by: Dr. Boogie

...CONTINUED

Randi's home is suddenly besieged by a pair of zombies, these ones looking slightly worse than the robber zombies at the start of the film. Roger and the two normies take cover behind Randi's tacky furniture and fire back. Roger gets sprayed in the chest with automatic gunfire, but remains very much alive. Of course, he probably would have lived anyway if he had been wearing the bulletproof vest that's standard issue to all police officers, but no time for details. The fight is moving to the patio!

The three of them hide from the two zombies and wait for the right time for an ambush. Doug, unfortunately, doesn't get the chance:

Bad luck for him, picking the more perceptive zombie. Roger has a little more luck.

And so it's fisticuffs! Forget about your guns, zombies! Roger hops out of the jaccuzzi and tosses a radio in to dispatch his zombie, and Doug impales his zombie with an umbrella. Apparently, that's fatal for a zombie.

Even more surprising, the VCR starts back up by itself and plays the rest of the video will. The old man, we discover, is Arthur Loudermilk, the recently deceased owner of Dante Pharmaceuticals and Randi's father. She explains that Loudermilk used the company to research anything that interested him, including machines to cheat death. Again, she says she had no idea there was such a machine on the premises, but she does remember picking up a goodly amount of sulfathiazole from an apothecary in Chinatown named Mr. Thule. Ah, the plot thickens. First things first, Roger needs to change into some less blood-stained clothes.

While combing his hair in the bathroom, Roger notices that he's starting to shed a little. He decides to end his combing early and gets a surprise:

A hallucination, yes. A cheap scare utilizing a sudden loud noise, yes. Hey, it's a horror movie, kinda.

Anyway, Roger changes into some clothes left by one of Randi's old boyfriends.

Stylin'. The effect is further magnified when he jumps into his 50's roadster.

Now that this undercover officer is even more conspicuous, time for a trip to Chinatown.

Like the perverted guard back at Dante Pharmaceuticals, the butcher gives them the cold shoulder, even when they flash their badges. Roger puts his on the butcher block, and the butcher cuts it in half! Ha, comedy gold!

Fortunately, Thule is right around the corner. He gets a little defensive when they start to ask him about the sulfathiazole, and responds to their threats with some Taoist platitude about life and death being two expressions of the blah blah bullshit. The point is, he's prepared a visual aid to get this point across.

With a single button press, his light fixture becomes a resurrection machine, and thus begins the greatest scene in the whole movie.

In what can best be described as a PETA wet dream, the carved-up animals in the butcher shop are transformed into tasty zombies, and attack our heroes. I guess Thule had been cooking all his animals in a sulfathiazole broth. Or maybe it's the MSG. Whatever the case, Doug gets tackled by an angry pig, and Roger is attacked by one very tenacious hunk of liver.

Randi also stumbles into a group of suspended ducks, but they don't seem to be as dangerous, per se. After a brief struggle, Doug manages to put a bullet in the brain of the rampaging pig, and Roger finally pries the liver off of his face. The butcher then pops back onto the scene, but he's not a zombie, and so a single shot in his considerable gut puts him away. Of course, he died right under the resurrection machine, so you'd think he would just get back up and start his attack anew, but not so. Apparently, this resurrection machine only works on livestock (or should I say, DEADstock! Muahahaha!).

There's more trouble on the horizon! There's a loud banging, and some serious dents start to appear in the door to the meat locker. What fresh horror is this?

Remember that scene in Rocky where Rocky is beating up that side of beef? Well it's back with a vengeance. And a side of mashed potatoes. The beef tackles Roger, though it's not really clear how it intends to attack him. Luckily, Doug is a master of the art of cow tipping, and Roger manages to wriggle loose. Eventually, it occurs to him that destroying the machine might at least slow down the tender vittles. Sure enough, all of the undead animals drop dead, even the flopping overturned side of beef. Whew!

At this point, Thule is long gone. Among his personal effect in the back room, our heroes find a list of initials and dates. Roger deduces that since the last one matches up with the death of Loudermilk, it must be a list of death dates. Time for a trip to the library.

Sure enough, all the other entries on the list correspond to the deaths of various rich folk. Was Dante Pharmaceuticals trying to kill rich people and turn them into robbers as part of some twisted, reverse "Robin Hood" sort of plan?

It's here that the weight of Roger's situation finally gets to him: His dead ass is dead, and in about six hours, they'll need a mop and a bucket to clean up his corpse. He freaks out a little, and Doug tries to perk him up by reminding him that they still need to find his killers and "trash their ass". Roger points out the grammatical error, and he's back to his old self again. Let's go to the morgue now!

Rebecca says she may have good news, and Roger introduces her to the PR woman he's been dragging around for several hours. What follows is the lead up to a knockdown, drag out catfight that never comes to fruition. And that good news Rebecca said she had for Roger? After searching through the files at Dante Pharmaceuticals, she may know of a potential way to prolong Roger's undeath. Good news, considering that he's now decaying much faster than she originally estimated. However, he just doesn't have time to wait around for potential fixes (he remarks, "what the hell am I doing here," which I was wondering myself since he never gave a reason, and all he does at the morgue is get a quick physical). Instead, he and Doug decide to split up, with Roger checking out Loudermilk's grave and Doug checking his Loudermilk's lawyer. They've already been attacked twice by the undead, so there's no better course of action than to split up.

Before they can leave, MacNab shows up to make light of Roger's unlife. He drives a fancy car, much fancier than you'd expect a coroner to be able to afford. Hmm...

Roger and Randi get to the cemetery, only to find Loudermilk's tomb locked (to keep the zombies inside, now doubt!), so Roger simply shoots the lock off. Thankfully, the smog around LA is so thick that the sound of a gunshot only carries to about 20 feet. Roger can't help but notice that Loudermilk's epitaph doesn't mention a daughter. Cornered, Randi admits that she isn't his daughter; she met him in the hospital when she OD'ed, and he made her the head of PR and gave her a nice house. "You believe me, don't you" she asks. Of course he does. I mean, your story fits together so well.

Also discovered on this tomb trip is a ten-digit number scrawled on the inside of a lamp shade. I wonder if the people who moved the lamp into the tomb thought that was odd.

Anyway, mission accomplished. Time to meet Doug back at Randi's place. Now, there's been a shootout at the place, so I expect there to be a lot of caution tape around, and maybe a small police presence.

No, my mistake. The harsh rattling of automatic gunfire went completely unnoticed. Randi tries to flip on the lights, but they appear to be out. The TV works, though. Good move, putting your TV on a separate circuit from the rest of the lights in the room. The old horror movie on the TV distracts Randi from the large decoration that was recently added to her fishtank.

Oh, Doug. Now who will fill our lives corny one-liners and macho remarks. This has got to be hard on poor Roger. I mean, he basically sent his partner to his death. Perhaps that impaled zombie from before managed to swim out of the pool and yank out that umbrella.

Find out what happens next on
Page 4 of the Dead Heat feature!