There once was a man named Vladimir Koziakin, and about this man’s personal life I know very
little (read: nothing). What I do know
is that he produced one of the most entertaining, engrossing, and lovingly
remembered books of my youth. I’m of
course speaking of Movie Monster Mazes,
the 1976 tome that not only reinforced my love of monsters but also gave me new
creatures to track down (if only their films would play on one of our stations;
bear in mind this was back when we had maybe thirteen channels that could be
tuned in on our television, and you were subject to whatever their programmers
wanted to/could afford to run). The
premise is self-evident; there were fifty (“a panoramic journey through FIFTY
(not Forty-Nine) FIFTY Monstrous Mazes!”) puzzles in the shapes of different
cinematic fiends (as common as Godzilla,
as obscure as The Monster of Piedras
Blancas). The accuracy on a few of
the pieces would drive monster perfectionists insane (He spells Ghidorah as
“Gidra” and calls Ray Harryhausen’s
Ymir “Giant Ymu”), but I didn’t care. I
was too intent on running through the mazes (in pencil, of course, because the
book cost ninety-five cents [!], and it’s not as if the book was easy to come
by [that I recall]), erasing the lines, and doing it all over again (the
erasures made their own permanent paths on the paper after a while, but the
artwork was still attractive enough on its own to warrant paging through again
and again). There is a PDF of the book
you can find online, the great tragedy of which is that many of the mazes have
already been solved. I’ve made it my
mission in life to digitally remove all that and print each of these pieces to
do again (and to share them with my monster-loving godchild if I can get him to
lift his head up from his Nintendo DS or whatever the hell that thing is). It’s good to have goals. The relevance of this circuitous
circumnavigation to Bruno Mattei’s
(under the pseudonym of Bob Hunter) Cop Game (aka Cop Game: Giochi di Poliziotto), is that the film’s plot is so
convoluted, you’ll almost certainly need to use the rewind button (the modern
film viewer’s equivalent to a pencil eraser on a maze) to get all the way from
start to finish with some idea of the plot intact.
During the final days of the Vietnam War, officers are being
picked off one by one by former (maybe current?) members of the Cobra
Force. Enter special investigators
Morgan (Brent Huff) and Hawk (Max Laurel) who are charged with
getting to the bottom of this mess. And
they’re not afraid to break the rules in order to do it.
Post-Vietnam-War, movies set during almost any conflict tend
to have a very dim view of the governments who send the soldiers off to fight
in them as well as of war itself (though the latter notion in cinema has been
around for much longer, it rose in prevalence around the time of this war and
carried on ever after). Typically this
stink eye is focused on America, and there is far more anti-colonialist subtext
at work (and not wrongfully so in both regards, I think). Gone is the homogenized “rally round the
flag, boys” depiction and attitude of good men fighting the good fight for a
good reason. Having the bloody footage
of a war broadcast into homes on a daily basis not only peeled away the clean
cut façade of warfare and changed the public perception of the men and women
who fight, but it also forced filmmakers to steer toward more realistic
portrayals of war time, even when the stories were fantastic in nature. Things became grottier. Characters became less idealized, and many
began to lean far more to the dark side than to the light. Italian filmmakers, combining the neo-realist
movement developed and popularized by auteurs such as Vittorio De Sica and Roberto
Rossellini with the sensational, primal elements which would quickly
transform into a sleazy aura that became like a signature writ in giant,
glowing, neon letters for exploitation hounds the world over, tucked into this
new approach with gusto.
Naturally, different filmmakers achieve different levels of
success with this approach, and, if you know anything about Mattei you know he does his level best
to hit all the right notes, though rarely do his compositions orchestrate the
way I’m sure they were first envisioned.
I’m also quite confident that his motives were more monetary than
artistic, and I have zero problems with this.
So, we get a lot of exterior shots of the Philippines standing in for
Vietnam, and the footage from the streets adds the appropriate flavor to the
proceedings. The attitude is present with
Hawk telling Morgan that he comes “from a country of assholes,” that America is
“playing cowboys and Indians” in Vietnam, and most presciently, “After you get
back home, you will forget all about me.
But I will still be here, drowning in a sea of shit.” Shooman (Robert
Marius) commands the Cobra Force, and is alleged to have destroyed a
village full of women and children in bloodthirsty pursuit of the Viet Cong (a
trope of Vietnam War films inspired by the infamous My Lai Massacre in 1968).
Likewise, we get the populist components such as plentiful
gun fights, chases, and brawls. Hawk and
Morgan break a suspect’s fingers to get him to talk (in broad daylight and full
view of anyone wandering by). What feels
like a large chunk of run time takes place intercutting back and forth to
scenes in a strip club (with French cut bikini bottoms and fashionably torn
half shirts aplenty, but somehow no nudity) which feels more Eighties than
anything else in this film, barring Huff’s
dangly left earring. Morgan and Hawk are
flippant to their direct superior Captain Kirk (yes, really, and played by the
late, great Romano Puppo) and
everyone else they encounter, dress exclusively in street clothes, and don’t
give shit one about any collateral damage they cause while doing their
job. The film does manage to balance
these two perspectives (gritty, yet overwrought) fairly well, but it also piles
on plot points nigh unto the breaking point.
In fact, once you add on the idea that a Russian spy named Vladimir has
infiltrated the American armed forces, may or may not be a heroin dealer, and
may or may not have had a hand in or is just spreading rumors about the village
massacre and what any of this has to do with the initial murders, your head
will be spinning, especially since the filmmakers don’t care about connecting
scenes or ideas until it’s absolutely necessary. Luckily, the aspects of the film that work (Mattei knows his way around action
sequences, and there is a quasi-Noir angle that I enjoyed) do so well enough
that the labyrinthine story and the writhing the script has to do in order to
attempt resolving it become like frosting on the multi-flavored layer cake that
is Cop Game.
MVT: Huff
loves giving everybody guff (yes, I made this sentence rhyme; sue me). He is jaw-clenchingly anti-everything, so
much of the joy in watching his character do his thing lies in how relentlessly
hard-headed he is in every single way.
Make or Break: Without giving away exactly why it’s so
outstanding, there is a car chase in this film that I would attest can stand up
to any in the history of cinema. Okay,
that’s an outright lie, but it’s so much damned fun, I couldn’t help loving every
second of it.
Score: 6.5/10
No comments:
Post a Comment