Podcast: Noel Bartocci on ‘Dead Heat’

Take one scoop of Shane Black and two scoops of Return of the Living Dead, and what do you get? Something pretty similar to Mark Goldblatt's Dead Heat, a 1988 action-slash-horror-slash-comedy that punches well above its weight class. On this week's episode, the Matts are joined by podcaster and physical media expert Noel Bartocci to shine a light on everyone's new favorite cult classic.

After a string of violent robberies terrorizes Los Angeles, police detective Roger Mortis (Treat Williams) and his partner Doug Bigelow (Joe Piscopo) are tasked with hunting down the money behind the gang. But when the investigation goes terribly wrong, Mortis ends up dead – at least temporarily. You see, the wealthy of Los Angeles have banded together to build a resurrection machine, and Mortis is brought back to life with only 12 hours to solve the mystery behind his own murder. Written by Terry Black – brother of Shane and screenwriter for the Tales From the Crypt adaptation – Dead Heat is a zombie police comedy with a surprisingly rapid pulse.

In this short excerpt from the episode, Bartocci shares the childhood ritual that allowed him to watch Dead Calm for the first time.

If you were lucky enough to have parents that paid for it, [HBO] sent you a little pamphlet every month that had the programming schedule. So every month, I would comb through the programming schedule with all the descriptions of the movies in it and find out when they were playing. And I just, Dead Heat, oh my god, I'll finally get to see it. It's only on at, like, four in the morning, so waking up at 3:45 to go put a tape in the VCR to record randomly, hoping to get the whole thing.

The Dead Calm episode of the Certified Forgotten podcast with Mike Mendez is now available to stream on Spotify, Apple Podcasts, YouTube Music, or the podcast platform of your choice.