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.

There’s nothing here that is going to be subtle. After watching a gearing up montage, we see a woman get attacked by a couple of muggers. She sees a police officer in the distance and runs up to him for help only to be grabbed and strangled by the cop. We’re going to get a little more in the opening in terms of watching our cop in question commit random murders seemingly with no connection to everything else going on around the city.

Meanwhile, police officer Jack Forrest (Bruce Campbell) gets called into work, which gets him out of the fight with his estranged wife Ellen (Victoria Catlin). Jack leaves and she decides to tail him, only to find him in flagrente with another officer, Theresa Mallory (Laurene Landon). Angered, Ellen stomps out of the motel room only to run into our maniac cop, who murders her and eventually dumps her back in the motel room. This means that our boy Jack is now the main suspect for the cop killing, and when it’s finally revealed that he’s been humping Officer Mallory, she’s implicated as well.

The guy who has caught the case, at least in part, is Lieutenant Frank McCrae (Tom Atkins). He’s soon convinced that Theresa and Jack are innocent and that the actual killer is Matt Cordell (Robert Z’Dar), a former supercop who was brought down by false charges and was killed in prison. Of course McCrae is right, because we need to have an undead killer stalking the city. It’s no fun if the bad guy can’t handle half a dozen rounds from a service revolver.

This is really it. McCrae wants to find proof that Cordell is responsible while Theresa and Jack are desperate to clear their names. Other than that, the movie is really just watching the title character pull a short sword out of his police baton and stab people.

One thing that we genuinely need to talk about is Robert Z’Dar’s face. Z’Dar is mainly known for the size of his face, and I am not joking. He did have a medical condition that caused him to have a huge jaw, and it seemed that it continued to grow—his face is certainly huge in Maniac Cop, but in this movie, it’s merely huge, not developing its own gravity and weather system as it did in later life. Even at this point in his career, before his head became a perfect trapezoid, his chin looked like Stevie from the last season of Eastbound and Down.

The truth is that there aren’t a lot of places for Maniac Cop to go, so it goes exactly where you think it’s going to. That’s fine, but it’s also not really good enough to support an audience watching it knowing what the ending is likely to be. Anyone with an ounce of media literacy knows what this will be (it’s actually reminiscent in a way of an old Night Stalker episode) and the writing and dialogue isn’t interesting enough to watch a movie where the ending is essentially guaranteed.

Is Maniac Cop good? No. But is it fun? Also no.

Why to watch Maniac Cop : You should watch more Bruce Campell.
Why not to watch: The premise is the best part, and it’s not that great.