Holy Hell! Who would of thought that a movie with Treat Williams and Joe Piscopo was something I never knew that I truly wanted. It’s the ultimate buddy duo horror, action, comedy movie that I never realized existed until Netflix recommend that I check this out cause apparently I was watching a lot of bad movies and this is right up there with it. Don’t get me wrong, this is a bad movie, but shit man I loved watching this terrible movie about a cop named Roger Mortis, basically stopping undead criminals by becoming undead himself. Oh yeah, Roger Mortis, Rigor mortis, fucking awesome.
Roger Mortis and Doug Bigelow are cops that are chasing crooks that are dead serious about crime. Or should I say they are chasing dead crooks perpetrating serious crimes? Seems some nutcase has learned how to bring back the dead and is sending them on crime sprees. Now these indestructable goons are in the way of officers Mortis and Bigelow. To even things up, when Mortis is killed (in the line of duty, of course) he gets a jump start from the Resurrection machine and takes the fight to the zombie bad guys.
I love the 80s, like a lot, since they have given me a general wealth of bad movies in which I can write about with a sort of glee that only teens have when they find out about using the internet and finding all the porn they can handle. Dead Heat is a total Treat Williams movie, not to say he is relegated with doing movies like this cause he is Treat Williams, but in that Treat Williams would so want to do a movie like this. A buddy cop, action film that has both Williams and Piscopo battling a roving gang of zombie criminals, only to have to even the playing field by having Roger Mortis become a zombie.
It’s a dumb movie, with the sort of acting that you come to expect from Treat Williams and I guess Piscopo. I will still remember him for his time on SNL, but other than that, he played a sort of meat-headish character. The acting might be meh, but damn if this movie isn’t endearing. I loved watching the action scenes and the occasional quip from the two actors and frankly, they seemed to work really well together in a disjointed way. The comedy comes in the form of more slapsticky, cheesy one-liners, which are about as frequent as gunfire. The zombies are uninspired, but there are some moments of brilliance such as the mirror scene with Treat.
Dead Heat is surely a relic of its time. Much like when a talked about Traxx, which still fucking rules, Dead Heat is just a weird product of the 80s that is more cheesy than anything else. There is plenty of action, some zombie fighting and lame quips that kind of grow on you in a b-movie sort of way. I guess if you are a big Treat Williams fan, like I am, you got to at least check this out in some way. It’s there on Netflix, waiting to be watched while you knock back a few brews. Certainly not a genre defining movie, but it at least manages to be entertaining in a bad/good way.
