Exploiting our Archives: Assault With a Dead Weapon Case File #149/My Year of Flops II #46 Dead Heat (1988)
VHS is truly the only technology classy enough for a movie like Dead Heat
Tales from the Crypt is of course an enduring cult classic as a controversial comic book and iconic HBO anthology series but its legacy on film is less distinguished. William Gaines’ classic series of horror comic books inspired some solid British anthology series in the early 1970s and Tales from the Crypt got off to a strong start as an American film series with 1995’s rock-solid cinematic spin-off Demon Knight.
Tales from the Crypt’s subsequent foray into the world of feature filmmaking, Bordello of Blood failed to match its predecessors’ modest success with critics or audiences, essentially killing a potentially lucrative and entertaining franchise in its relative infancy.
You would think a movie entitled Tales from the Crypt Presents: Bordello of Blood would have to be, at the very least, a tiny bit awesome. I mean, c’mon: The Tales. The Crypt.The Bordello. The Blood. The Crypt-Keeper. What’s not to love? How can you possibly miss with a title and premise like that? Answer: you cast sentient smirk Dennis Miller in the lead role although Bordello of Blood had so little going for it that it would have bombed even with Tom Hanks heading up the cast.
Bordello of Blood did so badly that the third Tales from the Crypt feature film spin-off, a voodoo themed remake of I Walked With a Zombie called Ritual was released direct to video and a proposed Mardi Gras Tales from the Crypt movie to be titled Fat Tuesday or Dead Easy never got off the ground. The Frighteners, Peter Jackson’s American debut, was initially conceived as a Tales from the Crypt movie before producer Robert Zemeckis decided that it had too much breakout potential to be tethered to a television show, even one as beloved and prestigious yet trashy as Tales from the Crypt.
The 1988 zombie buddy dark comedy Dead Heat is not an official Tales from the Crypt production but it has so much in common with the TV series that it wouldn’t feel out of place if its full title was Tales from the Crypt Presents: Dead Heat and it opened with everyone’s favorite long-dead dispenser of punishing wordplay wisecracking up a storm.
Waste of a terrific tagline.
Dead Heat was written by Terry Black, who has two professional distinctions beyond being the man who gave the world Dead Heat. He is the brother of Shane, whose contributions to the mismatched buddy comedy genre, most notably in the form of his scripts for Lethal Weapon and Kiss Kiss Bang Bang, outstrip his brother’s somewhat.
Secondly, Terry is a Tales from the Crypt veteran with credits for “Dig That Cat…He’s Real Gone”, the show’s rightly venerated pilot, “Korman’s Kalamity” and “The Reluctant Vampire.” He even worked on Tales from the Crypt’s kiddie animated spin-off Tales from the Crypt-Keeper, which is not to be confused with its non-animated kiddie spin-off Secrets of the Crypt-Keeper’s Haunted House, a Double Dare-like game show for children. For a profane, hyper-violent festival of T&A and the very worst in human behavior, Tales from the Crypt absolutely kills with children.
Dead Heat star Treat Williams did fine work as a sociopathic seducer and killer of rich old women in the Michael J. Fox-directed standout episode “None But the Lonely Heart.” Reduced to its barest, sexiest outline, Dead Heat could be summed up as Tales from the Crypt Presents: Lethal Weapon.
“I’ve seen MEAT LOAF that looks better!”- (actual Joe Piscopo line from film)
Before Bright, Theodore Rex, A Gnome Named Gnorm, The Happytime Murders and Detective Pikachu, Dead Heat had the vision and audacity to ask, “What if you made a mismatched crime-fighter comedy but with a fantastical creature as one of the buddies, Lethal Weapon but with—get this—zombies!?!”
I, for one, was intrigued by that pitch. When you add, “And with Joe Piscopo also!”, however, my attitude goes from “tell me more” to “hard pass.”
Dead Heat has many fatal flaws. Joe Piscopo’s central presence is the most insurmountable and unforgivable. Rocking a power mullet and a fashion sense that can only be described as “Buttafucocore”—skin tight black tee shirt that lets the ladies know how hard he’d been hitting both the gym and the anabolic steroids, black leather jacket and tight black jeans—Piscopo is charmless and unfunny as a wacky, mugging comic sidekick who holds onto his eminently punch-worthy smirk and penchant for a groan-worthy one-liner no matter how many bodies pile up around him.
Piscopo’s shtick is exhausted and exhausting. You want someone to take his character aside and tell him to stop, just stop, for the sake of everyone, particularly himself.
When Piscopo is trying to be funny he’s painful, sucking all the oxygen out of the room with his dismal riffing. When he’s called upon to engage in heavyweight dramatics, however, he becomes unintentionally hilarious.
When Piscopo’s Lou Bigelow grimly contemplates his aptly, punningly named partner Roger Mortis’ (whose name is supposed to sound like Rigor Mortis and Roger Murtaugh, Danny Glover’s character in his brother’s script for Lethal Weapon) violent death in a decompression chamber for animals, expressing with palpable horror, “He died the way dogs are supposed to die” it’s not supposed to inspire the biggest belly laugh of the film but it does.
