William Lustig disappeared a few years after the premiere of ‘Vigilante’, a film that ended up raising just over 5 million dollars in North American territory, not bad for a film that surely cost much less. With renewed energy and a script and production by his colleague Larry Cohen, Lustig returned in 1988 with ‘Maniac Cop’, all a classic from the 80s.
The policeman who did not want to die
With an eighties tinkerbell cast of Tom Atkins, Bruce Campbell, Laurene Landon, Richard Roundtree and Robert Z’Dar, (or Jake LaMotta’s cameo) ‘Maniac Cop’ had a million dollar budget and the usual drive to its screenwriter and director of stick your finger in the sore in the most explicit way possible. To do this, nothing better than to give the role of Matt Cordell, the maniac policeman, to the great Robert Z’Dar.
PIVOT
The actor was a singer, keyboardist and guitarist for Nova Express, a Chicago band that came to act as the opening act for Jefferson Airplane, The Who or The Electric Prunes. To round out the most eclectic resume possible, Z’Dar also served as a Chicago police officer and Chippendales dancer. His physical presence was ideal for the role of an exemplary policeman with unfinished business post mortem. His relevance as a serial killer, without being on a par with other contemporary iconic figures, deserves to be among the greatest.
Who was never very satisfied with his involvement in the film was the star of ‘Infernal Possession’. Bruce Campbell has always insisted that this was nothing more than a nutritional job and the poor quality of the film. It’s still surprising today that someone with Campbell’s career denies one of the coolest movies he’s been involved in. out of your comfort zone with Sam Raimi. His character, an especially bastard and miserable antihero, may have something to do with the star’s hatred of a movie far above almost all the things he usually gets into. Mind you: participate in the bluray audio commentary, so it won’t be that bad, huh, Bruce?
Speaking of the director of ‘Darkman’, three cameras were hired to film the film’s St. Patrick’s Day parade before production began. Raimi filmed some of the images, which were shown to investors to secure the money needed to make the film. In addition, we will also be able to see a very cute Raimi as an informative presenter at the foot of the street, in the middle of the parade.
The infernal trident formed by Glickenhaus (producer and director of the no less mythical ‘The Exterminator’), Cohen and Lustig (who returns to be a hotel manager), cooked in the same kitchen of hell, puts the director on a tray with an ideal vehicle for your planning between seedy hotels and tight alleys around the missing towers city guide.
‘Maniac Cop’ is a very funny and very poisonous slasher that, unfortunately, will always have a significant current load.
A citizenry terrified of manic police officers who feel safer shooting the heads of officials of order than by obeying his orders. Genius. Visionary.
The day after
Despite its short duration, the sequel ‘Maniac Cop 2’ has no qualms about starting by repeating the climax of the original film. Two years later they would return the next day. Cohen & Lustig returned with their ‘Mad Max 2’, their ‘Evil Dead 2 ‘ and, in a way, his ‘Terminator 2’. An improved sequel / remake, hypervitaminPowerful packaging and a couple of great script ideas. Someday, in time, it would be nice to collect all the shitty hotels that appear in Lustig’s movies. Surely some of your most screwed up ideas came out of one of those rooms.
But there are only good ideas here. Ideas that could make filmmakers the likes of James Cameron pale. Because Lustig’s staging leaves memorable paintings. That diabolical Cordell, already transformed into a beast, returning the bullets to the officers from the target practice or the assault on the police station is much more than simple action cinema series b: it is film of many carats.
But not only will the climax of the first part be repeated. The prison sequence, a horrible nightmare that we can almost see, returns to make the viewer uncomfortable again. But it does not do it for its own sake. The climax of ‘Maniac Cop’ takes place in the place where the monster was created. Cordell continues his revenge against the system that made him what he is, but he also needs to put things right in the showers that saw him (not) die.
It is not that I am clear that we are facing the best film of its director. Lustig himself is sure of it: “I consider ‘Maniac Cop 2’ as my best film. It was the film in which I felt how my team and I were doing something at full speed. And I think we did an excellent b series“.
To finish off the great task that this sequel is, the script also offers great flashes of brilliance with the strangler subplot, where Leo Rossi steals the role with that kind of mini-Frankenstein that he stars together with the sad monster. Rossi, who will later embroider his role in the sensational ‘Outside of himself, without rest‘, he was left with a role that was going to go to Joe Spinell. Unfortunately the star of ‘Maniac’ passed away before the filming of a film dedicated to his memory.
‘Maniac Cop 2’ is an excellent sequel which showed that not all the second parts are bad: some are even much better. Robert Davi was left with the position of detective hero in hat and coat, making the good guys forget, if there were any, from the first part.
Black magic
Directed by Alan Smithee. That can give you an idea of what is behind the chaotic production of the last installment of the saga. Cohen and Lustig had a script written where a black detective investigated murders in a Harlem hospital. With the production underway, the international investors who would be indispensable to finish the film decided that the protagonist should be the one from the previous installment. Robert Davi or there was no movie.
Thus, Lustig came across a script that made no sense. Larry Cohen refused to rewrite the script unless he was paid for the additional work, but the producers refused to do so. As a result, the director had to improvise and remove scenes from the script, reaching a point where all the scenes that could be shot were filmed and the rest were scrapped. The result was a 51 minute cut. With Lustig and Cohen gone, the film was completed with Joel Soisson in the director’s chair. I guess the shots with Ted Raimi as a news anchor and Robert Forster always up for a jerk will be shot under Lustig’s orders.
Despite the chaos, ‘Maniac Cop 3’ is a funny voodoo holding from the original myth with highly accentuated Promethean forms. If already in the second installment those Frankenstian ways were intuited with the relationship between Cordell and the psychopath played by Leo Rossi, those reflections advance one step further to the point of looking for a girlfriend for the crazy super cop.
Somehow the movie had to end, of course. The result is, logically, the least personal of the three, but that momentary mad shitty air and the change of register make ‘Maniac Cop 3’ a ideal complement for a night grindhouse which also includes a couple of anthological sequences.
The nightmarish wedding of the police officer who starts the plot, where the guests and the photography turn the scene into a suffocating experience, or the final chase, with a villain engulfed in flames speeding down the freeway, magnify a much smaller and more troublesome film than meets the eye.