William Lustig and Larry Cohen's 1990 Direct-to-Video Sequel Maniac Cop is a Masterpiece of Sleaze and Sin
Welcome, friends, to the latest entry in Control Nathan Rabin 4.0. It’s the career and site-sustaining column that gives YOU, the kindly, Christ-like, unbelievably sexy Nathan Rabin’s Happy Place patron, an opportunity to choose a movie that I must watch, and then write about, in exchange for a one-time, one hundred dollar pledge to the site’s Patreon account. The price goes down to seventy-five dollars for all subsequent choices.
Sometimes you have an idea about something and the reality is infinitely more exquisite than you could possibly have imagined. That’s how I feel about 1990’s Maniac Cop 2.
I have long been fascinated by the Maniac Cop series. It’s a strange obsession that began in my teenage years when I would gaze with morbid fascination at the impossibly lurid covers of the Maniac Cop trilogy at the video store where I was first a customer and then an employee.
Yet that fascination inexplicably never led to me actually watching any of the movies. So you can only imagine how excited I was when a patron chose Maniac Cop 2 for Control Nathan Rabin 4.0. Now I had to watch Maniac Cop 2. It was a solemn professional obligation.
So last night I watched my first Maniac Cop movie. It was a religious experience. I was transfixed. If I were a working film critic when the film was released it would have easily made my top ten list even though it went direct-to-video and consequently robbed audiences of the communal ecstasy of getting to see Maniac Cop 2 in a packed theater full of adoring fans.
The ideal way to see Maniac Cop 2 would be in a Times Square porno theater in 1990 or a drive-in somewhere deep in the South. It is a masterpiece of sleaze and degradation that makes you feel dirty in the best possible way.
Maniac Cop 2 begins at 11 and maintains that level of lurid intensity until the last frame. Maniac Cop 2 opens with an adrenaline-pumping scene from the climax of Maniac Cop where Officer Jack W. Forrest Jr. (Bruce Campbell, in a role that inexplicably filled him with shame) is clinging for dear life to the side of a van driven by Matt Cordell, AKA the Maniac Cop (Robert Z’Dar), a hulking, undead police officer who returned from the grave to seek revenge on the people who framed him.
The revenge-crazed monster is impaled with a pipe and the van plunges into the river. This should kill Officer Matt Cordell but he was already dead well before he got into that van. How do you kill the already dead?
Unfortunately for the people of a gloriously grungy pre-Giuliani New York, where there seems to be a rat, a rapist and a killer cop around every corner, Matt's watery excursion barely slowed him down.
Matt steals a car and resumes his murder spree. Matt Cordell deserves a place in the horror movie pantheon as one of the all-time great slasher movie villains. Robert Z’Dar was a large man with an even larger chin.
Z’Dar would not need make-up to play a Dick Tracy villain. The cult actor with the face even a mother couldn't love gives Cordell an unrelenting forward momentum not unlike Arnold Schwarzenegger in The Terminator.
The titular bad guy doesn’t make jokes. He doesn't wisecrack. There’s nothing campy about him. He doesn’t even talk. He just kills and kills and kills again with no remorse or regret.
Z’Dar throws around grown men and women like they’re rag dolls. He's an evil Incredible Hulk focussed monomaniacally on revenge.
Lustig frequently shoots the character so that we don’t see his face. Instead he’ll focus on Cordell ominously toying with a night stick with a blade inside or on his enormous muscles just barely contained by a tight police uniform.
As a countercultural smartass with a distinct satirical streak Cohen understood that nothing is scarier than corrupt authority. What could be more terrifying than a profession where you get to kill people as part of your day to day job?
Matthew Cordell is a wild card. He wears a cop uniform to lull the public and police officers into a false sense of security and also because doing so more or less gives you a license to kill indiscriminately even if you are not an undead serial killer.
The Maniac Cop swaggers silently into already fraught situations but instead of punishing criminals he murders police officers and the victims of crime.
Campbell’s Officer Jack W. Forrest Jr. thinks that the Maniac Cop is dead and consequently can’t hurt him anymore but his colleague Theresa Mallory (Laurene Landon) realizes that he’s still out there killing police officers and also innocent people.
