Customer Reviews

Dead Heat [VHS]

5 star:		(11)
4 star:		(11)
3 star:		(6)
2 star:		(1)
1 star:		(2)

 

 

Dead Heat kinda fell into obscurity right away, so I don't think it even reached cult film status. This is one of those that you may have caught late at night in the old glory days of HBO. It's not a horror film, it's more of your typical buddy action/comedy in the vein of Tango & Cash, but with a few horror elements thrown in. Zombies are roaming around robbing jewlery stores and causing other assorted mischief due to a new resurrection machine. The zombies are pretty much normal looking people who are a pain in the ass to kill. Some are a little yucky and decomposed too. Treat Williams and Joe Piscopo are the cops on the case. Naturally, Williams being the straight cop and Piscopo being the wisecracking tough guy cop. I've always liked Williams, and though his performance is nothing to shout about, I enjoy his presence. Piscopo is another story. In general I do like Piscopo, but his role in this film is I guess a real love it or hate it affair. The humor of the movie is almost all set on him, yet he is probably the unfunniest wisecracking cop I have ever seen in a movie. He has absolutely no delivery and the jokes seem forced and just plain bad. It's strange coz he is so not funny that it actually becomes kinda funny. Funny for reasons other than intended. Plus, he's supposed to be a big, buff badass, yet he's always saying stuff like, "Oh, that's gross!", "That's really disgusting", and "I think I'm gonna throw up". These aren't tough guy lines, and he comes off sounding like a wuss. Steve Johnson's fx are pretty good. We have a mean looking mutant biker guy, a disintegrating woman, and a Chinese restaurant full of reanimated ducks and pigs and stuff. Williams' half melted face in the last 10 minutes looks good too. Some cool appearances here too, including Darren McGavin, who you may remember as the leg lamp obsessed dad in A Christmas Story("Oh, you should see what it looks like from out here!"). Vincent Price has a small walk on part as well. The leading lady is quite flat and boring. All in all, Dead Heat may be a cheap action/comedy, but it obviously had more money invested in it than other films of this type. The fx are top notch and the film really doesn't look that cheap at all. This is no masterpiece for sure, but I must say that I really miss this kind of film, coz stuff like this just isn't made anymore. Enjoy.

This is the epitome of the type of movie Anchor Bay releases on DVD, crisp, clean, clear and celestial. Dead Heat is by far a cult movie that can be seen as both an action and horror movie. Our leads, LAPD detectives Roger Mortis (Treat Williams) and Doug Bigelow (Joe Piscopo) are investigating crimes, which are being committed by people who are deceased. When Roger is killed during the investigation, he is brought back to life, by the same element that is resurrecting these criminals, to solve the mystery.

The movie itself isn't suppose to be taken seriously, at least that is how I watched it. Joe Piscopo provides many one liners that are really funny, and one liners can be hard to pull off. Treat Williams also provides some dry and wry humor. It's cool that Vincent Price was in this movie, which gives it the official horror stamp of approval. There are plenty of dummies, fake blood, and cheesy effects to keep you going. It also has this buddy cop vibe to it, now it isn't Lethal Weapon or anything, but still a buddy cop movie. The sour cream on the taco is it was made in the 1980s! So if you love those late night cop movies and have a taste for things that are undead, you get them both in the same eighty-four minutes!

I saw this in the theater way back when and I thought it was hilarious so I went and saw it again. Treat Williams is a cop who dies and yet he lives on and decomposes throughout the film. Piscipoe is not funny normally - this is the only time you'll ever see him being funny. The film was not well received and I think it has somewhat of a cult following since only a handful of people actually liked it. Haven't seen it in ages so I don't know how well it would hold up. I remember it being really cool though. This is what 80's movies were all about... being really terrible with cheesey special effects, but entertaining as all hell. I won't buy it until it comes to DVD.

I had no idea this movie even existed until a few months before its release on DVD. I never saw it in theaters when it came out in 1988, and by the looks of its box office receipts I wasn't the only one that missed it (ahem). I was only 11 back then and it was an R-rated film after all, so there's my excuse. How it escaped my keen horror radar in the following 16 years is a complete mystery, however. You'd think that I would have caught it some late night on television or on video at least once in all those years, but DEAD HEAT proved as elusive for me as a successful movie career did to Joe Piscopo.

