Dead Heat (1988, Mark Goldblatt)

After Hiruko and White of the Eye, I’m accidentally on a late ’80s kick… help. Straightman Treat Williams and his wacky partner Joe Piscopo (Wise Guys, SNL) are in trouble with their cop boss Robert “The Cowboy” Picardo for being reckless out of control loose cannons who do not follow the rules. At a sketchy science lab investigating some major crimes committed by zombies armed with machine guns, PR Hotgirl Lindsay “Sister of Mark” Frost fails to distract them and Joe easily finds the zombie reanimation chamber – and just in time, since Treat gets himself killed in another room. Lot of fishtank drama in this movie: “Rich dead people, what does it mean?” Funny, I’m reading Don DeLillo’s Zero K, which asks the same question. But here the screenplay is just something you’ve gotta get through, an obstacle to the heart of the movie, which yearns to show us more reanimated corpses with machine guns (and admittedly good makeup), now including Treat. The PR woman joins them, saying she didn’t…