This movie is equal parts amazing and utter garbage, and I couldn’t be happier that I have seen it. Dead Heat (much like Cannonball Run) makes me pine for the days when production companies used to just make movies for fun.
Dead Heat, at its heart, is a buddy cop movie. Det. Mortis (Treat Williams) and Det. Bigalow (Piscopo) are two detectives on the hunt for jewelry store robbers. These aren’t your ordinary robbers. They don’t feel bullets when shot and appear to have been dead long before Mortis and Bigalow put them down for good. What they stumble on is a case far beyond what they could have imagined. In the end, it all comes down to money and friendship.
From almost the very beginning of this film, I was laughing my head off. There are so many strange and hilarious leaps of story-telling faith, I don’t even know where to begin. There’s the fact that Mortis dies 20mins into the story and everyone knows he is dead, yet does little to test how this is possible, or really, even care in the least. Then the girl they are galavanting around town with turns out she is dead too. Upon revealing this, she decays so quickly that she not only melts but explodes. I found myself yelling at the television (through tears of laughter, mind you) “WHY WOULD THEY EVEN DO THAT?!?!”
Dead Heat is a great movie. It’s great because it requires no thought to watch. Actually, it actively, almost literally, tells the viewer, “Hey, don’t read to far into this, ok.” Treat Williams plays the odd “bad cop” to Piscapo’s dopey yet somehow more laid back version of a cop. Though their on-screen chemistry isn’t the greatest, they do play well off each other. Dead Heat is a movie to watch if you love buddy cop movies, possibly ones that even have a bit of horror in them. However, when a man gets attacked by a reanimated, nondescript, animal liver, you know that you sometimes just have to let things go and laugh at the absurdity of it all.
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