Dead Heat (1988)....... and we borrowed the title of this post from a line probably spoken by thousands upon thousands of video store clerks to customers everywhere in 1988......
A better title for this rambunctious cheeseball of a buddy-cop comedy might have been "Everyone Dies Hard!"
And by that, we do mean everyone.
Directed at a zippy clip by film editor Mark Goldblatt, "Dead Heat" served as a vivid of example of the obsession with 'high concept' screenplays that attempted to do a Frankenstein stitch job on two different genres...
In this case, it's "Lethal Weapon" meets "Night Of The Living Dead".
Treat Williams and former 'Saturday Night Live' player Joe Piscopo play the wisecracking buddy cops, rogue jokesters whose one liners sound copied from the "Buddy Cop Dialogue For Idiots" paperback.
The boys come across a gang of undead jewel robbers who can't be killed despite constant peppering with automatic weapons fire. This leads them to the sinister Dante corporation, where Treat, playing detective 'Roger Mortis' (yuk, yuk, yuk) ends up dead.......and then resurrected, Frankenstein-style, in the company's big sci-fi, snap-crackle-and-pop machine.
Bad luck for Treat, since his return to the prone position will only last 24 hours before he starts decomposing and collapses back into a pile of bony goo. So he and Joe have limited time to hunt down the masterminds behind all this raising of the dead.......
And wouldn't you know it.......who else would be behind all this but an aging Vincent Price, looking like he himself has one foot in the grave.......
Sounds like sick, dumb fun.......and it would be, except that it's not even a fraction as funny as it thinks it is. Screenwriter Terry Black piles up what seems like hundreds of terrible death gags, rapid-fired by Williams and Piscopo as if they think they're the cleverest quipsters who ever drew breath.....or didn't draw breath, heh, heh, heh.....sorry, we couldn't resist joining in.
To its credit, the movie does move as lightning fast as a movie like this should.......since you don't want to stop and think about what's going on it for more than half a second. And we did love the sequence where the Dante resurrection ray zaps a butcher shop full of duck and pig carcasses, reanimating them all into instant creepy monsters.
We'll follow the video-store clerks wise advice......and recommend this one only when you can't find "Die Hard" or "Lethal Weapon" on any of your streaming services......2 stars (**)
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