While Joe Piscopo may not have had a stellar career in movies, as soon as I found out that he was in DEAD HEAT and that the film is billed as half "buddy cop comedy" and half "zombie horror", that's all I needed to hear. I was sold. In a rare move for me, I bought the DVD without even having seen the movie. My instincts proved correct once again as I found out that zombies plus Joe Piscopo equals comedy gold! Actually, gold might be overstating it. Comedy silver? Maybe. At the very least, DEAD HEAT is pure comedy bronze!

It doesn't take long before it strays from your normal buddy cop formula in a big way. When Roger (Treat Williams) bites the big one in a doggie euthanasia room while fighting a hefty undead two-faced biker (don't ask me about the two faces, I don't get it either) and is resurrected shortly thereafter, it becomes a race against time as he and Doug (Joe Piscopo) try to find Roger's killer. Can they find his killer before his body decomposes and he turns into worm food? Can Doug keep from becoming a walking corpse himself? Who's behind this zombie crime wave? Did Joe Piscopo's career tank after SNL or what?

Piscopo's character Doug is a veritable one-liner factory, churning them out fast and furious. It's probably because we're too busy trying to absorb them all that the audience essentially ignores Treat's character, Roger. Joe Piscopo delivers the lines with ease, some being real gems and some are just plain bad. The bad ones don't linger too long because there are enough good ones to get you through. These one-line jokes make up essentially all of the comedy, and in that respect the script is a little weak.

Like a lot of horror movies, the special effects and makeup are almost a character in themselves. Dead Heat is no exception. I was highly impressed in the job that Steve Johnson (SPECIES) did. With no CGI, all the effects withstand the test of time, even after all these years. There's a particularly nice scene of a woman who fast-forward decomposes right before your eyes. Even better than the decomposition scene is the Chinese restaurant scene. In one of the most phenomenal scenes in all of movie history, you can see all manner of animal get resurrected and get very ornery. From a pig on a platter and a flying liver of unknown origin to, best of all, a completely skinned undead steer on the attack. It's so utterly ridiculous, it's brilliant, and I doubt anything quite like it will ever be seen again on celluloid.

Director Mark Goldblatt's vision for DEAD HEAT was for it to be a legitimate comedy/horror crossover. If you hold it up to that standard it definitely falls short, especially if you compare it to the 80s film that was the most successful at it, RETURN OF THE LIVING DEAD. Where ROTLD was funny, yet still very much a horror film, DEAD HEAT doesn't nearly compare. There's just no horror to speak of. All of the scenes that are supposed to scare just don't work very well. Zombies attacking with Uzis in broad daylight are more laughable than horrific. They would have been better served to just concentrate on the comedy.

Simply put, despite its shortcomings, DEAD HEAT is a fun piece of cheese that is distinctly 80s. Vincent Price has a small, but important role, and what his presence adds to a film you just can't quantify. This is one of his last films, and it's worth seeing almost for that fact alone.

This turkey movie star Treat Williams(Deep End of The Ocean) as a cop who gets killed and is brought back to life.This a buddy moive much like the "Lethal Weapon" movies, but it does not take itself too seriously.It not too scary and I would even think that by today's standards t would rated PG-13! If you like a turkey movie once in a while buy this one! Plus it does not cost as much as the other videos they have here! Face it guys,this video is bargain! Now go buy it and have some laughs while you watch it! Also starring is Vincent Price as the villian trying to take over the world!

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There's a certain offbeat awesomeness to this 1988 hybrid movie which just compels me to pop it in the player every few years. DEAD HEAT baffles straightforward attempts at genre pigeonholing. There's a bit of that buddy cop LETHAL WEAPON flavor going on, a bit of D.O.A., and some A NIGHT OF THE LIVING DEAD. And then it carries on with its own mad vibe. Joe Piscopo is Joe Piscopo, and that's not an endorsement. DEAD HEAT certainly won't win accolades in acting or screenplay or cinematography, but, damn, if there isn't something about it that keeps your eyes glued and keeps you wondering what kind of crazy is going to drop next.

Maverick LAPD detectives Roger Mortis (Treat Williams) and Doug Bigelow (Piscopo) look into a spate of armed robberies in the posh district, the twist being that these masked robbers prove to be really, really, really hard to kill. Because they're already dead. The investigation leads the detectives to a pharmaceutical firm where they get in a shoot-out with more really hard to kill weirdos (as Bigelow would later comment: "Remember the good old days when guns killed people?"). When Roger Mortis becomes a casualty, he's revived by a resurrection device and comes back without a heartbeat but with a sort of invulnerability. He has ten to twelve hours before his corpse dissolves into organic goo, time enough, he hopes, to catch his murderer.

