Dissecting Slashers: Maniac Cop (1988)

Maniac Cop is a great way to celebrate St. Patrick's Day.

BACKGROUND

It all began with the 1980 slasher Maniac. The mainstream feature directorial debut of William Lustig, that film caught a lot of attention when it was released – and sure, a lot of it was negative attention, because the movie was accused of being misogynistic and it had shocking moments of violence, featuring Tom Savini gore effects, that repulsed a lot of movie-goers... but all of the controversy just helped make it a success. Lustig followed that up with the 1982 action thriller Vigilante, which gained a cult following, but wasn’t a financial success at first. And then Lustig hit a six year dry spell. He would work on projects that wouldn’t go anywhere. He was getting offers to make movies in Los Angeles, but he didn’t want to leave his home in New York City. Then, his fortunes changed when he met fellow filmmaker Larry Cohen.

Cohen had almost thirty years of experience in the industry at that point, having made movies like the It’s Alive trilogy, Q: The Winged Serpent, and The Stuff. Over lunch one day, Cohen asked Lustig why he hadn’t made a sequel to Maniac. Lustig didn’t think a follow-up to that one would work... but nothing was stopping them from making a different movie with “Maniac” in the title. Beverly Hills Cop and RoboCop were recent releases at the time, so Cohen came up with the idea for Maniac Cop. Speaking with Fangoria magazine, Lustig explained, “Larry had the idea of doing a Friday the 13th-type movie that centered around a cop. Something less mean-spirited than the usual gore film, with intelligent characters and numerous clever twists.” He said that when Cohen first told him the title and tagline, he “laughed my head off. Who wouldn’t? A movie whose tagline is ‘You’ve got the right to remain silent forever’ is not something you’re going to take too seriously.” Then Cohen just had to write a script that would live up to the title and tagline – and he pulled it off.

Lustig was friends with filmmaker James Glickenhaus, who had a lot of money at his disposal, thanks to a family business. One day, Glickenhaus mentioned to Lustig that he had just made fifty million dollars from that business. So Lustig asked him if he could have one million of that to make a movie and pitched him the concept of Maniac Cop. Glickenhaus just happened to be securing a production deal with Leonard Shapiro at the time, so he not only ended up giving Lustig a budget of 1.5 million dollars for Maniac Cop, but the film also became the first project for Shapiro-Glickenhaus Entertainment. Oddly, Shapiro didn’t like the title. When he signed on to produce the film, it was in his contract that he wanted the title to be changed. Lustig had to fight to call his movie Maniac Cop, even though the title was the project’s entire reason for being. Of course, Lustig won that argument, and was very happy to be able to keep his attention-grabbing title.

SETTING

The setting of the film is Lustig’s beloved New York City – and it’s the NYC of the ‘80s, when the city still had a lot of gritty edge to it. Just one month after Cohen came up with the idea, while the script was still being written, Lustig was already filming, because the St. Patrick’s Day parade was going through the city and he wanted to get footage of it to increase his film’s production value. He had Bruce Campbell and his Evil Dead director Sam Raimi come to the city so they could be part of the parade footage – Campbell playing the film’s hero and Raimi making a cameo as a news reporter. The rest of the movie wouldn’t be filmed until the summer. But, thanks to the parade and some decorations, Maniac Cop became a St. Patrick’s Day movie.

What’s surprising, especially since Lustig was turning down LA projects, is that a lot of Maniac Cop was filmed in Los Angeles. The parade was in New York, and so was the opening sequence, some establishing shots and attack scenes, and the helicopter footage. There’s enough NYC footage in there to make the viewer to believe that every single minute is occurring in New York. But, to keep the film on budget, a lot of it had to be shot on the West Coast. As Lustig commented to Camera in the Sun, “I didn’t do it because I wanted to. I did it because New York is expensive. Especially when you bring people in and put them up in hotels.” Well, he had me fooled. I had no idea that any of the movie was shot in LA until I saw that interview.

KILLER

The Maniac Cop himself is Matt Cordell, a New York police officer who was known to be a bit trigger-happy, but became something of a celebrity - and a hero to other officers - due to the notable busts he made. Then he got too close to bringing down crime bosses with connections in important places. City Hall turned against him, had him convicted of rights violations, and sent him off to Sing Sing, where he was locked up with the criminals he had busted. He was ambushed in the shower and cut up so badly he was believed to have been killed. But he wasn’t quite dead. He was kept alive by the need for vengeance. Now he stalks the streets of New York, killing criminals and innocent victims alike while also on a mission to wipe out the higher-ups and politicians that sacrificed him to save themselves.

