IHAO on ... Dead Heat

Have you ever wanted to watch a gross-out zombie film, but it never has enough buddy comedy in it?  Have you ever wanted to watch a gritty 80s cop action film, but it just doesn't give you enough Evil Dead nightmares?  Have you ever said "I really like Treat Williams, but I wish there was a movie that paired him with a Saturday Night Live alumni most people never knew existed"?  Dead Heat is just the perfect movie for you!

This movie starts as one genre, 80s buddy cop action film, including angry black boss cop guy threatening to take away their badges.  It is hilarious, not in "this movie is funny" way, but in a nanar kind of way.  Treat Williams, man of a bunch of very very low-grade action films, and Joe Piscopo, a man I quite literally never knew even possibly existed and thought was just a guy related to Lou Ferrigno.  The jokes are terrible, the sets are ridiculously cardboard looking, but the gun fight is ridiculous and entertaining enough.

Wait for it ... 

Then they go and fight a three-faced biker zombie and Treat Williams dies in an asphyxiation room.  And he is then brought back to life with the Resurrection Machine that made three-face zombie, but he's going to deteriorate in 12 hours if they don't solve the case.  Oh, and the love interest is replaced with another love interest, but the new love interest turns out to be a zombie, too, and she dissolves into nothing in a gross display of awesome, and the original love interest gets all kinds of murdered by the bad guys.

Worth the wait, wasn't it?!

This movie is nuts.  I didn't even talk about the absolute best, most disgusting, most nightmare fuel zombie scene I've ever seen in buddy cop film.  And then on top of that, on top of all the ridiculous, there actually is some pretty decent acting going on from Treat Williams.  Only him.  Well, him and Vincent Price, but he's just in a cameo.

The movie isn't terrible, not really.  Ok, yeah, it is.  It really is.  Cheesy and terrible and lucky it is shot on location most of the time because other than the one set, all the built sets look like poo.  It is just ridiculous beyond all reason.  It isn't QUITE bad enough for me to willingly call it nanar, but it can definitely scratch that same itch.  There is so much I want to just share and tell you about this movie, but I'm actually very surprised to find very few people have heard about it or talk about.  Even the reviewers I follow that specialize in just this kind of crazy ridiculousness, no one has touched on it.  So hey, it was crazy fun, absolutely ridiculous, and needs to be watched.  Even if the quality isn't actually all that high.

Grade: D++