Just the Ticket #166: Maniac Cop

Article by Sean Wilkinson,

a.k.a. the Ticketmaster.

Merry Christmas, Ticketholders!

I decided this would be the movie series I would review for the holidays during last year's Christmas Special review of the Lethal Weapon series because Tom Atkins, who played strong-armed father Michael Hunsaker in that series' first entry, also has a role in the Maniac Cop trilogy.

Also, the second movie takes place around Christmas, and the Maniac Cop series features some little gifts that I wasn't expecting to bring warmth to my heart the way they did.

Financially, I have been forced to lower my expectations of what I want for Christmas this year, so I will settle for any extra hours I can get, and keep trying to get on as many Copywriting Nice Lists as possible so that I'm not crushed by financial responsibility in the new year.

Barring that, all I want for Christmas is that you please remember to Become A Ticketholder if you haven't already, comment at the bottom of this post, help out my ad revenue as you read, and follow me on Tumblr, Reddit, Facebook, YouTube, and LinkedIn to like what you see and receive the latest stocking stuffers of news on my content. I promise not to trade away your engagement contributions at the White Elephant party.

Feeling unsettlingly contemporary because the early 2020s peeled the bandaid off of the police brutality scars of the 80s and early 90s, Maniac Cop was released in 1988 as a way of using that well-founded fear of the time to put a new twist on the fading 80s slasher craze. What if the giant, undead killer with a knife was a cop? And what if that cop slaughtered the innocent while letting real criminals go free?

That's the basic beat (police patrol puns! And alliteration! And I didn't mean to do it with the APB acronym backwards, but I did it!) that writer/producer Larry Cohen (director of the It's Alive! trilogy and writer of Phone Booth and Cellular) and director William Lustig (Maniac, Vigilante, Relentless, and Uncle Sam) went with. And that's mostly what happens.

Robert Z'Dar (Samurai Cop) features mostly in silhouette as Matt Cordell, a former "shoot first, ask questions later" "hero" cop who was sent to prison by his superiors and left for dead because I guess you could just get away with not putting a cop in solitary protective custody back then. But he's revived by the coroner...somehow...as an undead shell powered by vengeance (that he doesn't even attempt to achieve in this movie) and a moral code so twisted and nonsensically backwards that it makes him seem unfocused as a villain, tragic or otherwise, and makes the audience glad that he never speaks so we don't have to listen to him explain himself.

Caught up in the case (that the commissioner - Shaft himself, Richard Roundtree - and mayor - "just read his Wikipedia page" character actor Ken Lerner - are attempting to cover up because [insert Jaws beach closure joke here] on St. Patrick's Day or something) is troubled Cordell fanboy Lt. Frank McCrae (the aforementioned Tom Atkins, Night Of the Creeps). He's an amazing character played by an iconic actor, with a personal connection to the killer, which makes it incredibly disappointing when Cordell throws him off a roof to his death, and focus switches more heavily to the unfaithful Officer Jack Forrest (Evil Dead's Bruce Campbell, who would have balanced out my disappointment over Atkins' premature departure if he weren't phoning it in so much that his performance put me to sleep and half of his action scenes were done by barely-convincing dummies), who becomes the prime suspect in the Maniac Cop murders when his wife (Victoria Catlin, Howling V) is killed after finding Forrest in a motel room with fellow officer Theresa Mallory (Laurene Landon, Samurai Cop 2).

Despite the film's (then-bitter) commentary on the rogue cop trope and the fear surrounding real-world police brutality, it ultimately feels more like a police action movie with brutal slasher-esque, strongman-with-knife kills than a slasher movie with a killer in blue. The first two thirds of Maniac Cop's relatively short runtime (all three films clock in around an hour-twenty each) hold interest thanks to Tom Atkins' performance, the competently handled procedural mystery of Cordell, the aforementioned police-phobic atmosphere and commentary, and the brutal but datedly tame kills. But the third act drops all of that for a car chase that would have impressed me if the lack of heart and focus hadn't already put me to sleep, the underwhelming and unconvincing reveal of Cordell's facial appliances,

Cordell's anticlimactic, stakes-free showdown with a Bruce Campbell ragdoll, and an obvious, "the killer survived drowning with a baseball-sized hole in his lungs" sequel-bait ending.

