October Edition #26: DEAD HEAT

Director: Mark Goldblatt
Screenplay: Terry Black
Starring: Treat Williams, Joe Piscopo, Lindsay Frost, Darren McGavin, Vincent Price
Release Date: 1988


Los Angeles Detectives Roger Mortis (Williams) and Doug Bigelow (Piscopo) are hot on the case of  a series of robberies committed in broad daylight by criminals who are unusually hard to kill. You can keep pumping bullets into them all day long, but blowing them up seems to be the only thing that takes them down. Once the remains are taken to the city morgue, the coroner makes a gruesome discovery -  these guys have already been through the morgue before, and have got the autopsy scars to prove it. After detecting a chemical called sulfathiazole in the criminals’ blood, the detectives are able to trace the drug to the nearby Dante Pharmaceuticals, where Bigelow is attacked by an obese triple-faced mutant biker demon. In the ensuing battle Mortis is accidentally locked in the company’s “Asphyxiation Room” effectively rendering him dead as disco. Fortunately Bigelow discovers a hidden room containing a machine that can reanimate dead flesh and before you know it Mortis is back in business and feeling better than ever. There’s just one small catch. He has no heartbeat, and has only twelve hours to solve the mystery of who murdered him before his entire body decomposes into a puddle of protoplasmic ooze.

Detectives Bigelow and Mortis examine the remains of Joe Piscopo's film career.

The combination of the jacket, the mullet, the "Whole Piscopo", threatens to make this zombie hurl.

And so they spend the rest of the movie on the trail of Mortis' killers, running down a checklist of every buddy cop movie cliché along the way. Mortis and Bigelow are of course your typical loose-cannon insubordinates, who begin the film getting a proper dressing down from the chief of police, even though they did just save everybody’s ass during a massive shoot-out outside of a jewelry store. Written by Terry Black, the brother of LETHAL WEAPON scribe Shane Black, DEAD HEAT seems to take more than a few pages from that film’s playbook, with a nice dash of gruesome horror thrown into the mix. Here Treat Williams assumes the straight-man “Murtaugh” role, and Joe Piscopo is …. well, just Joe Piscopo, unfortunately, a setback that effectively knee-caps any  chance this movie had of ever working as a horror/comedy. Piscopo, clad in a tacky leather jacket with way too small shirt, sweating steroids from every meaty pore and sporting the worst mullet this side Kevin Dillon in THE BLOB (1988), his character is a total miscalculation on every level. There isn’t a single second he’s onscreen that isn’t spent mugging for the camera, and every word he utters is the worst kind of groan-inducing one-liner. He isn’t funny, likeable, or at all pleasant to look at, resembling some kind of ‘roided out ape who was somehow allowed onto a movie set.

...and that's how Zordon was created, children.

But other than that, the movie has a few good things going for it, namely the absolutely awesome special make-up effects by Steve Johnson. By this point in the 80’s Johnson had worked on some of the biggest effects pictures of the decade, including AN AMERICAN WEREWOLF IN LONDON, GHOSTBUSTERS, FRIGHT NIGHT, and A NIGHTMARE ON ELM STREET PART 4, so with the experience of those classics under his belt he totally brought his A-game to this picture, delivering a slew of desiccated corpses, full-body meltdowns, and gratuitous head trauma. The movie’s biggest set piece takes place in a Chinese butcher shop in which all of the dead animal parts are reanimated and attack the two detectives, including various chicken parts, ducks, a stuffed pig and, most impressive of all, a hollowed-out bull carcass that rears up on its hind quarters and attempts to engulf Mortis. I have definitely never seen anything like that in a movie before, so I’ve gotta credit the filmmakers for creativity.

Dana Carvey has really let himself go!

The director is first-timer Mark Goldblatt, a seasoned editor of some of the decades biggest action blockbusters, including THE TERMINATOR and FIRST BLOOD, and who would later go on to direct the first PUNISHER movie starring Dolph Lundren. He does a decent enough job here, staging an impressive gun battle in the opening scene, but it’s pretty apparent that when it came to the performances he pretty much let the actors do whatever they wanted, which is fine for a pro like Treat Williams, but someone needed to rein Piscopo in and let him know when to shut the fuck up. Better yet, someone needed to just not cast him in the first place.

Fortunately for Vincent Price, he got to be in EDWARD SCISSORHANDS after this. No one wants to end their career with a Joe Piscopo vehicle.

Terry Black’s screenplay probably seemed like a great idea on paper, but in practice the tone is wildly uneven. It’s no good at being a comedy, and the horror aspects are so horrific as to render the film a depressing mess. The sole bright spot comes in the form of two cameo appearances from veteran genre stars Darren McGavin and Vincent Price. McGavin brings the same “aw, shucks” likeability he did to Carl Kolchak in THE NIGHT STALKER, and Vincent Price, well, all he needs to do is be Vincent Price and I’m a happy customer.

Now if the guy on the right would just point his gun at himself, then we'd have ourselves a pretty good movie.

I don’t know about this one. It wasn’t nearly as awful as I’d always heard, with a neat premise, some badass practical make-up effects and a few decent action scenes. Unfortunately someone dropped a putrid pile of pig shit named Joe Piscopo onto the production, which is too bad because this could have been a fun little cult movie. As it is, I’ve gotta give it a solid meh.

My Rating:
5/10

Or

Which mullet is the greater atrocity? You decide.