16: Dead Heat (1988)
Trailer with about half of it from the last twenty minutes
Watching The Revenant reminded me I’d never seen Dead Heat, a 1980s SF action comedy take on the undead avenger, and found it free with ads on YouTube.
Detective Roger Mortis (yes...) and his partner Doug Bigelow (if this is also a pun I’m not getting it) investigate a spate of daylight robberies by guys who appear to be even more bullet-resistant than the average 80s action movie character. Finally managing to kill two of them after they gun down dozens of cops - which I feel the police captain should have been more bothered about - they hear from the coroner and Roger’s on-off girlfriend one of the bodies has a Y incision. Following a clue to a pharma company and getting the brushoff from PR flack Randi James (I must assume that’s also deliberate) Doug sneaks into just the right room and finds a machine that brings back the dead. And then Roger dies. And twenty-four minutes into an hour and twenty-three, he’s back, for a self-confessed remake of D.O.A. where the hero is literally dead as he tries to find who killed him.
With ten to twelve hours before final death, Roger visibly deteriorates over the film, to a final form that I’d seen in the film’s original publicity which also involves some Lethal Weapon hair. (Shane Black cameos in that scene and his brother Terry wrote the screenplay so I don’t think it’s a coincidence!)
Along the way there are some gross Reanimator moments, an impressively horrible how-did-they-do-that death scene, and some fun gag casting with Darren McGavin being sceptical and Vincent Price cameoing for exposition. Also a mutant kind of guy who doesn’t fit the theme at all.
It hasn’t aged as well as some of its contemporaries, with a case of fridging, some of the language and a Chinatown scene which weren’t particularly okay then let alone now, so approach with that in mind.
The medium: YouTube free with ads
Gameability: Reanimation technology as an in-setting excuse for 80s action movie hard-to-kill characters and a ticking clock for the adventure.
No comments:
Post a Comment