‘Maniac Cop’ No Longer Feels Like A Pure Exploitation Picture — It’s A Prescient Precursor To Today’s State of Police Distrust

There’s a moment in the middle of director Bill Lustig’s genuinely great Maniac Cop where a Black man says that he’s watched cops murder his friends as they ran from them, unarmed. “Cops like to kill,” he says. The first time I watched this movie, way back in the late ’80s, I took this statement as provocative hyperbole, in league with the rest of the picture’s broad, comic book style amplifications. Watching it now — in 2020, in the wake of months worth of nationwide protests against our radicalized, militarized police force — Maniac Cop doesn’t seem much like an exploitation picture anymore.

I love Bill Lustig. He’s done important work championing overlooked titles as the head of the Blue Underground distribution company, but he’s probably best known for his grimy, nihilistic slasher flick Maniac. His stomping ground for both Maniac and Maniac Cop — no relation, at least not directly — is the lost New York of Taxi Driver, the no-wave period where the Big Apple became shorthand for moral failures, administrative mishandling, and societal rot. Consider a tossed off detail in Maniac Cop of a Times Square marquee featuring a movie called Eat a Peach – a reference, I think, to “The Love Song of J. Alfred Prufrock,” buried in here like the world’s most melancholy Easter Egg to identify Lustig as a pulp poet of our dissolution. It’s probably a porno, Eat a Peach, and there’s something almost dulcet in the use of a T.S. Eliot quote from a poem about the crippling fear of experience used to advertise an entertainment designed for the lonely and the dissolute.

Maniac Cop is Officer Matt Cordell (Robert Z’Dar). He is Frankenstein’s monster: a creation of a corrupt system, sent to prison unjustly, and torn apart in there by a vicious knife attack in a shower that presages the nude-grapple in Eastern Promises. He’s dead, of course, disfigured and violated in any number of ways up to and including a full autopsy. (So there’s no question, we see his naked murder AGAIN in its entirety in Maniac Cop 2. And why not? It’s a great scene.) But Officer Cordell is back, an avenging demon not interested in going after the people who sold him up the river, but rather all the people he’d been sworn to protect. We, as an American society, are complicit to systems of oppression, and perpetuating the lie of the American Dream is our Original Sin. Officer Cordell is here to collect our spiritual debt. Maniac Cop opens with a young woman fleeing a pair of attackers into the huge arms of what she believes to be her salvation only to have her neck broken, her body tossed aside like a rag doll. The betrayal of the pact between the police and the people they are sworn to serve is shocking. I only wish it were as shocking now as it used to be.

Pathos is the defining emotion of Maniac Cop. Detective Lieutenant Frank McRae (the great Tom Atkins) is assigned to investigate the aforementioned young woman’s death; Lustig reveals McRae has recently tried to kill himself, despairing over the death of his partner. When told he doesn’t smile enough, Frank tries to paste one on in an attempt both hilarious and heartbreaking.

Cordell, in life, was a good cop who, in death, becomes disillusioned with systemic forms of social control; his rampage seeks to address both victimhood (by eradicating victims) and the corrupt police directly responsible for his death. In doing so, he becomes a true agent of chaotic evil. It’s not just him, though; even “Good” cop Jack (Bruce Campbell), framed for Cordell’s atrocities, is introduced in bed with his mistress, Officer Theresa (Laurene Landon). To amplify the transgression, the lovers are discovered en flagrante by Jack’s long-suffering wife (Victoria Catlin), who is promptly murdered off-screen by the marauding Cordell. Maniac Cop is the socially devastating version of the psychologically devastating Halloween. The inexorable bogeyman here is virtue betrayed and our collective innocence lost.  Of all the films Maniac Cop echoes and predicts, its closest spiritual doppelganger is David Fincher’s Se7en what with its “moral” butcher and its despairing detectives forced to stare too long into the abyss.

All that being said, Maniac Cop, for as heady as it can be, also doubles as a wildly entertaining slasher flick, one that sports the same kind of energy as Sam Raimi’s (who makes a cameo in this film as a reporter) early pictures and Scott Spiegel’s Intruder. An extended sequence where a handcuffed Bruce Campbell is thrown around the back of a runaway police van deserves to be a slapstick classic; and a disorienting shot where Lustig tilts his camera sickeningly into a dutch angle one way, then slowly to the other, as Cordell’s former (and current?) lover (Sheree North) proclaims her undying devotion to the demon she knows is about to kill her, is a triumph of expressionism. I love this movie’s energy and its take-no-prisoners commitment to its premise; its social conscience and punk rock attitude itching for violent revolution. What used to be outsider cinema is now a reflection of a massive popular shift. Maniac Cop wants to raze it all and start over from scratch. When every institution is infested, overrun with vermin, burning it all down suddenly seems the only sane, palliative response.

Walter Chaw is the Senior Film Critic for filmfreakcentral.net. His book on the films of Walter Hill, with introduction by James Ellroy, is due in 2020. His monograph for the 1988 film MIRACLE MILE is available now.

Watch Maniac Cop on Shudder