Remember the Movie DeadHeat?

If the answer’s “no”, you’re forgiven. It was a B-movie, but a very good one and it starred two awesome dudes people seem to remember about as well as they do the move: Treat Williams and Joe Piscopo.

TDLR: Treat Williams plays a cop who bites the big one while on duty. Too good to be left to the afterlife, a secret experiment see Williams re-animated and put back out on duty.

Flash forward almost 30 years and it seems like the premise of DeadHeat is about to become a reality.

A groundbreaking trial by BioQuark Inc, to see if it’s possible to regenerate the brains of dead people, has won approval from US health watchdogs.

Now here’s the thing: we’re not going to be seeing exact Walking Dead-style zombies (unless shit goes really, really wrong).

The 20 recruited patients are clinically brain dead, but are kept alive through life support.

However, although brain dead humans are technically no longer alive, their bodies can often still circulate blood, digest food, excrete waste, balance hormones, grow, sexually mature, heal wounds, spike a fever, and gestate and deliver a baby.

The range of experiments that will be carried out on the dead will include chemical cocktails, laser therapy and nerve stimulation – the same methods that are commonly used to bust people out of a coma.

Almost sounds like the movies are mapping out the paths science is destined to follow.

While you may not remember DeadHeat, you have to at least remember Terminator: Salvation.

This is exactly what the entire movie was about.

While we’d love to see this effort bring us Robocop, it’s looking more like we’ll end up with something closer to Skynet.