Lustig cast Robert Z’Dar as Cordell, having been creeped out by his performance in the 1986 film The Night Stalker. John Naulin, who worked on Re-Animator and From Beyond, provided the Cordell makeup effects, which were designed to make you wonder if the guy is dead or alive... But we don’t get a good look at that makeup until the climactic sequence, and the most we see of Z’Dar comes in the flashback to Cordell’s time in prison. For the most part, Cordell is presented as hulking figure that’s usually obscured by shadows, with shots of his gloved hands as they grab people or hold weapons. It’s enough to establish him as an intriguing character that viewers were interested in seeing come back for sequels. The creepiness of his presence is enhanced by the haunting score provided by Jay Chattaway, who gave Cordell a very unnerving, whistle-based theme.

FINAL GIRL

We have a Final Couple in this one, a Final Girl and Final Boy combo – and that Final Boy is played by an actor who’s known for being the greatest Final Boy in horror history, “Scream King” Bruce Campbell. In the Evil Dead franchise, he plays bumbling, blowhard hero Ash Williams. Here, his character is a police officer named Jack Forrest, whose own wife, played by Victoria Catlin, suspects he might be the maniac cop – which is easy to understand, since he keeps odd hours and Cordell has an associate who makes taunting phone calls to Mrs. Forrest, telling her that her husband is a killer. But he’s not a killer. Instead, he’s a cheater. Jack has been having an affair with fellow police officer Theresa Mallory, played by Cohen regular Laurene Landon. Of course, nobody believes that Matt Cordell is alive, so it looks like Jack is going to take the blame for his crimes unless he and Theresa can figure out exactly what’s going on and clear Jack’s name by bringing Cordell’s rampage of revenge to an end.

Jack Forrest is no Ash Williams, but he’s a good flawed hero to follow, and Theresa is a capable heroine. In one standout sequence, Theresa even haves to deal with being handcuffed to a corpse while being chased by Cordell. 

VICTIMS

Lustig assembled an incredible cast to bring the story’s characters to life, with the actors already mentioned being examples of that. But there are several more impressive actors in the supporting cast.

For the first hour of the film, it seems like troubled, hard-boiled detective Frank McCrae is the hero, and that role went to Tom Atkins from Night of the Creeps and Halloween III: Season of the Witch. Then, like Marion Crane in Psycho, McCrae is removed from the picture in a shocking moment and different characters have to step up.  

Veteran character actress Sheree North was cast as Sally, a cop with a romantic connection to Cordell. Legendary character actor William Smith was cast as Captain Ripley, and as the commissioner we have Shaft himself, Richard Roundtree. Both of these guys are on Cordell’s hit list. 

Lustig said they were able to get an A cast for this B movie by giving the actors good characters to play and a good story for them to play around in. Going for a cast like this was a great move, and not just because you can count on all of these actors to deliver solid performances. It enhances Matt Cordell to see him causing trouble for such a cool group of actors. If he can take on these badasses, he’s quite a badass himself. 

Cordell also slashes and brutalizes his way through a lot of random citizens and police officers, so the film ends up having a body count of around 20.

DEATHS

The most disturbing death in the film happens right up front. A young woman named Cassie (played by Cohen’s daughter Jill Gatsby) is mugged by a couple of guys while she’s walking home from work at night. When she gets away from them, they give chase. It’s not looking good for Cassie... until she spots a cop standing in a park. She runs up to him, asking the officer for help. Instead of helping her, he grabs her and breaks her neck – while the shocked muggers watch from nearby.

Cassie is the first innocent civilian to fall prey to Matt Cordell. From there, we get a guy getting slashed to death during a traffic stop, another man getting his face shoved into wet cement, and Jack Forrest’s wife getting killed. Cordell also takes down a whole lot of random police officers. Some are hanged, some get their heads based into jail cell bars or walls, one is strangled with hand cuffs. A good number of the kills occur off screen, but there’s plenty on screen kills. The film satisfies the slasher fan’s desire to see characters getting offed on camera.

