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Before I get into the movie, I need to tell you about my Aunt Lou and Uncle Kurt. I talked about my uncle once before, the one who watched me tongue Fireball Island’s Idol one Christmas. They’re also the ones who gave us the Christmas Box I talked about in that article, tricking me and my brothers into accepting an ugly ceramic elephant table one year. Something I didn’t tell is that they, especially Aunt Lou, did not give a care. They kept a Playboy magazine in their living room because the cover girl was the daughter of one of their friends. They had a file cabinet, one of the big 5-drawer types, full of dirty jokes, like multiple photocopies of a crudely drawn Mickey Mouse flipping the bird with a rude poem. We loved going there; it was a kid’s dream come true when we stayed with them because we felt like we were always getting away with something. Uncle Kurt had kids from a prior marriage, but Aunt Lou never had kids of her own, so the three of us were the closest she had. She’d let us do whatever we wanted, which included renting movies we never should have been able to.
On one particular trip to the video store, the three of us were told to pick out one video each. My older brother, who had just entered his teens, picked Candid Candid Camera, a version of the classic television show that included a ton of nudity, like a girl whose dress would fall off whenever she sneezed. My younger brother picked House, and I picked probably the most generic scary movie I could find, Maniac Cop.
The movie starts with an officer getting dressed in uniform with an extreme close-up, focusing on each button, belt buckle, handcuffs, and night stick as the opening credits roll. We switch to a bar as one of the servers goes home for the night, getting hit on by everyone she passes on the way out. She walks down the street and is immediately accosted by two thugs trying to steal her purse. She fights them off and runs to a cop for help. Instead of helping, though, he picks her up and breaks her neck without saying a word.
By this point, little me was crying for my aunt to turn the movie off and return it. I’m pretty sure she laughed at my panic. In the ensuing forty years, I have never gone back to watch the movie, but just like with Chopping Mall last time, I’m going to fix that now.
Maniac Cop was released in 1988 and stars Tom Atkins as Detective McCrae, determined to find the killer officer, never doubting it’s actually a cop doing the murders, like he had the script all along. He and his partner, Lovejoy, go to the saddest looking morgue I’ve ever seen in a movie (seriously, it looks like a garage with medical posters tacked up). Lovejoy almost hurls as the coroner says the woman’s neck was broken and her larynx was crushed. “Head’s just floppy,” he says.
Meeting with Commissioner Pike (played by Richard “Shaft” Roundtree no less), he says he’s positive a cop did the murder but we don’t really see why he’s so sure, all we hear is that he tried to kill himself a few years ago when his partner died in the line of duty and should see a shrink or retire already. McCrae’s told he never smiles anymore and does a worse impression of a smile than Arnie in T2. After being ordered to keep the story under wraps, McCrae goes directly to a reporter friend and tells her to play the story. She says, “Maniac Cop?” We have a title! As the story goes out, people are terrified of the cops (even more than usual), and one lady even blows a cop’s brains out when he was trying to help her with her car.
We see another close-up of an officer getting dressed in a different uniform while the officer’s wife clips articles about the murders into a scrapbook. She thinks it might be her husband, Jack Forrest, played by Bruce Campbell in a surprisingly serious role one year after Evil Dead 2 came out (he says he only did it because he needed the money). She suspects him because he’s always working night shifts, but when she follows him on shift one night, she finds him in a hotel room with another woman. Whew, it’s just an affair! Even if he’s not the murderer, she pulls a gun on them anyway before running away, only to be caught by the actual Maniac Cop.
After having killed numerous random people - a driver whose throat he slashed during a sobriety test and a musician he drowns in wet cement - the murder of Jack’s wife puts Jack squarely in the sights of his Captain. Jack is thrown in jail and interviewed by the Captain and McCrae. The Captain is sure Jack did it because they found his wife’s scrapbook. McCrae isn’t convinced, especially after learning the other woman is another officer, Theresa Mallory. McCrae goes to talk to her during a prostitution sting, and right on time, because she’s attacked by the Maniac Cop as well. He takes a boatload of lead from the two officers without showing any damage but disappears like a ghost when they run out of bullets. They suspect someone from inside the force is controlling him, and there’s only one other person at the station who knew about Jack and Theresa’s affair.
