles/adapts from fairytales for his nephew. The first one is an original tale of witchcraft and human sacrifice, and the second and third are loose adaptations of "Little Red Riding Hood" and "Goldilocks and the Three Bears."

Each of the three stories has a different tone and feel. The first has a children's fairy tale vibe (except for the gore effects and sexual content) despite being the only story not adapted from a fairy tale, the second takes a more traditional horror movie approach, and the third is a cartoonishly violent gross-out comedy in the Troma vein. I found something to enjoy in each one, as well as at least one scene that made me ask myself why the hell I was still watching.

Fortunately, Ed French handled the special effects. The narrative sometimes fails, the seams of the low budget sometimes show, but the big effects sequences are all well done, with French delivering the over-the-top goods. French's list of credits in both mainstream and independent filmmaking are lengthy and impressive, but my personal favorite is the time he got to decapitate himself in bonkers Thanksgiving-themed underground classic Blood Rage (starring Louise Lasser!!) when he pulled double duty as actor and special effects guy. Sir Ben Kingsley could never.

The first segment stars Family Ties' Scott Valentine as Peter, the slave of a couple of witch sisters named Hanagohl and Florinda. He assists the witches with spell recipes and manual labor, but he starts getting bummed out after procuring a human sacrifice and learning there will be even more murders as part of a plot to find and reanimate the third witch sister, Magoga. When the attractive and charming Miranda is the next sacrifice target, Peter starts hatching a secret plan of his own. This is the cheapest-looking and least initially satisfying of the stories, and at moments, I felt like I was watching a boring kid's show or a small-town community theater performance. I generally love witch horror, but when it gets a little too bubble bubble toil and trouble, I check out. I like the sexy witches, the folk-horror witches, the terrifying witches, and the mysterious witches, but the hag witches making potions and/or the broomstick witches are for the kids. I'm a sophisticated adult who needs suitable witches for a gentleman of my age and discriminating taste. The witch story picks up when Magoga enters the picture, and Ed French saves the day with a pretty awesome transformation effect. It gets silly again after that, but it's a bit more fun.

The second story, a spin on the Little Red Riding Hood tale, has more grit and visual texture and is the closest to then-contemporary horror. Sexy 26-year-old high school senior Rachel (Nicole Picard) has the slowest and strangest sexual fantasy in front of a mirror in her bedroom (why are you telling this story to your little nephew, Uncle Mike?) until her mother tells her she needs to pick up her grandmother's prescription from the pharmacy. She puts on her red tracksuit and jogs down there, where she encounters fellow customer Willie (Matt Mitler, veteran of such cult films as The Mutilator, Breeders, and Basket Case 2). Willie is a leering hoodlum with a drug habit, and the shady pharmacist accidentally swaps his "prescription" package with Rachel's grandmother's legit prescription. Willie goes to grandma's house to get his narcotics, Grannie gives him the business, and he turns into a damn werewolf. Meanwhile, Rachel takes a detour on her way to Grannie's to lose her virginity to her dweeb boyfriend on an air mattress in a tool shed before finally getting some werewolf action of her own. This is pretty standard '80s horror fare, but the wolf effects are cool, the red tracksuit really pops onscreen, and the locations have excellent horror movie atmosphere.

The third story is weird, weird stuff, with an early role for Melissa Leo, who would go on to much greater success. The Baer family (pronounced "bear," get it?) are locked up in an insane asylum for their many violent crimes. Mama Baer (Leo) gets her hands on a car while Papa Baer (Kevin Hannon) and their dimwitted son Baby Baer (Timothy Rule) get a gun. Even though Melissa Leo and Kevin Hannon were in their twenties in 1986, they were cast as the middle-aged Baers, complete with bad wigs. The Baers bust out of the asylum after overpowering a security guard played by Rondell Sheridan, a comedian who would later star on the sitcom That's So Raven. I'm sure you're all huge That's So Raven fans.

While the Baers were locked up, another escaped lunatic, Goldi Lox (Cathryn de Prume), has been squatting in their abandoned, dilapidated house along with the dead bodies of dozens of former boyfriends who tried to get too handsy with her and had to be murdered. Goldi Lox is a homicidal maniac who also has telekinetic powers, for some reason, and when the Baers arrive in their old homestead and find Goldi Lox in the shower after an extended breast-rubbing shower scene, they decide to let her stay and join the family. They go out for pizza because the porridge is too cold, and mayhem ensues. Only about one joke out of ten lands in this last story, but the whole thing is so weird and so stupid that I had no choice but to be entertained. I especially liked the answer the chief detective gives when a reporter asks him his strategy about how to handle Goldi Lox's murder spree: "Well, we plan to arrest her and of course put her in jail. That oughtta do it."

Deadtime Stories is far from an essential classic, but it's reasonably well made despite its first-time director and bare-bones budget, the special effects are good, and the interior settings have a personalized, lived-in feel. This is not exactly a "good" movie, but I had a good time with most of it, even the ultra-cheesy musical score.