Perhaps the biggest treat here besides the underutilized presence of Atkins and Campbell was finding out that the soundtrack featured two songs with the late David Carradine on vocals...except that they aren't available to listen to online.

Maniac Cop is a partially entertaining, well-cast movie that knows what it wants to say but can't do so with any conviction or tonal consistency in an era when its two genres of choice were going braindead and running on autopilot.

D+

Lustig, Cohen, Campbell, Landon, and Z'Dar continued right where they left off in 1990's Maniac Cop 2, with Cordell finally having a character direction that makes sense, even if the movie itself is more cluttered with hastily woven-in plot threads than the original.

It's Christmas now, even though the opening re-use of Maniac Cop's finale makes it seem like Maniac Cop 2 happens immediately after it. How did Cordell manage to not make the news, or even refrain from killing anyone, for nine months straight?

Whatever the case, he's back from his drowning, still somehow managing to fling around his billy club/shortsword without randomly knocking out a car window with the sheath, smashing through walls like he's Jason Voorhees jacked up on Kool-Aid, and killing innocent people and cops instead of criminals. Also, he manages to squeeze in a car chase or two, killing off the people you expect to be the main characters again (Forrest and Mallory are unalived from the film roughly thirty minutes in), and "dying" in a spectacular but anticlimactic fashion.

Replacing Bruce Campbell (who probably wanted his character killed off because he disliked the first movie so much) and Laurene Landon for the remainder of the sequel are Robert Davi (known mostly for playing cops, gangsters, and Russians in films like Die Hard, The Iceman, and The Expendables 3) as Lt. Sean McKinney and Claudia Christian (Babylon 5) as Forrest and Mallory's police psychologist Susan Riley.

Michael Lerner replaces his brother as New York's mayor (which is apparently not a survivable position in this universe), and Bruce Campbell's favorite director Sam Raimi returns as a news reporter cameo.

When he's not killing seemingly random people or returning characters, Cordell gets embroiled in a "suddenly this has been happening the whole time but we're just mentioning it now" plot involving an annoying Diet Manson serial killer who targets strippers (frequent Lustig collaborator Leo Rossi) and serves as a means for Cordell to break into the prison where he was killed and take revenge on the inmates who attacked him (including more re-used footage from Maniac Cop and a blink-and-you'll-miss-it cameo by Danny Trejo).

The police plot is less of a mystery than it is about McKinney and Riley dealing with an incompetent government cover-up that goes unresolved because it's suddenly time to have a car chase, get in a shootout with an undead giant who's immune to bullets, and set him on fire so he can plow through one last wall and fall through the roof of a school bus that explodes multiple times because this is a turn-of-the-decade action movie with horror elements that needs a "nobody could have survived that" ending.

Surprisingly, despite the "drop everything that would have been interesting in the two other kinds of movie this movie doesn't really want to be because action, explosion, suddenly the end" feeling of the third act, this is not where Maniac Cop 2 chooses to have its cliffhanger. There's actually one more scene, where Cordell's remains have been recovered and McKinney and Riley are attending his funeral, and the sequel bait jumpscare is saved until after they have paid their respects and left, which was refreshing.

The Cordell make-up is more of a mixed bag this time around, the more zombified, prune-ish, cracked appearance of his face looking more interesting but mask-like than the "let's cover him in pieces of a Klingon's forehead and call it scars" design from the end of Maniac Cop, but not getting as much screentime because the director presumably learned his lesson.

