Editor’s Note: This was originally published for FANGORIA on April 23, 2004, and we’re proud to share it as part of The Gingold Files.
I’ve always had a soft spot in my heart—or maybe it’s my head—for Dead Heat, which opened in 1988 in the wake of the successful comedy/horror hybrids Re-Animator, Return of the Living Dead and House, the latter also released by New World Pictures. The reception given Dead Heat, however, was more akin to that which greeted the lamentable Return of the Living Dead Part II, with a good deal of the vitriol leveled at the presence of Saturday Night Live then-star Joe Piscopo. To be sure, his attitudinal one-liners are a distraction from the main action, but the story of detective Roger Mortis (Treat Williams), who tries to solve his own murder after being brought back to life as a slowly decomposing zombie, has its share of gruesome and amusing moments. Call me easily entertained, but the sight of the undead Mortis and a ghoul foe pumping each other full of endless rounds of machine-gun fire, neither one succumbing to their wounds, struck me as pretty funny in a sick sort of way.
On the commentary track of Anchor Bay’s Divimax DVD, director Mark Goldblatt (an ace action/horror editor who made his debut at the helm here), screenwriter Terry Black (brother of Lethal Weapon scribe Shane) and producers Michael Meltzer and David Helpern make it clear that their own ambitions for the film lay more in the horror than the humorous arena, and that they were somewhat thwarted. One of the producers recalls that another studio saw the project as a flat-out comedy (and ultimately, it seems, so did New World; a promo reel included on the disc is scored with “Shakedown” from Beverly Hills Cop), and it doesn’t take much reading between the comments to discern that Piscopo might not have been everyone’s first choice for that role. There’s also a good deal of discussion about the gore and violence trimmed for the R rating; the material in question seems pretty minor considering what Dawn of the Dead and The Passion of the Christ got away with this year.
Yet for all these laments, the track is largely upbeat and a fun listen, and the guys have plenty of entertaining stories to tell, with few areas left unexplored (though I’m still curious, given the connection between their creators, as to whether Heat’s Roger Mortis and WEAPON’s Roger Murtaugh are related). The filmmakers still seem proud of what they accomplished, especially given the budget ($5 million, pretty low for a movie of this scope even for 1988). That low cost does show in the disc’s 1.85:1 transfer, which isn’t quite up to the standards of previous Anchor Bay Divimax titles. The mastering is very crisp but the print used is a little rough around the edges, with variable colors. Fleshtones, for example, seem a tad pale (even for those characters who are alive all the way through), while the red of Mortis’ car stands out so vividly in the movie’s visual scheme that it seems like an intentional design choice, though no one on the commentary brings it up.
Beyond assorted promotional material, the disc also offers a number of deleted scenes, derived from a raw but watchable video source. Most of those MPAA trims seem to have been lost forever, as only one of these sequences (the disintegration of Lindsay Frost’s character) showcases extra grue, but a couple of others provide a taste of Mortis’ melancholy side, which the filmmakers had hoped to emphasize in the overall feature. It’s also nice to see Dick Miller pop up in the excised portion of a mausoleum scene. There are also commendably well-stocked photo, advertising and storyboard galleries, and the latter includes one of my favorite production-art captions ever, one which captures the movie’s particular brand of humor: “She backs into the ferocious hanging zombie ducks!”
