My favourite accounts on instagram, TV Hed Pde and VCR Of Death, have been independently shown one clip from Dead Heat (1988), the excessive scene where Treat Williams with half of his face looking like a zombie and a security guard fire submachine guns into each other’s torso for what feels like five minutes, standing there shaking as multiple blood packs keep exploding upon each of them. Dead Heat definitely was no doubt produced out of the box office success of An American Werewolf In London and Ghostbusters, with a supernatural horror movie layer to what is a buddy cop comedy. And this is where things get interesting, because can you have a fun time at the movies when one half of the buddy duo is consistently irritating?
Partnering Treat Williams and Joe Piscopo works in the former actor’s favour. As the straight-arrow one who wears suits and is brought back from the dead during an investigation, slowly decaying with hours on his side to bust open the case, Williams comes off as likeable, funny and creates an arc, between dogged professionalism, panicked existentialism at his own mortality, and ghoulish freedom when he wages revenge against the bad guy in his unkillable state.
Whereas Joe Piscopo is super annoying and wearying with his one-liners, his mullet, his tight t-shirt over his muscles, and his broad-as-a-barnyard mugging, particularly the smirk whenever he delivers a bad joke. In a weird way, Piscopo’s awfulness just adds to the shockly fun of Dead Heat, which is served with great practical special effects and stuntwork, all of which clocks in under 90 minutes. A standard eighties action comedy that lifts during certain sequences to great heights, almost unexpectedly, and even finds a place for Vincent Price in a small part within the mayhem.
Dead Heat is silly and junky, and very fun, particularly if you’re a Treat Williams fan, and enjoy watching him put through the wringer, until he looks like a human Gremlin wielding an automatic machine gun. Streamed on Tubi (US).
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