Similarly when the ripped and shredded Jersey jokester gets all metaphysical in regards to the curious new trend of dead people coming back to life and doing crimes and melodramatically inquires, “But what about the SOUL, Becky, what about the soul?” it’s hilarious precisely because it is so appallingly, unsuccessfully serious.
Dead Heat opens with Lou and Roger still alive but chasing death by ignoring the dreary dictates of protocol and the tedious demands of “due protocol” and pursuing the bad guys with a recklessness that promises to get somebody killed.
They’re renegades who play by their own rules. They’re unconventional, to put it mildly, but they get results. So even though their angry older black Captain delivers spittle-flecked, apoplectic speeches about how they’re out of control he can’t argue with success. In other words they’re cliches facing a formidable new criminal menace: smash and grab thugs who seemingly can’t be killed through conventional means because they’re already dead.
The partners figure out that these living dead goons originated from Dante Laboratories, a sinister corporation whose title made me wish Dead Heat was directed by the great Joe Dante and not the future editor of Chappie.
Mortis meets an unfortunate end in a decompression unit where animals are put down. But in the world of Dead Heat death is not the end. Heck, it barely slows you down. So Mortis is brought back to life through a resurrection machine and sets about solving the most important murder case of his career: his own.
Needless to say, every scene with Joe Piscopo in short sleeves takes place at the GUN SHOW!
Mortis isn’t quite the same after his miraculous comeback, however. From the moment the dead cop is brought back the clock is ticking. He’s got about twelve hours to crack the case and, if time allows, put his affairs in order and come to terms with mortality before he decomposes completely and his organs turned to mush.
In the cruelest twist of all, this poor, poor man is doomed to spend a good chunk of his final hours on earth enduring Joe Piscopo’s antics. No man should have to suffer such a fate, not even Bin Laden.
Mortis is, as you might imagined, more than a little bummed about both his recent and future deaths. Dying a violent death would be a big enough downer. But to die a violent, awful death, be unexpectedly resurrected, only to have to die a second, definitive death within a twenty-four hour period; that is one seriously shitty day.
Dead Heat lurches artlessly and joyless between violently conflicting tones. There is, first and foremost, a lazy reliance on the trite cliches and beats of the mismatched buddy cop genre. Then there’s the muddled existential melodrama of Williams’ heroic crime-fighter coming to terms with his own death and the randomness and cruelty of fate.
Not Treat Williams’ best look, TBH
Williams is a fine dramatic actor but even he can’t wring any genuine pathos and emotion out of an undead zombie cop needing to uncover a supernatural conspiracy before he turns into a puddle of bones and blood and viscera.
Dead Heat only works tonally when it aggressively attacks the same proudly pulpy, exquisitely vulgar intersection of gothic supernatural horror and ghoulish, pitch-black comedy as Tales from the Crypt, which would debut in 1989, a year after Dead Heat flopped, putting the final nail in Piscopo’s non-starting career as a leading man.
Other than the inventive, low-budget creature design the film’s only redeeming facet are amusingly hammy turns by genre greats Vincent Price and Night Stalker Darren McGavin as the bad guys, malevolent capitalists willing to help the fabulously well to do cheat death by very selling the ultimate luxury item: immortality.
Piscopo is such a hack that not even death can keep him from mechanically delivering canned one-liners.
Late in the film Bigelow is killed, mercifully. Sadly, it’s only temporary, as he’s resurrected by evil scientists and ordered to kill Mortis.
Who is that mustached man? Why character actor extraordinaire Robert Picardo, of course!
Bigelow is supposed to be so brain-dead that he can’t be reached but Roger Mortis references some of the shitty riffing he’s done over the course of the film and Piscopo is such a crazed narcissist that being reminded of his crap comedy is enough to bring him back to his senses.
Instead of killing his partner, the muscle-bound law enforcement officer kills the bad guys and immediately goes back to wisecracking despite having less than a day left on earth before he turns to ooze himself.
Did Piscopo’s generically sassy cop really transgress the once concrete and insurmountable boundary separating the living from the dead just so that he can say that if he gets reincarnated, he hopes it’s as a girl’s bicycle seat?
Roger Mortis just needs a little downtime to decompose—I mean deCOMPRESS!
Dead Heat is exactly the kind of movie that should be remade. It’s got a terrific, ghoulish, extremely commercial premise, particularly given our current mania for zombies and all things horror but the execution is abysmal.
Williams does what he can with an impossible role but he’s defeated by a dreadful script; his character is a stiff well before he actually becomes a stiff.
I suspect a dry, deadpan, even arty approach would suit this material best. Think What We Do in Shadows or Jim Jarmusch’s horror comedies. Dead Heat was one of the first credits of Robert Yeoman, a cinematographer who would go on to fame for his work with Wes Anderson.
Suffering through Dead Heat I found myself wondering what Dead Heat would feel like with Anderson in the director’s chair, an infinitely better script and Paul Rudd instead of Joe Piscopo. I’m guessing that theoretical version would be better than what we got but that’s setting the bar awfully low.
I was hoping Dead Heat would improve upon a second viewing, but this remains deadly in more ways than one, a DOA waste of a terrific conceit that feels like a Tales from the Crypt episode that lingers on for fifty minutes too long and was never any damn good in the first place.
Failure, Fiasco or Secret Success: Failure
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