Thumbing through Glenn Kay’s awesome book, Zombie Movies: The Ultimate Guide I found a relatively obscure zombie film starring none other than Joe Piscopo with Vincent Price being noted as a supporting actor. My god … did I find the white whale of cheese movies? Titled, Dead Heat, this movie sounds about as good as you can imagine it to be.

Reading the blurb on it, Kay mentions how the MPAA forced the creators of the film to trim back some of the more obnoxious special effects else the movie would earn itself an X rating. Having recently watched Angels & Demons – a PG-13 film which features an assassin cutting open an investigators throat, a hanging priest being burned alive, and several officers being shot in the head – it seems rather quaint that a Joe Piscopo move could be slapped with such a warning,

A most excellent documentary aptly titled, This Film is not Rated actually breaks down the MPAA’s rating system with some rather interesting conclusions, noting that the process of rating a film is both opaque and entirely subjective. The films proceeds to compares the difference between an R rating and an NC-17 rating which usually boils down to a few seconds or even less. This Film is Not Rated is currently available on Netflix streaming and I highly suggest you watch it.

In any case, this is what Glenn Kay thought of Dead Heat (note, this entry contains a lot of spoilers):

After entering the subgenre with a segment of Creepshow 2 the previous year, New World Pictures released its first full-length zombie title, this unusual $5 million hybrid of undead horror and buddy action/comedy. The emphasis is on laughs as Treat Williams and Joe Piscopo play L.A. cops who find themselves investigating walking, talking, deceased criminals. After the two discover what can only be described as a large stainless-steel resurrection machine operated by the villainous Vincent Price and Darrin McGavin, \Williams is offed in a decidedly unheroic manner (he accidentally locks himself in an “Asphyxiation Room” and is “decompressed”).

Thankfully, Piscopo places Williams on the wacky resurrection machine, and our hero returns as a zombie supercop, ready to help his partner hunt down the responsible parties — before he decomposes. (They would have been wiser to simply sit by the resurrection machine and wait for the villains to return). “They can’t kill me,” Williams claims, only moments after completely obliterating a fellow zombie without much trouble. More nonsense follows, although the outlandish premise leads to some nifty action scenes. In the most memorable sequence, the resurrection technology is unleashed on a Chinese butcher shop’s wares, and the cops are attacked by angry ducks, pigs, and a gutted cow hanging in a meat locker. As for the comedic elements, the viewer’s appreciation will depend on what he or she thinks of the comedy styling of Joe Piscopo.

The film suffers in the makeup department due to the interference by the increasingly stringent MPAA. By now, the ratings board was threatening to brand many horror titles with X ratings, forcing filmmakers to chop their most outrageous effects to earn a more publicity friendly R rating (NOTE FROM BRIAN: movies will not be shown in 99% of theaters with X or NC-17 ratings). While some films like Day of the Dead (1985) chose to open unrated instead, Dead Heat buckled under the pressure and clipped the gory highlights. Filmmaker retained eye-catching footage of William’s punkish, charred, metal-embedded visage after a traffic accident, but they trimmed the other effects in obvious and jarring ways. For instance, an elaborate gag in which a character melts away on camera was almost entirely excised.

Dead Heat is also hampered by an awful musical score, and it can’t compete with the flashy action of the big-budget cop movies of the period. With a little more money, the concept of a zombie cop could have been more successful, but this feels like a missed opportunity. The film was yet another box office failure, and its soon-to-be defunct distributor, New World Pictures, suffered a costly blow.

Has anyone seen this and what do you think?

Zombie Movies: The Ultimate Guide (amazon.com <- new window)
Dead Heat amazon.com <- new window)