Dead Heat

    Fun fact: this was the third to last movie Vincent Price appeared in before ‘Edward Scissorhands’ and … ‘Catchfire?’ Starring Dennis Hopper, Jodie Foster, Dean Stockwell, Joe Pesci, John Turturro, Charlie Sheen, Catherine Keener, and Fred Ward? The fuck? How bad must that movie be to be so completely forgotten? That’s going on a list.

    Anywho, ‘Dead Heat.’ It’s basically a dumbed-down variation on ‘D.O.A.’ with zombies, right down to a moment where a character catches a scene from it on a television.

    It opens with a couple of thugs busting into a jewelry store in broad daylight and stuffing pillow cases full of loot. Within just these few quick scenes it’s clear we’re not getting award-winning directing and cinematography here, it’s all closeups pushed too far in and basic coverage of scenes. We cut away to our two heroes: Treat Williams as Roger Mortis (which, woof) and Joe Piscopo as Doug Bigelow, driving through Hollywood. They trade dialogue tired even in 1988 before getting a call about the robbery. They peel out towards the scene and meet up with a lieutenant played by Robert Picardo in just the cutest little mustache. Picardo is great in everything. Cops line the street, guns ready to take out the robbers as they come out.

    The robbers leave the store and a shoot out ensues. Around ten or so cops are taken out and the robbers take gunshot after gunshot without going down. Eventually one blows himself up by mistake with a grenade and the other is mowed down by Treat Williams in the lieutenant’s car.

    Now there are already two big problems here. The first is that the robbers are dead, former criminals brought back to life and sent out to rob stores, and it’s never really made clear why they’re robbing the stores since the masterminds behind the resurrections are already rich. Also the criminals have around ten hours or so before they dissolve into organic goo, so why are they wasting what time they have left? Now maybe the criminals were lied to about how much time they had or were told they had to rob the stores and bring back to the loot so they’d get a fictional cure for the goopification but that doesn’t answer why rich people need jewelry stores robbed or why the thugs wouldd do it in the middle of the day where they would be at best severely inconvenienced, able to be killed or not. The second is that even blown up or mowed down by cars these criminals are functionally zombies, as shown in later scenes this would not be enough to kill them. They wouldn’t be very useful but the bits and pieces should still thrash around and the one crumpled by the car would still be able to crawl around a bit.

    But moving on, the detectives have a scene with Da Chief where he yells at them (he is never seen again) and then meet with the coroner who, while telling them these dead men had already had autopsies she and Treat Williams bicker over the breakup of their relationship (this does kind of come up again) and Darren McGavin (Kolchak!) wanders through and takes up enough screen time that you know he’s secretly the bad guy.

    They investigate a strange chemical picked up during the latest autopsies and head over to a local company who just bought a large quantity of the materials. They meet up with the head of PR who proceeds to give them a tour. While poking around Joe Piscopo manages to short circuit one easily-accessible door which opens directly onto the very-obvious resurrection machine upon which lies a double-faced undead monstrosity which immediately attacks. The monster is never addressed or explained after this scene.

Ok, fine, that looks kinda neat.

    During the fight Treat Williams dies. Cut to the forensics and the police milling around the lobby starting a no-doubt thorough investigation that immediately shuts down the company and immediately discovers the resurrection technology. No, no, just kidding, outside of our heroes and the coroner this is never mentioned again and the larger police force play no role in the events of the rest of the movie.

    After the coroner shows up she immediately decides to bring Treat Williams back to life, which she does. Joe Piscopo is fine with this. Darren McGavin wanders through to remind you he’s the bad guy. The very next scene the coroner informs them Treat has about 10 hours left before he dissolves. He vows to nail the people who did this to him.