McCrae goes to speak with Sally, another officer stuck in records after sustaining an injury and walking with a leg brace and a cane. After an awkward conversation, he follows her to the docks, where she speaks to the Maniac like a doting girlfriend. The titular character is former super-cop Matt Cordell, played by Robert Z’Dar, the only man in Hollywood with a chin that could challenge Campbell’s. Sally says that Matt was brought back to get revenge on the Commissioner and mayor who threw him in jail.
We then see one of the oddest scenes I’ve ever watched in a movie, with Cordell lying down in full uniform, looking at the moon and remembering his arrest and subsequent murder in prison, all while creepy children’s music plays. The disconnect between seeing a naked Z’Dar fighting guys in a shower and a soundtrack like a messed-up Jack-in-the-Box made me feel just weird watching it, like we’re supposed to feel so sorry for this guy who killed a woman begging for help less than an hour ago.
Theresa and McCrae visit Jack in prison at the same time as Cordell and Sally do. Cordell goes on a killing spree, hanging cops from the ceiling with their handcuffs and beating other officers to death. Sally tries to stop him, and he kills her as well before throwing McCrae from a window, crashing on top of a cab right next to an escaping Jack and Theresa. Two thirds of the movie in, and top billing’s already dead? It took 20 minutes before Bruce even showed up!
Jack and Theresa go to Sing Sing to find out what happened to Cordell in prison. The coroner there says his body was claimed by Sally because it turns out Cordell wasn’t even dead! Even after his attack, he had a pulse, but he was severely brain-damaged. So he’s not some ghost resurrected for revenge, but I’m pretty sure brain damage doesn’t stop bullets from hurting you. The movie only shows shots to his chest earlier, but Theresa swears she shot him in the face twice. I’m actually disappointed that he wasn’t some undead monster, risen from the grave to get his revenge.
As they leave the prison, we find out it’s St. Patrick’s Day! The mayor, the Commissioner, and half the remaining police force will be in the parade, and you know Cordell will be there too. Sam Raimi, not the director, writer, or any other way attached to the film, cameos as a reporter, sharing that the cops have received numerous threats from the public over the Maniac Cop’s murders. Theresa tells the Commissioner and Captain about Cordell, but they still believe Jack did it and she helped. They have her arrested, and on the way to the parade, they’re both killed by Cordell in the elevator. Cordell follows it up by stabbing the officer who cuffed Theresa but letting her drag the dead cop down the hallway before trying to kill her too.
Theresa escapes onto a roof, while Jack is captured by the other cops and tossed in a wagon. Cordell somehow teleports to the ground and steals the vehicle with Jack in it, driving like crazy. Most of the time we’ve seen him, he’s been Frankenstein levels of slow but now he’s a Miami Vice speedster. Kinda weird, but worth it to see Bruce Campbell be thrown around the back of the truck like they’re going for something from Evil Dead 2.
They end up back at the docks, and Cordell hacks into the truck with an axe to kill Jack. We finally get a good look at the "undead" cop, and he nasty, especially his teeth! Cordell tosses Jack around before jumping into the wagon again to get away when he hears sirens. A bunch of cops didn’t scare him at the jail, so I don’t know why they would now. He drives straight into a pipe, impaling himself and crashing into the water. The vehicle is brought up from the deep, but Cordell is nowhere inside - instead, his hand comes up out of the water, and credits roll with that same creepy music from the prison scene.
Is Maniac Cop the terrifying movie I thought it was when I was 7 or 8? Maybe - the murders get a little more grizzly after “Head’s just floppy,” especially the massacre in the jail with cops hanging from the rafters and in piles on the floor. Does the movie make sense? Not really. Matt Cordell is described as a great cop, McCrae even called him his hero, even if he was so brutal that he was sent to prison to hide his record by the Mayor and the Commissioner. So why does he start his revenge rampage by killing innocent people? He’s sent after Jack and Theresa by his old girlfriend Sally for having an affair, but why would he kill a ton of good cops to get to them? Even if the story doesn’t make a lot of sense, it did well enough to spawn two direct-to-video sequels with Z’Dar returning to play Cordell both times. A good cop’s work is never done.
All three Maniac Cop movies are available to watch on Amazon Prime.
Elfi Santa
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