Campbell, who was prominently billed for a role that barely qualifies as a cameo, is murdered by the Maniac Cop. Theresa, meanwhile, goes on a trash television show to warn the public of the dangers posed by an undead police officer on a prolific posthumous murder spree.
The trash TV host was initially supposed to be played by Robert Downey Sr. but after he dropped out Charles Napier secured the role. Maniac Cop 2 has an incredible cast for a direct-to-video sequel to a movie called Maniac Cop. In addition to Campbell, Napier and Z’Dar, the film costars Clarence Williams III, Michael Lerner as a corrupt Deputy Commissioner, Robert Davi, Sam Raimi, Danny Trejo and Leo Rossi as Steven Turkell, a serial killer of sex workers with a thick beard and mountain man vibe.
Maniac Cop 2 could have been even more star-studded but Joe Spinell, Lustig’s original choice for the role of Steven Turkell, died before the film could be made.
Russo does a fine job playing a man so disgusting and depraved that he makes the Maniac Cop look like Mister Rogers by comparison but it would have been amazing to see a film pairing the star of Lustig’s career-making 1980 cult film Maniac and the Maniac Cop in the same movie. Z’Dar and Spinnell would have been the ultimate b-movie dream team, or rather a nightmare duo.
Cohen’s script, which should have won an Oscar and Nobel Prize but had to settle for a Fangoria Chainsaw Award nomination for Best Screenplay, ingeniously has the Maniac Cop team up with another prolific killer of New Yorkers. Maniac Cop 2 is consequently maybe the darkest and most violent buddy movie ever made.
The Maniac Cop isn’t much of a talker, in the sense that he’s essentially mute but that doesn’t keep him from bonding with Steven over their shared love of killing people and hatred of police officers.
The zombie police officer and his serial killer friend team up with a crazed killer played brilliantly by Williams III and head back to prison to liberate other crazed killers.
Lustig doles out shots of the Maniac Cop’s face, which is a ghoulish grey mask covered with scars from when Cordell was brutally murdered in prison, stingily. The character’s impressive make-up and costume design consequently never lose their impact. We never get used to his face or his singularly sinister presence.
Just when it seems like Maniac Cop 2 cannot get any more badass it sets the Maniac Cop on fire. I am a sucker for any movie that sets a stuntman on fire for any period of time.
There's something about seeing someone on fire that brings out the kid in me. The morbid, creepy, borderline sociopathic child within.
Usually when a stuntman is set on fire it’s for a very short amount of time because it’s dangerous and expensive. Also people tend to die pretty quickly when their entire body is engulfed in flames.
That is not the case with Maniac Cop 2. Poor Matt Cordell isn’t on fire for a couple of seconds; it feels like he’s on fire for a couple of minutes, if not a couple of hours.
He’s on fire!
Seeing someone on fire, even in a fictional context, does something to our brains. It doesn’t matter how jaded we might be: when you see another human being on fire you worry about them. This is true even if the person on fire is a murderous monster.
Maniac Cop 2 feels dangerous. It has the unhinged air of a production where actors and stuntmen risked their lives unnecessarily for the sake of great art and also transcendent sleaze.
Unfortunately that turned out to be true. According to the IMDB, Claudia Christian, who plays a police psychologist who tangles with the Maniac Cop and his new pal, was three months pregnant when she filmed a thrilling sequence where she’s handcuffed to a moving car and suffered a miscarriage that shut down production.
The actress apparently had not told the filmmakers that she was pregnant but that doesn’t make her experience any less tragic or horrifying.
Maniac Cop 2 is a b movie on the edge, a dodgy endeavor that captures everything that was wonderful and horrible and sleazy and irresistible about New York before Giuliani ruined the place by snuffing out the crime that gave it its special texture and flavor.
Lustig’s lurid masterpiece is a product of its time but it also feels prescient. Before A.C.A.B, Maniac Cop proposed that All Cops Are Maniacs.
It seems like the kind of thing that Nicolas Winding-Refn would want to remake because it is something he’s tried to remake, both as a feature film and a limited series.
Winding-Refn’s remake seems stuck in development hell. That’s too bad, as this story has all sorts of contemporary relevance but you cannot improve on perfection and in its own way Maniac Cop 2 is perfect.
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