Cordell has a signature weapon: a blade hidden within his policeman’s baton / billy club, and many of his victims are stabbed or slashed with that blade. Of course, since he is a former cop, he’s also not adverse to using guns, like many slashers are. One of his victims gets blasted with a shotgun.

Neither Richard Roundtree nor William Smith are given standout death scenes, but Tom Atkins is removed from the film in a fittingly spectacular way, getting tossed out a window.

CLICHÉS

The biggest cliché in Maniac Cop is in the set-up: the killer is an extremely strong, potentially undead character who has been wronged in the past, and now he’s out for revenge. The big city setting removes some of the standard slasher cliches – you don’t have characters wandering out into the woods or anything like that – and the fact that the movie centers on adult characters, almost all of whom are police officers, wipe out more of the clichés. This isn’t a movie where youngsters get murdered after smoking pot or having premarital sex.

Matt Cordell even has a girlfriend, which is almost unheard of when it comes to slashers. She’s the one who has been taunting Jack Forrest’s wife, directing the “maniac cop” suspicion his way. Cordell doesn’t treat his lady (Sheree North's Sally) very well, but he does get some help from her for a while.

POSTMORTEM

Sadly, Bruce Campbell has turned his back on Maniac Cop over the decades, saying that, while he thought it was perfectly legit at the time, it’s not a good movie in hindsight. When the subject came up during a Variety interview, he took the opportunity to poke fun at Cohen’s writing. He said, “Maniac Cop? Were there any memorable lines in that movie? The guy who wrote this movie wrote a bunch of exploitation stuff. He claimed that his dialogue was actor proof. That his dialogue was so good, no actor could screw it up. I had a different take. Your dialogue is so bad, it’s actor proof, because no actor can say your dialogue. Thanks for playing, Larry.“ But, at the time of production, Campbell had no issues, and it was one of his first big opportunities to build up a career separate from the work of his childhood friend Sam Raimi.

The filming of Maniac Cop went very smoothly, with Shapiro and Glickenhaus being very accommodating producers. The only issues came up late in the process. Lustig has said, “This guy showed up at dailies with a clipboard and a little light, starting to write notes to us. I neutralized him by giving him a big credit in the main title with the provision that he should go and take a walk. That was it, there was an attempt to collaborate and it was quickly neutralized. I'll give a credit – go away! He has this big credit in the main title and he was never there for production.” Then, Lustig disappointed the person handling distribution sales by turning in a movie that was better than expected. Throughout production, he would downplay the quality of the film to them, saying, “I think it’s okay, it’s gonna work, it’s commercial.” His approach was to lower expectations and deliver something better than expected. But, the sales person felt that if Lustig had hyped it up properly, it could have sold for higher numbers. 

Lustig did make this a great movie that deserved to be a big success. He has described Maniac Cop as “an action-packed horror with some real satisfying scares (and) a clever, tongue-in-cheek quality, even in its most violent moments.” And with this film, he and Cohen brought us one of the last great horror icons to come out of the '80s. Matt Cordell. The film is rather atypical for a slasher, with its big city setting. This allows for some bigger sequences, like a jailhouse raid and a climactic car chase, which builds up to an awesome stunt involving a truck crashing off of a pier. (Which was filmed in Los Angeles.) The story is well-rounded, the mystery intriguing, and Lustig shot the film with a nice, dark, moody atmosphere, going for a noirish look. That atmosphere is greatly enhanced by a haunting score provided by Jay Chattaway, who gave Cordell a very unnerving, whistle-based theme.

Even though the movie was undersold to distributors, Maniac Cop was successful enough to launch a franchise. Released in 1988, it was followed by Maniac Cop 2 in 1990 – and many fans (including myself) feel that sequel is even better than its predecessor. Then, Maniac Cop 3, which had a very troubled production, came along in 1993. In recent years, Drive director Nicolas Winding Refn was trying to revive the property with either a feature remake or a TV series. But for some reason, the revival never got off the ground. Which is a shame. We’ve lost Robert Z’Dar in the years since the original films were made, but Matt Cordell is still out there... and he deserves a comeback.

At least we got a pretty cool trilogy out of the concept. And it got started with a great slasher movie that is perfect for St. Patrick’s Day viewing.