Cody starts the Halloween season with Matt Cordell, New England cannibals, a strange corpse, and culture shock.
MANIAC COP 3: BADGE OF SILENCE (1993)
NYPD police officer Matt Cordell (Robert Z'Dar) was a good but overzealous cop. When he was busted for violating the rights of suspects he was sent to a prison packed with criminals he had sent away. So of course, he was brutally murdered there. In Maniac Cop and Maniac Cop 2, Cordell rose from the grave to kill everyone responsible for his death, from city officials to those criminals who were still behind bars. With his mission accomplished, and with detective Sean McKinney (Robert Davi) making sure the dead-again Cordell was buried with honors, it seemed like the "maniac cop" might be able to accept death and rest in peace at the end of part 2... But anyone who saw Cordell's hand bust through this coffin lid at the end of that film knew that wasn't the case.
That's because a voodoo practitioner named Houngan (Julius Harris) decided he needed to raise Cordell from the grave so he can continue fighting injustice. Who could have predicted that? No one ever expects resurrection by voodoo.
Since Cordell's story was wrapped up, Maniac Cop 3 has to drop him into the middle of a new story. This one concerns police officer Katie Sullivan (Gretchen Becker), a dear friend of McKinney's who has recently gotten in trouble - and earned the nickname "Maniac Kate" - for the use of excessive force. Sullivan's reputation is further sullied when her attempt to stop a pharmacy robbery being committed by over-the-top junkie Frank Jessup (Jackie Earle Haley) goes terribly wrong, leaving Jessup and Sullivan both hospitalized with gunshot wounds. It's even worse for Jessup. She ends up in a coma that smarmy Doctor Myerson (Doug Savant) doesn't think she'll ever come out of. Even while she's on life support, she's criticized for the way she handled the robbery. Cordell becomes enamored with the comatose Sullivan and sets out to protect her and improve her reputation.
That means Cordell starts killing people or setting them up to be killed. People like a couple guys he overhears mocking Sullivan, the doctor who gives a negative prognosis, the doctor who discusses taking her off life support, the newshounds who shot footage showing how things really went down in the pharmacy, and of course Jessup. Cordell and Houngan hang out in a church (the church from John Carpenter's Prince of Darkness, to be exact) that happens to be connected to the hospital Sullivan is in through an underground tunnel, so that makes it easier for him to get around during all this.
Meanwhile McKinney is worrying about Sullivan, figuring out that Cordell is alive again, and striking up a romance with Doctor Susan Fowler (Class of 1999 II's Caitlin Dulany).
The first Maniac Cop was awesome and Maniac Cop 2 was even better, but Maniac Cop 3 turned out to be a mess, and I'm not sure why. Not even after watching the 25 minute "making of" retrospective that's included on the Blu-ray/DVD combo that was released by Blue Underground. All I could really glean is that, even though the cast had a good time working on the movie, it seemed like director William Lustig and writer Larry Cohen lost any passion for the project almost immediately after pitching it as a Maniac Cop version of The Bride of Frankenstein to producer Joel Soisson.
Cohen had initially written a script that was set in Harlem and would have had an African-American detective in the lead role. When the idea of an African-American lead wasn't enthusiastically received by distributors in some territories and financiers expressed a desire to bring Robert Davi back from Maniac Cop 2, the script needed a substantial rewrite. One that was never fully turned in, requiring Soisson (who had worked on A Nightmare on Elm Street 2: Freddy's Revenge and co-written the 1986 classic Trick or Treat) to fill in the blanks. Cohen had wanted Cordell's comatose love interest to be Laurene Landon's character from the first two movies, but Lustig wasn't into that idea - and I don't really see how it could have worked, since Cordell was the person who attacked her (and killed her, in part 2, instead of putting her in a coma) in the first place.
Lustig admits that he was reluctant to make a third Maniac Cop to begin with, and his displeasure with the situation was made clear when he turned in a 51 minute long rough cut of the film and, faced with adding several more scenes to expand the movie to a more acceptable length, decided to walk away from it. The movie ended up being about 85 minutes long due to extra scenes that were directed by Soisson.
Despite having a great cast bringing the characters to life - in addition to those mentioned above, Paul Gleason, Grand L. Bush, Robert Forster, and Ted Raimi also show up along the way - and the always appealing concept of the Maniac Cop killing people, the finished version of Maniac Cop 3 is a very bland movie and that feels like its just wandering from scene to scene. There is no sense of propulsion to the story, things just happen.