    He and Piscopo immediately drive to the home of the PR rep, because that’s how you investigate technological conspiracies. Spoiler: you find out about twenty-five minutes from the end of the movie that she’s dead too and on the same kind of timer Treat Williams is on. None of her actions in the entire movie give a hint of this fact. After some visibly decaying but clearly still capable of conscious thought zombies attack them she agrees to help and mentions she dropped off a supply of that mystery chemical at a storefront in China Town.

    We now come to this movie’s first interesting scene 41 minutes in. They walk into a Chinese butcher shop, talk to the owner played by Keye Luk (you know who he is) who touches a secret button and a small version of the resurrection machine sparks on the ceiling and the content of the store are brought to quasi-life. This is what established that even bits of bodies come back to life, not that it’s ever mentioned again outside of this scene. It’s mostly puppets and actors ‘fighting’ them through close-ups and inexplicably being unable to disentangle themselves but there’s a scene where a skinless, headless cow carcass smashes out of a freezer and shamble towards our heroes that’s genuinely unsettling.

That's the stuff.

    The second interesting scene makes absolutely no sense in the context of the rest of the movie but in and of itself it’s pretty good. After trips to the library and then the cemetery that are basically pointless (and of course directly contradict information we receive about character motivation later in the movie) we arrive back at the PR rep’s house. They find Joe Piscopo dead in a needlessly complicated manner. Remember earlier when I said the PR rep is dead and on a timer? Treat Williams has been slowly losing color and looking more and more zombie-like over the course of the movie. She has not. She double downs on this inconsistency by using her last few minutes at undeath to take a shower and then gaze forlornly at nothing in a towel, waiting for Treat Williams to wander into the bathroom. He does and a pretty good portion of the budget must have gone into her subsequent dissolving because it’s not bad. It’s ruined by her head falling off, dissolving into a skull, and then having her say her last words, but you can’t have everything.

 

You've ... you've got a little right ....

    The last interesting scene is at the very end. After Darren McGavin is revealed to the be bad guy (gasp!) he locks Treat into an ambulance to dissolve (oh, and the coroner is dead in there too, in retrospect why waste character development?), he jimmies the emergency brake and crashes it, emerges half-burned and super corpse-like, and takes off for the corporate office which, again, was allowed to continue its evil ways.

    The interesting part is when Darrin McGavin starts giving a speech in front of the resurrection machine to a gathering of the elderly rich, starting into a sales pitch for immortality, only to stop and reveal a previously dead Vincent Price who gives a very on-the-nose speech to his fellow wealthies about how death should only by the for the poor, they’re rich, why can’t they just buy off death? It’s not a great speech but Vincent Price is a great actor and sells the hell out of it.

    There’s a nugget of something there, as well as the obvious fact that if there was an immortality machine they would test it on disposable subjects before selling it to the fabulously wealthy (looking at you, Peter Thiel). This is hardly original to this movie but Vincent Price is so gleeful about it. The speech is fine but there is a great section: “Poor people are supposed to die, but the same rule doesn’t apply to us, we’re rich! God wants us to live forever! And even if he doesn’t we can always buy him off.” The rest of the movie is a stupid cop plot bolted to this one interesting idea.

    So Treat busts in and shoots up the place, Joe Piscopo is Brought Back Wrong so they fight briefly before teaming up and taking out Darren McGavin by zapping him with the immortality machine until he asplodes. and Vincent Price lives for whatever reason. Maybe they respected him too much to attach the squibs.

    Our hero corpses have a few more unfunny lines then walk into a sudden mist that is I guess the afterlife, the end.

    This is what we used to refer to as a USA afternoon movie, what would now be a TNT weekend movie I guess except much more low rent. That bathroom scene is the reason this thing stuck in my head at all, that was some good corpse dissolving. Unlike something like ‘Split Second,’ though, I can’t really recommend it unless you’ve honestly watched all the other 80’s B-movies and have somehow missed this one. The plot is stupid, the acting doesn’t rise past acceptable, there are three scenes of worthwhile special effects, and you have to put up with Joe Piscopo.