Men on Fire: Maniac Cop 2 and the Human Cost of Awesomeness
Steven Soderbergh recently paid reverent tribute to one of the all-time great action directors when he gushed of George Miller and Mad Max: Fury Road, “The ability to stage well is a skill and a talent that I value above almost everything else. And I say that because there are people who do it better than I’ll ever be able to do it after 40 years of active study. I just watched Mad Max: Fury Road again last week, and I tell you I couldn’t direct 30 seconds of that. I’d put a gun in my mouth. I don’t understand how [George Miller] does that, I really don’t, and it’s my job to understand it. I don’t understand two things: I don’t understand how they’re not still shooting that film, and I don’t understand how hundreds of people aren’t dead.”
I’d heard lukewarm things about Mad Max: Fury Road. Many people thought it was the greatest film ever made, but there was a vocal contingent of skeptics who insisted that it was only the greatest action movie of all time.
I know how Soderbergh feels because I feel that way about William Lustig and Maniac Cop 2. Watching the Larry Cohen-penned cult classic, I found myself thinking that the production was so authentically sleazy that someone probably died in its making.
Depending on when you think life begins, I may very well have been right.
Maniac Cop 2 is so wonderfully sordid that it feels like they decided to save money by using real weapons instead of props. It feels dirty and depraved and utterly unhinged in the best sense.
It’s such a transcendently trashy movie that I would be legimately disappointed if they actually got permits to film in various locations.
Researching and writing The Fractured Mirror, my upcoming book about American movies about filmmaking, I fell in love with stuntmen and women as a profession and the glorious subgenre of movies about stuntmen.
I appreciate the courage of all stuntpeople, but there is one kind of stuntman or stuntwoman that I prize above all others. That is the stuntman or stuntwoman who gets paid a considerable amount of money to be set on fire for our amusement.
There’s no substitute for putting a stunt person in layer upon layer of flame retardant gear and then setting that motherfucker on fire for sick thrills.
It’s strange. I genuinely think that children and animals should not be in entertainment because of the way that they are abused and mistreated. I’d much rather have an unrealistic CGI orangutan as a protagonist than a real primate who has been “trained “ to act through physical abuse.
I am similarly of the mindset that child acting is almost irrevocably scarring and that the vast majority of child actors have some sort of trauma.
Yet I don’t have any problem with people being set on fire as long as they are professional adults in a controlled environment. There’s just something about seeing someone genuinely on fire that brings out the little kid in me.
It may not be my favorite form of cinematic spectacle but it’s up there.
One of the things that I loved about Maniac Cop 2 is that they set people on fire repeatedly to great effect. Most shots of stunt people on fire are very short for very understandable reasons. If a stunt person is on fire too long, there’s a pretty good chance they’ll sustain serious injury.
Maniac Cop 2 has flaming stunt people of great quality and quantity. The stuntpeople in it damn near run an entire marathon while on fire.
In the end, however, it was not a stunt person who suffered the greatest injury during the filming of Maniac Cop 2 but rather its lead actress.
Claudia Christian apparently did not inform the makers of Maniac Cop 2 that she was three months pregnant, and she had a miscarriage while performing a stunt where her character is handcuffed to a moving car.
I don’t know why a stunt-woman couldn’t have handled this sequence instead of one of its lead actors, but it does add to the sense that there is something dangerous, even sinister, about this grindhouse classic.
According to the IMDB movie trivia, Lustig set his own arm on fire to convince actor Leo Russi to let his arm be set ablaze during the film’s climax.
So, if Maniac 2 feels dangerous and extreme, that’s probably because the filming was dangerous to the point of being wildly irresponsible. A lot of people endured a lot of pain on the set of Maniac Cop 2 for our sordid pleasure.
Was it worth it? I don't know. See Maniac Cop 2 and judge for yourself. It is a unique motion picture in many ways, some of them deeply unfortunate.
Nathan needs teeth that work, and his dental plan doesn't cover them, so he started a GoFundMe at https://www.gofundme.com/f/support-nathans-journey-to-dental-implants. Give if you can!
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