Perhaps the most gruesome buddy cop movie ever made (and definitely one of the most ghoulishly inventive), the sorely underrated Dead Heat stars Treat Williams and Joe Piscopo as two L.A. cops investigating a violent jewelry store robbery in which the culprits end up being reanimated corpses; their investigation into the unholy work of Arthur P. Laudermilk (Vincent Price), a rich industrialist who had created a “resurrection machine,” gets them both killed — and brought back as revenge-seeking zombie cops. A truly gonzo action horror comedy that was way ahead of its time when it was released in 1988, Dead Heat is kind of what you would get if you put Lethal Weapon and Re-Animator into a blender and hit “puree” — and then talked Vincent Price into starring in the gooey, delicious mess. The gory special effects are impressive (and the movie isn’t afraid to go way overboard with them — ah, the ’80s!), but it’s the cast that makes this really work by almost always playing it straight and sincere, even when Piscopo muses that he’d like to be reincarnated as a girl’s bicycle seat. Directed by Mark Goldblatt, an ace genre editor who only has one other directing credit on his resume: the 1989 version of The Punisher (yes, the one starring Dolph Lundgren).
