Rating: R
Run Time: 85 min
Director: William Lustig
Starring: Tom Atkins, Bruce Campbell
You have the right to remain
silent…forever, mutha-fucka!
In this unique trilogy, Maniac Cop Matt
Cordell kills the living shit out of just about any and everything that
breathes or has a pulse in 1980s New York City. I’m still not absolutely
sure why he does this, and his motive
becomes increasingly more obscure in each successive film. Across all
three, he also becomes progressively more hideous in appearance,
too. I’m not sure why this happens either, but it does.
However, in order to make some sense
of this strange phenomenon, I’d like to offer a little thing I call the Jason
Vorhees Doctrine (which I pulled out of my ass about three seconds before I
wrote those words down).
As we know of the F13 franchise, every new
makeup artist, from Tom Savini to Carl Fullerton to who knows who else and on,
came up with a new rendition of everyone’s favorite zombie goalie.
Because of the tortuous F13 timeline, this could be excused to some
degree. But the bottom line is this: Jason never looks one goddamned
bit like he did in the movie before. He’s like the David Bowie of
indestructible zombie serial killers. In F13 I, he’s the English Bob
Dylan; in II, he’s Ziggy
Stardust; in III, he’s the
Thin White Duke. Like, am I right? Fist pump, everybody! Fuck
yeah!
This is what I mean: In F13 I, he’s a grossly deformed,
bald adolescent boy. Why is he bald? I don’t know. Anyway, although the
intra-film time lapse between I and II is only a few months, in F13 II, he grows from a
teenager to a grown-ass man with a full head of hair and a beard, too.
And he doesn’t look anything like he did when he was a kid. In F13 III, he has either made
a trip to the barber or undergone the most aggressive chemotherapy treatment
imaginable…overnight, mind you. ...and he looks like a fucking human
pig. I won’t further belabor Jason’s amazing chameleon-like shape-shifting ability
because one day I’m going to have to visit that franchise and I want to be
fresh for what will surely be a grueling experience.
Yet Jason’s Story is truly a grand
bildungsroman-like saga that stretches across some of the most significant
periods in American history. Matt’s evolves over a contiguous and brief
stretch of time; each movie starts where the one before it left off. And
it’s all in that crappy, squalid late 70s-early 80s New York City of the
pre-Guliani era. The same one that William Lustig, who directed all the
Maniac Cop thrillers, utilized in his earlier exercise in serial killer
squalor, Maniac.
Essentially, Matt Cordell took Manhattan long before Jason ever thought of
hitching a ride on that shitty-looking barge that magically traversed from
Crystal Lake to some port in the Hudson Harbor. But let us not tarry
further in our journey.
Maniac Cop opens with a scene where a gargantuan dude
in a police officer’s uniform, ill-lit and in shadows, kills a poor woman who
is fleeing from a couple of hijackers who are right out of Ethnic Bad Guy
Central Casting. The cop wrings her neck, snapping it, while crushing her
larynx as well. Why does he do this? For absolutely no fucking good
reason at all, that’s why. This is not immediately apparent,
however. The body is discovered the next day and the investigation is
being conducted by a lone homicide detective played by…Jake fucking LaMotta!
As in former lightweight boxing champion of the world Jake LaMotta, Scorcese Raging Bull as played by DeNiro Jake
LaMotta.
Jake doesn’t keep the case long, however,
as it is soon apparent that a series of murders involving the same hulking dude
in a cop’s uniform are occurring throughout the Big Apple. Lieutenant
Frank McCrae (Tom Atkins, B-movie stalwart who always, always gets the hot chicks in these movies,
and God only knows why because he’s not particularly good-looking in the
conventional sense; he sleeps with Jamie Lee Curtis herself in Carpenter’s The Fog, which is just damned
creepy, man, because he looks old enough to be her grandfather) assumes the
case and soon becomes convinced that the killer is not just a guy dressing up
like a police officer, but really is a police officer. I don’t know
why. As far as I was concerned, it’s 50/50. What kind of cop
carries a concealed saber in his nightstick? Or wears silly-ass, foppy
white gloves?
There is an interesting sociological
sub-story in the movie that is revealed through media images, involving the
development of an ever-increasing distrust of police officers by practically
all of New York’s citizenry. Since when have people ever trusted police officers, I’d really
like somebody to tell me. Still, I watched the first movie relatively
soon after the whole Michael Brown, Eric Garner controversy that culminated in
the deaths of NYPD officers, Rafael Ramos & Wenjian Liu. I mean,
really, fuck people! Anyway, so nobody likes
cops, there’s a shocker for you.
Soon enough a suspect in these murders (a,
get this, cop), is developed when his wife is murdered after she catches
him in flagrante delicto with another woman. The wife had already become
all but convinced that her husband, Officer Jack Forrest, was the Maniac Cop when she followed
him. Jack, by the way, is played by Bruce “If Chins Could Kill” Campbell
at the height of his B-movie character actor glory, two years after Evil Dead II was released. Jack is having an
affair with Theresa Mallory (Laurene Landon). When Jack is arrested for
the murders, McCrae figures out about the affair and rightly believes Jack is
withholding that knowledge to shield Theresa’s reputation. He learns from
her that the only person she told about the affair is Officer Sally Noland, who
is partially disabled with a gimp left leg that necessitates she walk with a
cane. Interestingly, Sally is played by Sheree North, who was at one time
groomed to become heir apparent to the increasingly erratic Marilyn
Monroe.
