Thursday, May 8, 2025

All Cops are Maniac

Film: Maniac Cop
Format: Streaming video from Kanopy on Fire!

One of the common ideas in horror is finding something that is supposed to be trustworthy and turning it into a killer. This isn’t turning rabbits into monsters (like Night of the Lepus), but more people and things we think are safe. Consider Chucky from the Child’s Play movies, medical professionals like Dr. Giggles or The Dentist, and babies in It’s Alive. Even Santa Claus gets this treatment in a lot of movies. Maniac Cop does the same thing, obviously with the police.

Maniac Cop is a pretty typical schlocky movie from 1988 as the title suggests. Call your movie Maniac Cop and you’re not going to expect Shakespeare. Add in B-movie king Bruce Campbell and genre mainstays like Tom Atkins and Robert Z’Dar (as well as genuine badass Richard Roundtree), and what you’ve got is a B-movie that at least has the potential to be fun.

Saturday, May 3, 2025

What I've Caught Up With, April 2025

It’s probably not much of a surprise that I didn’t actually watch a lot of movies or television in April. My mother’s funeral service was a week ago, and things have been hectic. Watching a movie seems less easy to do right now, but it’s time to get back into things, I think.

Television-wise, the only show I actually completed was the latest season of Reacher. I have been watching Miss Fisher’s Murder Mysteries, The West Wing, and The Critic, but lately, my viewing is pretty much down across the board.