I thought about being a police
officer for a brief period of time. I’m
sure that, much like how the amount of FBI applicants rose when The X-Files became popular, this desire
sprang from a love of shows like Beretta,
Starsky And Hutch, and Hunter.
Unlike the sexier private detective characters , police (on television)
most likely wouldn’t be roughed up and intimidated by polyester-clad
goons. No, they would do the roughing
up, because that was life on the streets, baby, and you had to be tough as nails. And that’s when it dawned on me: tough as
nails, I ain’t. Watch any detective
show, and the crap these guys go through looks inordinately painful (if not at
present then certainly the day after).
There was also the requirement of being able to run after perps in
uncomfortable-looking footwear. I have
wide, flat feet, and just finding the shitty New Balance sneakers I wear around
was a task and a half. I’d hate to see
how far I would have to go to get an agreeable pair of work kicks for walking a
beat in the naked city. Naturally, I
don’t think most cops on the job go through anything even remotely approaching
the level of action of Hawaii Five-O. As a matter of fact, I tend to imagine that,
in reality, there is a ton of paperwork to fill out. I’m pretty good at paperwork, ironically
enough. I don’t love it, and I would
rather be leaning on suspects, but all things considered, it’s probably safer
than getting shot at. Okay, I definitely
should not be a police officer.
As Cassie (Jill Gatsby) is walking home from work one night, she is attacked
by a pair of vicious muggers. No
shrinking violet, Cassie manages to fend them off long enough to make a break
for it. Spotting a policeman across a
dark playground, Cassie darts for him, but her ersatz rescuer lifts her by the
throat and snaps her neck. As detective
Frank McCrae (Tom Atkins)
investigates, the victims of the Maniac
Cop (Robert Z’Dar) continue to
pile up.
The central idea behind William Lustig’s film is really
simplicity itself. In fact, it’s all
right there in the title, and this is one of the big appeals of the film: It is
plain in its intentions. This is a
quasi-Slasher about a maniac cop. It has
all of the puzzle pieces it needs, and it puts them all down in the proper
order, so the audience never completely has time or reason to question the
sillier aspects of anything that’s going on.
Add to that, good performances from solid character actors like Atkins, Bruce Campbell, and William
Smith, and the film becomes a nice bit of comfort viewing. Like a quiche at twenty-four
frames-per-second.
Of course, part of the simplicity
of why the film works also leads to its more interesting facets. At this point in time, the idea of the
vigilante cop and vigilantes in general were still very popular in cinema. The year before this film was released saw
the fourth installment in the Death Wish
series of films, and the same year as its release, the final Dirty Harry film, The Dead Pool, came out, just for two
examples. But what Maniac Cop does is turns these premises on their heads. Our antagonist still kills with impunity, but
he’s not cleaning up the streets from the scum of the Earth. No, he’s killing innocent people, and
inexorably he will turn on the brotherhood of which he at one time counted
himself a member. So, he’s sort of a
vigilante for evil (isn’t that a contradiction in terms?). Okay, you say, so he’s like every other
Slasher antagonist, hacking up people left, right, and center? Well, yes and no. He has the physical traits of a standard
slasher (imposing physique, seeming imperviousness to harm, relentless
tenacity), and his kills are set up and executed like vignettes with a gruesome
payout. But his initial victims are completely
unconnected and innocent. There is no
punishment of characters for having unmarried sex. There is no punishment of characters for
violating his territory. Cordell’s
victims are strictly victims. But what
they feel like in the terms of the film is practice for what is coming.
**POSSIBLE SPOILERS AHEAD**
**POSSIBLE SPOILERS AHEAD**
This kind of leads into another
element of the film. It is very much
concerned with ideas of betrayal. One of
our ostensible heroes is caught cheating on his estranged wife (Victoria Catlin) with our female lead (Laurene Landon). He is then accused of being the maniac cop,
thus creating a faux betrayal of the brotherhood of police. Cordell’s friend Sally (Sheree North) actually does betray the police, though she initially
has good intentions in what she does.
Cordell himself is a victim of betrayal by the police he had counted as
his brothers (though he was reputedly a bit of a gunslinger even before his
ordeal). But more than all that, at its
core, Maniac Cop is about the
betrayal of the public trust (see how it’s all right there in the title?). This is developed a bit in the story with a
scared citizenry shooting first and asking questions later (what Cordell was
accused of by some of his higher ups and colleagues). Yet, the filmmakers never take it all the way
to its logical conclusion, perhaps because of budget constraints, perhaps
because of genre constraints, I can’t say.
But it gets at a deeper concern
many people have. Can we really trust
the people with whom we’ve placed our security?
Who, after all, will guard the guards themselves? And how can you trust those guardians? Ideas of police brutality are tossed around, and
while the movie at the very least raises the questions, it also never really
answers them. Partly this is because to
do so would make a very good Action/Horror film into a pedantic philosophical
discussion. Partly this is because I
think Lustig, along with screenwriter/producer
Larry Cohen, has enough faith in the
audience to either know their feelings on the subject and even whether or not
they would care to consider it.
Consequently, they give the viewers the ingredients and the instructions
and leave the actual cooking up to the individual (another quiche
reference? How droll). Using straightforward direction as well as
some unobtrusive but still very impressive cinematography by Vincent J. Rabe (who only shot one
other film, unfortunately), the filmmakers produced an entertaining little film
that has something of a brain underneath, if you’re so inclined to dig that
deep. But you don’t have to in order to
enjoy it.
MVT: Lustig has always had a
very unpretentious hand behind the camera, and his direction works because it
doesn’t put on airs while simultaneously acknowledging that there is some
thought at play. It doesn’t pretend that
it’s more than it is, but it also doesn’t pretend it’s dumb.
Make Or Break: I think the
first kill scene does a fantastic job of setting up the premise and the
tone. It has an edge to it, some
unexpectedness (Cassie’s more of a badass than one would think at first blush),
and a nasty little ending. What more
could you ask of a film titled Maniac Cop?
Score: 7.25/10
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