I have this poster with 1500 “must see” movies on it, and you can mark off the movies you’ve seen and enjoyed. As someone who considers himself a movie guy, I was somewhat surprised when I first got it to see I’d only seen about 600 or so of them. Since then, I’ve been trying to fill in the gaps and get most of them eventually filled in (there are a few I can safely say I will never watch), and I have become more interested in horror movies.

Point is, I found the 1988 zombie cop comedy Dead Heat on Shudder, and I also remembered both that it was on the poster and a classmate of mine spoke highly of it back when it was new (to the point of telling me the ending). I might as well check it out. It’s under 90 minutes, after all.

There’s a crime wave hitting Los Angeles when a lot of guys are robbing banks and jewelry stores, guys who can take a lot of bullets without going down. On the case are detectives Roger Mortis (Treat Williams) and his wiseass partner Doug Bigelow (Joe Piscopo), and they get a lead when Mortis’s love interest in the coroners office says some bodies on her slab have autopsy scars. Oh, and she performed the autopsies. A lead to a lab ends with Mortis dead, but a weird machine there manages to bring him back to life. Sure, he has no heartbeat and he doesn’t bleed when he’s cut, but he’s alive.

Of course, his body is decaying, and he’ll dissolve into sludge in 12 hours. He has until then to find his own killer.

That is, at least, a potentially intriguing premise. Williams, at least, is a charming actor, and the make-up job done on him as Mortis (get it?) decays is pretty good. Darren McGavin is there as a charming guy that everyone likes but he’s obviously a villain, and Vincent Price gives the movie what little gravitas it has. That said, this isn’t a very good movie.

Most of that is due to the fact that, as a comedy, it really isn’t all that funny. I do know that it’s hip to say Piscopo isn’t a funny guy, but regardless of whether or not you think Joe Piscopo is funny, he doesn’t really have anything funny to say. There just isn’t much to laugh at here. Much of what happens is rather rote and familiar. McGavin actually makes for a good villain especially since he really doesn’t act like one, such that when Piscopo’s Det. Bigelowe says he likes the guy, it’s easy enough to see why.

However, there was one clever scene. At one point, Mortis and Bigelowe follow a lead to a butcher shop. Said shop does have a resurrection machine in it, and once switched on, all the slabs of meat come to life to attack the protagonists, including a slab of beef walks out mooing despite a lack of a head or internal organs. Sadly, the rest of this rather mediocre movie never quite reaches that level of creativity again.

Now why was this on my poster?

Grade: C


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