Not to date myself, but I remember a time when Joe Piscopo told punch lines instead of being one. He was great on Saturday Night Live, very funny in Johnny Dangerously and surprisingly endearing in Brian De Palma’s criminally ignored comedy, Wise Guys.
Dead Heat, however, provides ample evidence for the continued absence of Joe on the celebrity stage. If there is a prize for Comedian Who Should Be Least Allowed to Improvise One-Liners, Joe wins hands-down, besting even the immortally awful Pauly Shore. Every single line Piscopo grunts out falls to the ground and dies an ignoble death. As a cop who becomes a zombie, poor Treat Williams suffers death, rebirth and decomposition, but that’s nothing compared to having to smile at every ill-timed goddamned gag that slips out of the witless jokesack that is Piscopo. When Joe finally gets murdered, the feeling is not one of sadness, but utter relief.
The rest of Heat’s a mixed, low-rent bag. A routine tale of buddy zombie cops (seriously, why should that be routine?), it has some pleasingly goopy gore, wastes appearances by Darren McGavin and Vincent Price, and at least gave Williams a paycheck to feed him until Deep Rising.
Other than Piscopo, the main claim to fame for Heat is being written by Terry Black, brother of writer/director Shane Black (Kiss Kiss Bang Bang). On the spectrum of movie people with more talented siblings, Terry is far from a Tony Scott, Beau Bridges or even Eric Roberts. He’s not even a Charlie O’Connell.
No, Terry’s a Stephen Baldwin. I didn’t want to go there, as there are just some things you can’t take back, but Dead Heat forced me to. —Corey Redekop
No sooner has thieving murderer Joe Breezi (Andy Warhol regular Joe Dallesandro) escaped from prison to sweet freedom than he kills a couple of farmers, stabbing one with the elderly guy’s own pitchfork. At least he has good reason: Joe needs their car to drive to the two-room countryside cottage in which he buried 300 million liras five years prior, underneath the fireplace.
My dad always told me that the shortest distance between two points is a straight line. What he failed to mention is that a rapist may be hanging out somewhere around the middle. That’s the case for the pink-skirted schoolgirls who, while on their way home, take a shortcut 
I hadn’t heard anything about 
If you see only one David Heavener film in your life … well, it’s clearly one too many. Heavener’s one of those guys who does practically everything in his low-budget action movies; in addition to starring and producing, he provides the witless writing, the lifeless direction and the atrocious music. (It’s a wonder he wasn’t credited with doing his own mullet-sculpting.) Despite all his involvement to the contrary, he can’t be an action hero, because he looks like the guy who last serviced my car.