Davi's Lt. McKinney is not as interesting in Maniac Cop 2 as Atkins was in the first, but he's better in terms of performance and character depth than Campbell's "wrongly convicted cheater-turned-hero with sequel trauma" across both of his appearances, and Claudia Christian's Riley stands out as a could-be love interest and co-lead next to Davi even though she wouldn't appear again in the third entry.

And I would be remiss if I didn't mention that Maniac Cop 2 is the only entry to get a stylized title and an end-credits theme song (the incredibly 1990 "Maniac Cop Rap" by Yeshuwa Barnes, Brian "B.Dub" Woods, and Jay Chattaway).

Maniac Cop 2 itself overall is Maniac Cop, but more of it for better or worse. More jumbled focus and unlikable characters, more tonal whiplash, more Cordell doing Cordell things, more disappointment at the main character dying early, and thanks to the recycled footage, literally more Maniac Cop.

But for all that it does wrong or does again, there are things that the sequel does better. Robert Davi is a better replacement protagonist here than Bruce Campbell was. Cordell actually does things that make sense for his character and has a more interesting face design. There are explosions. The title sequence has notable design effort. The "Maniac Cop Rap" exists. And the sequel bait genuinely hits.

I don't have the experience to agree or disagree with William Lustig's statement that Maniac Cop 2 is his best movie, but I can say that it felt like a slightly better movie than the original.

C

One claim I can agree with is Josh Spiegel's statement that Maniac Cop III: Badge Of Silence could have been a better movie if it were instead titled Bride Of Maniac Cop...and if it had spent more of its runtime on that concept. But I don't think it is such a bad movie that it deserved Lustig giving it the Alan Smithee treatment (and making it the first movie I have reviewed to get that honor, which I think is one of those special Christmas surprises that I mentioned above, beating out the David Carradine songs, the trilogy cast, and the rap as my favorite holiday intangible this year).

For those who don't know, Alan Smithee is an alias commonly used in the entertainment industry, especially by film directors, when someone is so dissatisfied with their final product (whether for drastic changes from the original creative vision, general quality, or other reasons) that they want their involvement kept anonymous. It's kind of the "I want a lawyer," "no comment," or "I plead the fifth" version of "I think my movie sucks everything suckable and a few things that aren't." It was temporarily retired in the early 2000s, but is still in use to this day.

So, yeah; director William "Alan Smithee" Lustig and writer/producer Larry Cohen sent the trilogy out in a blaze of glory and several explosions in 1993. Which would have been a good thing if the Japanese distributors weren't racist, Cohen had been paid to do rewrites, and Lustig hadn't walked away from the film because in order to make the film make as much sense as it does, the script had to be hacked to pieces and filler scenes had to be shot to meet a feature-length runtime, contributing to its slower pacing.

Robert Davi returns as Lt. Sean McKinney (being the first and last returning main protagonist in the series to not be killed and replaced halfway through the movie), and Robert Z'Dar returns as the undead Matt Cordell (because no one noticed the empty coffin with a hole in the lid that's sitting in the open grave of a known undead serial killer cop, nor did anyone say anything about it), now sporting a burnt, melted appearance, engaging in more sensational, campy kills like clay pigeoning a man and x-raying a doctor (Robert Forster, Breaking Bad) to death...and he's Chucky.

By which I mean he came back from the dead this time because of voodoo and because his motivations have always been too simple for the movies to define or resolve with any kind of logical certainty such that his soul refuses to rest, not that he's a tiny ginger murder-doll now.

Speaking of Cordell's goals being inconsistent and ill-defined, this movie now has the young, by any means necessary cop, Officer "Maniac" Kate Sullivan (Gretchen Becker, The Doors and Ed Wood), who is rendered comatose in a drug-related robbery by junkie Frank Jessup (Jackie Earl Haley, Watchmen) and his girlfriend.

I guess because Kate has the same nickname and her reputation was destroyed in the press, Cordell decides he loves her or something, so he's going to kidnap her from the hospital and take her to the voodoo priest who revived him (Julius Harris, Live and Let Die) so she can be a zombie, too.