The Cliff Notes version is that Frank digs
up the sordid skinny on the whole Cordell story, learning also that Matt and
Sally were lovers. Her injury occurred when she attempted suicide by
jumping out a window after Matt was imprisoned. Now, being a police
officer, of course, she has a gun. How much easier it would have been to have
just shot herself with that gun, but okay. Frank gets from A to C by
following Sally to a rendezvous with Matt in some old decrepit storage
lot. When he is discovered, Sally starts shooting into the shadows at
him, using the same damned gun she should have used to kill herself. But
if she hadn’t done what she did, we wouldn’t have ourselves a movie, folks, as
you’ll figure out for yourselves if you watch.
Before long, the Maniac Cop tries to kill
Theresa as she does UC roleplaying as a prostitute. Both she and Frank,
who just shows up out of fucking nowhere, shoot Matt to no effect, including
several shots to the head that would have killed a mere mortal. After
this, Frank, now convinced of his innocence, tries to get Jack out of jail but
Sally has figured out what Frank knows and attacks him in her best wild-ass
crazy disabled lady cop fashion in the precinct station house at the same time
that Matt is making his rounds killing all the rest of the police officers in
the building. Jack and Theresa make it out. Actually, so does
Frank, only he does so through an upper floor window courtesy of a pissed-off
Matt, who has up and killed Sally now, too. I mean, this guy just beats
the living shit out of the only person in the whole damn movie who even cares
for him. See what I mean by motiveless, indiscriminate
killing?
Anyway, the two survivors next visit Sing
Sing and learn everything about everything on the Cordell front just before the
final confrontation that ends the film. And the ending is not even
equivocal, folks. It is made very clear that Matt is still alive.
Somewhere along the line, he has also become indestructible for no goddamned
good reason at all. In just one movie. Whereas even the
arbitrary F13 series took four before blessing Jason with immortality, Matt has
gone from someone clinging to life with a faint pulse and no brain activity to
full-on “you can’t kill me, ‘cause I’m already dead”
mode.
Maniac Cop’s not a bad movie. It’s well-acted
by a group of memorable B-movie stalwarts, including Shaft himself, Richard
Roundtree, as police commissioner. People you think will make it suddenly
don’t, in a time when there was still a sense of danger about such
horror/exploitation fare as this. There is also a neat way that the
killer cop is just sort of there when somebody looks his way that is
super creepy. It’s an editing trick, I think, and I am unfortunately not
the kind of movie aficionado who appreciates cinematography, editing, sound
mixing in any sophisticated sort of way at all…unless something sucks, I don’t
register such aesthetics consciously. I’m of the “hey, that looks like
shit,” or “hey, that sounds like shit” persuasion. Still, it
is a movie made by people who did seem to care, which is itself a virtue in
that 80s-era cash-grab atmosphere that clung so tenaciously to the slasher
formula which form was already absolutely on its last legs when the first Maniac
Cop came out (slasher era mach 1, that is).
I have a few quibbles: this guy’s
supposed to be fucking brain-dead or some shit, yet he plots to frame another
guy for the killings in a manner way, way uncharacteristic of any 80s serial
killer outside of perhaps Freddie Krueger. And his nefarious plot is far
more sophisticated in its construction and intent than anything I’ve ever seen
in a slasher flick. His rationale is this: killing innocent people will
discredit the police department such that doing so will lead to the downfall of
those Cordell blames for the predicament that sent him to prison on trumped-up
charges in the first place. WTF? That would require machinations
that go far beyond just killing innocents on the streets of NYC.
So, yes, there are a few problems with
this theory. First, it is strongly suggested that what landed Matt
in prison prior to the events we see in the first movie was that, as an
old-school police officer, he was violating the ever-loving shit out of
people’s civil rights while doing his job. It is implied that this is the
only way a cop can see results or effect a change. That logic is
counterintuitive at best. Beyond that, even, police officers can and do go to prison for doing exactly the
sort of thing that he was apparently doing. So whose fault is it you landed
in Sing Sing, Mr. Badass? Second, it is not at all clear that the people
in power who allegedly screwed him for being NYPD’s greatest detective are the
same people who are in still in power now. With the exception of Richard
Roundtree, who apparently was…I think.
Oh, my. I’m at almost 2,000 words
and haven’t said a damned thing about Maniac
Cop 2 and Maniac Cop 3: Badge of (get this) Silence, so let’ wrap it
up. Matt just sorta decides to show up and start the killing again in the
next two, including more people you think aren’t going to get theirs…who
do. Yeah, and Robert Davi joins the cast in two and three and somehow
manages to wildly overact in a subdued manner; it’s
really amazing to watch, but how is that possible? And, as I noted
earlier, Matt continues to decompose at an alarming rate. I suspect
perhaps the series ended because there just wasn’t enough left of him to keep
killing people. A pity. Why not Maniac
Cop IV: Skeleton Cop?
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