And yet, when I was around 10 years old I put together a horror marathon for my friends and of the three Maniac Cop movies I had to choose from, the one I picked to include in that marathon was Maniac Cop 3. What was I thinking? Never mind how underwhelming the first 70 minutes of the movie are, my entire focus was on how cool the last 15 minutes are. Within that stretch of the film, we're shown a car chase in which Cordell is pursuing a vehicle that McKinney and Fowler are in, and for this entire chase Cordell is fully engulfed in flames. All this time later, that remains an amazing sight to see, especially since it was accomplished in an era when all this stuff was being done for real by stunt performers.
That chase sequence is so good, it's a shame everything that leads up to it wasn't better. And it's a shame there was never a Maniac Cop 4, since the door was left wide open for one. It would have been easy for a part 4 to be better than part 3 is.
OFFSPRING (2009)
In 1980, the first novel by author Jack Ketchum was published. Titled Off Season, it blended elements of popular horror films of the era like Night of the Living Dead, The Hills Have Eyes, and The Last House on the Left to craft a very simple, straightforward story of a group of people getting together at an isolated cabin on the Maine coast and being attacked by a tribe of feral cannibals that live in a nearby cave. Famous for the passages where Ketchum delves into the gory details of what the cannibals do to the civilized folk, Off Season is crying out for a cinematic adaptation, and in the right hands it would make a hell of a movie. For some reason, an adaptation has never been made, even though there have been attempts to get one off the ground and The Hitcher / Near Dark screenwriter Eric Red has expressed interest in the project.
We don't have an Off Season movie, but we do have a movie based on the 1991 sequel novel Offspring, which was good but not nearly as good as Off Season. Directed by Andrew van den Houten with Ketchum handling the screenplay adaptation himself, Offspring brings the story of the novel to the screen so faithfully that there are references to the events of the Off Season story, which occurred eleven years earlier. When mutilated bodies start turning up in their jurisdiction, the police officers in this film react like, "Oh no, it's those cannibals again! Guess we didn't get them all last time." (Don't worry, that's not actual dialogue.) This is basically a sequel to a movie that still doesn't exist. The back story is that a lighthouse keeper and his family went missing back in the 1800s, apparently wiped out by storms and starvation after being trapped on their island. But no one realized that there was a survivor, a child driven mad by hunger, living in a cave on the lighthouse island. That child would later abduct another child to keep them company. And from those two children came this tribe, cannibals hiding from the outside world. Except when it comes time to hunt people. Some dialogue and the title sequence fill in the blanks well enough that you understand what's going on with these killers.
Offspring wasn't brought to the screen on the level that I would want to see Off Season made at. Something went wrong with the cinematography, because the movie isn't shot very well and the picture quality is surprisingly poor. It was shot on 16mm film, but there are times when I could have been convinced that it was standard definition DV. There are moments of bad sound to go along with it. Despite the picture quality, there were some shots in this movie that I loved, but that's entirely thanks to the filming location - a house that has a beautiful country view through its windows.
Some of the acting is just as dodgy, and the look of the cannibals is more likely to make you laugh than to make you scared. When they come busting into a house it should seem like something out of a terrible nightmare, but instead here it looks silly. When they tear into people, it's meant to be gross but doesn't look very convincing.
The bright spot among the cannibals is Pollyanna McIntosh, who turns in a strong performance as the one called "Woman", even though the cannibals speak in a language they have made up for themselves. As it turns out, Offspring was the first entry in a franchise that revolves around McIntosh, and it's easy to understand how that happened.
The story involves a couple named Amy (played by Amy Hargreaves of Brainscan and Super Dark Times, who's always a welcome presence in a film) and David (Andrew Elvis Miller), the parents of a baby. Their friend Claire (Ahna Tessler) has just served divorce papers to her off-kilter husband Stephen (Erick Kastel), and comes to visit Amy and David during this tough time, with her young son Luke (Tommy Nelson) in tow. There's a sense that Stephen may be dangerous, Claire has a restraining order against him, so it's disturbing news when the group hears that Stephen is coming over to talk to Claire. As far as they're concerned, Stephen is the greatest threat to their safety.
Then the cannibals arrive, with the intention of killing and eating everyone except the baby, which they plan to keep and raise as one of their own. Meanwhile, a group of police officers are searching for the cannibals, led by Black Christmas's Art Hindle as someone who has experience facing these maniacs (this character was also in Off Season).