There's so much that could have been done with this, like subverting series formula by making her the hero who dies too soon but bringing her back as a zombie to fight Cordell on equal footing alongside McKinney, or doing a couples thing where she and Cordell team up against McKinney and Riley had Claudia Christian returned.

Instead, because of those script-saving filler scenes (and recycled footage from Maniac Cop and Maniac Cop 2 whether it fits in context or not), everyone just waits around in the hospital, keeping an eye on Frank and worrying about Kate's vegetative state, until it's time for Cordell to shoot his way through the building (giving a few asshole doctors some extra attention because promiscuous, insensitive, cowboy surgeons have replaced police brutality as the new social boogeyman, beating Grey's Anatomy and its many knockoffs to the punch by twelve years or more) like he did in the last one, get in several car chases with the hero like he did in the first two, and catch on fire and "die" in a multiply exploding vehicle...like he did in the last one. At no point beyond the first act of this movie is Officer Sullivan anything but a plot vegetable, and Jackie Earl Haley fills the role of the annoying, chaotic criminal who overstays his welcome and does almost nothing.

The only saving grace here character-wise is McKinney. Despite only being in this under-paced hatchet-job of a movie because Japanese distributors didn't want a black hero in their killer cop threequel, Robert Davi plays his character like if Humphrey Bogart was an 80s action hero: emotional when the stakes are personal, ruthless when the bullets start to fly, an aged, sexy romantic when the scene calls for it (he gets romantically involved with a beautiful doctor, played by Oldboy's Caitlin Dulany in her first film role), and so "I'm going to finally light this cigarette with a burning, severed zombie hand" cool that you can feel it in your bones.

On top of that, the scenery that we as viewers are made to waste time in (pipe-lined service tunnels, dimly lit hospital rooms, and the voodoo chapel set, among others), combined with the more absurd kills, makes this final entry feel the most like a horror movie that the series ever has.

Would I rather have watched what I suggested for Bride Of Maniac Cop? Or the Maniac Cop In Harlem movie we would have gotten if Japan was okay with black protagonists? Or whatever we would have gotten if Larry Cohen was paid to write a coherent script? Or the perfectly serviceable police drama that this movie is without needing to also be a Maniac Cop movie? Absolutely.

But despite all of the production problems that ultimately made Badge Of Silence what it is, on feeling and a single performance alone, I can't say I hate it as much as the director did.

I get why he disowned the project. The pacing is the slowest of the trilogy (even the final chase dragged on longer than it could have), the transition between movies doesn't make sense, and the concept and characters are wasted. But Davi is a badass, and in terms of tone, it's the closest to how I expected a slasher movie called Maniac Cop should feel.

Arrest me if you want, but I'm grading this in second.

C-

There have since been recent efforts to revive the property as a film remake (perpetually in Development Hell as of 2018) and a television/streaming series (a pilot was developed, but the series was announced as grounded in 2023 after being workshopped since 2019), and I understand why they haven't been produced, given recent public sentiment toward such concepts and the efforts of television media (like The Rookie and 9-1-1) to repair and positively demonstrate the reputation of those who serve and protect.

You have the right to remain festive, Ticketholders! Any comment you make at the bottom of this post will not be held against you in a court of public opinion. You have the right to joy and presents. If you do not have joy or presents, they will be provided to you by your friends and family. If you understand these rights, please remember to Become A Ticketholder if you haven't already, comment at the bottom of this post, help out my ad revenue as you read so I can afford last-minute gifts for my family, and follow me on Tumblr, Reddit, Facebook, YouTube, and LinkedIn to like what you see and receive the latest stocking stuffers of news on my content. I promise not to trade away your engagement contributions at the White Elephant party.

Oh, and Stay Tuned for the last List Lookback of 2024.

Ticketmaster,

Merry Christmas to all,

And to all,

I'm Out.