I bet that, back in the 1980's, the makers of this film thought that pairing a veteran sexist cop (Michael Parks) with a young lesbian partner (Denise Crosby) and turning them loose in Phoenix, Arizona, to catch a cop killer was an original idea. Problem is, all the rest is so unoriginal that you can constantly foresee the nest scene. In addition, Parks makes his character awfully irritating from the very beginning. Only near the end he starts to show his softer side, but by then it is too late, since you are already wishing that he gets killed. Crosby, on the contrary, gives one of the few OK performances in her career (I wonder if that is the reason why she has played so many cops and lesbians ever since), though she is constantly harassed by Parks, who even tries to rape her when she finds out that he has slept with her girlfriend. In spite of this, she can´t help falling in love with him (!!!). Frankly, though the idea of a woman like Denise Crosby (when she was still young and beautiful) being a lesbian seems like a terrible waste to me, I think this is just a piece of misogynist trash about how a though, independent homosexual woman is tamed and brought back to heterosexuality by a sexist moron. Add to this a lame direction work, totally unexciting (and few) action sequences and the fact that anyone can tell very soon who the bad guy is. What you get is just another boring ultra-low-budget thriller not worth the 85 minutes you need to watch it.
Review of Arizona Heat