I have issues with the presentation, but Ketchum provided a solid enough foundation that Offspring is still a decent viewing experience. It could have been much better, but still managed to get a franchise started, and the hope remains that someday an Off Season movie will get made and become a new classic.
THE AUTOPSY OF JANE DOE (2016)
I'm not the type of horror fan who thinks a movie needs to be gory to be good, although gore can certainly be a lot of fun sometimes. On occasion, gore can even make a film more effectively troubling. For example, Re-Animator can be downright disgusting at times, and the movie is all the better for it. I would say the same for The Autopsy of Jane Doe - and I suppose Re-Animator came to mind before because a good portion of the movie takes place in a morgue, and The Autopsy of Jane Doe is set almost entirely in a morgue.
Directed by André Øvredal from a script by Ian Goldberg and Richard Naing (who also wrote a rejected draft of an unmade Friday the 13th film a few years back), The Autopsy of Jane Doe delivers exactly what the title promises. We're basically shown the entire autopsy of an unidentified woman, with some incredible special effects work allowing Øvredal to show this autopsy in nauseating detail. Performing the autopsy are coroner Tommy Tilden (Brian Cox) and his son Austin (Emile Hirsch), a certified medical technician, and the work is being done in the basement of the Tilden Morgue and Crematorium, which was established a hundred years ago. This has been the Tilden family business for generations, and Tommy has been at it for so long that he has seen everything... But he hasn't seen anything like this Jane Doe before.
There is a lot of gore in this movie, but that's not what it's all about. There is something very strange going on with this corpse. When she is opened up, there are signs of severe trauma that left no marks on the exterior of her body. She has a substance under her nails that can't be found in the area of the Tilden business. Same goes for the flower that is found in her digestive system - along with a piece of cloth that has strange writing on it and is wrapped around a tooth that was pulled from the woman's mouth. The more Tommy and Austin learn about this woman, the more it becomes clear that there is a supernatural force at work here.
That supernatural force soon traps the Tildens in the morgue for a night of horror.
The Autopsy of Jane Doe is creepy and gross, and I was captivated by it, anxious to see what was going to happen next and how it was going to be explained. This is a really good horror movie, but you'll have to have a strong stomach to endure it.
INTO THE DARK: CULTURE SHOCK (2019)
One reason why I have enjoyed the Hulu / Blumhouse horror anthology series Into the Dark so much is because it reminds me of the good old days of tuning in to watch a different horror anthology show, Masters of Horror, on Showtime. I equate Into the Dark with Masters of Horror more than other shows like Tales from the Crypt because they both have feature length "episodes"; and while MOH installments would top out around 60 minutes, entries in the Into the Dark series strive for 80 minutes or more. Director Gigi Saul Guerrero's Culture Shock is an Into the Dark movie that's reminiscent of Masters of Horror in another way. Like Joe Dante went political with his Masters of Horror movie Homecoming, which first aired in 2005 and was about American soldiers who were killed in a questionable war rising from the dead to vote out the presidential administration that had started the war, Into the Dark goes political with Culture Shock.
Into the Dark movies were released on a monthly basis and each one has something to do with a holiday or notable date in the month of its release. Culture Shock made its Hulu premiere in July, so it takes inspiration from Independence Day to tell a story of migrants from Mexico and points further south as they make a desperate journey toward the American border. Once they reach the border, they appear to get dropped right into the American dream, finding themselves residents in a perfect little community where everyone is smiling and happy, our heroine is dressed in a different shade of pastel every day, and plans are being in set in motion for a big 4th of July celebration. But "American dream" is a very accurate description for this place, because there's no way what's going on in this town can be real.
Like Homecoming was a great political horror story for its time, Culture Shock - which was scripted by Guerrero, Efrén Hernández, and James Benson - is a great political horror story for 2019, dealing with the humanitarian crisis at the southern border of the United States and putting a genre twist on the sort of appalling, horrific things that have truly occurred at immigrant detainment centers.
The cast, which includes Martha Higareda as pregnant lead character Marisol, Richard Cabral as Marisol's fellow traveler Santo, and Barbara Crampton, Shawn Ashmore, and Creed Bratton as American citizens, all do strong work in their roles, and this may turn out to be a major breakthrough for Guerrero, who has been steadily building up her filmography for the better part of the last decade. We should be hearing a lot more about Guerrero in the future, because she is clearly capable of doing some great work.
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