I haven't seen too much of Treat Williams's cinematic stuff, but I've seen DEEP RISING and DEAD HEAT plenty of times, and dude is terrific in these two movies. His performance bolsters DEAD HEAT's oddball premise, exuding as he does this essence of understated cool. His character Det. Roger Mortis has always demonstrated a sense of reckless bravado, but it's fun watching him let loose and show even more disregard for personal safety the more he accepts his zombie state. I guess there's a certain release that comes with gross skin deterioration and an assortment of gashes and gory bullet wounds. In the final half hour, zombie Detective Mortis can't seem to help but smile and smile.

No brains were eaten in the making of this movie, but there's still ample gross-out moments for ghoulish-minded sorts like me. The out-of-left-field sensibility, that twist of the surreal, is never more palpable than in the frenetic and kinda sick butcher shop sequence, in which slaughtered meat come to life and jump on our characters. Somewhere, Sam Raimi is giving a fist pump. DEAD HEAT makes a half-hearted effort at a romance with not one, but two, hotties (Lindsay Frost is smoking hot), but it's really more about the weirdness and the horror and the tongue-in-cheek stuff and the undead cop getting his vengeance on even as bits of him get sliced at, shot off, burnt up, or rotted off.

The most charitable thing I can say about Saturday Night Live alum Joe Piscopo is that, as the muscle-bound, dim-witted cop partner, he's less annoying in this one than in other things he's been in. Meanwhile, old horror vets Vincent Price and Darren McGavin lend the picture a kind of dubious prestige. And, to apply the Kevin Bacon game on DEAD HEAT and LETHAL WEAPON, not only did Terry Black - brother of LETHAL WEAPON writer Shane Black - write the screenplay to DEAD HEAT, but Shane Black himself makes a cameo appearance as a patrol cop in DEAD HEAT. His scene coincides with my favorite line in the movie. Right before Shane shows up, a severely scorched Roger Mortis unzips himself from a body bag and starts pulling burnt pieces of his face off, at which point a paramedic cautions him: "Take it easy, mister. You're not well." (Heh.)

Even though this guilty pleasure was released in 1988, the special effects hold up well; the zombie make-up stil looks pretty decent. This DVD is the "Divimax Special Edition," and it's got okay bonus features, all things considered: an audio commentary with Director Mark Goldblatt, Producers David Helpern & Michael Meltzer, and Writer Terry Black; 8 deleted scenes, most of which merely expand on already existing scenes; the original electronic press kit, which is a brief behind-the-scenes look at the film; the theatrical trailer; MIFED Promo (which is sort of like a trailer); poster and still gallery; original storyboard art; and the original screenplay set in PDF format on DVD-ROM.

DEAD HEAT isn't going to wow you with its smarts or wit or deep character arcs or its big budget. And it certainly wallows in its share of 1980s cheesiness. But what DEAD HEAT is, is a fun train wreck. Treat Williams puts on a good show.

a unique blend of action and zombie movie from the ' 80 cult classic movies.
i highly recomand this one as one of my favorite movie as a kid.
lot of blood and gun fight. zombies with uzi fighting each other and trwoing grenades! how can you not love this?

Great movie. Had this on Video and wanted to upgrade to DVD. I wasn't able to obtain this in Australia and when I found it at Amazon I was thirlled

I saw this movie on cable tv back around 1990 or 1991 and kind of liked it. Then it just sort of disappeared. Four or five months ago (early summer 2002) I was looking at some DVDs at a flea market and, lo and behold, there it was ... all brand new and shrink-wrapped. I think I paid a whole [$] for the DVD. It was marketed by some off-the-wall video company, but surprise, surprise, the picture and sound quality are VERY good. I think it looks as good as it did on cable. Well, the movie is still not a classic or anything, but it probably is developing a following of sorts since it is so hard to come by. Sorry, but I can't help you to find a copy of it. The best I can do is to tell you to do what I did ... search carefully at your local flea market and keep your fingers crossed. Good luck.

This movie is terrific B-movie fun. Loved it the first time I saw it and every time since then. Highly recommended!