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.
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.
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