Maniac Cop (1988)

Maniac Cop arrives from 1988 with the smell of VHS plastic still on it. William Lustig directs, Larry Cohen writes, and a large man named Robert Z'Dar stalks New York in a police uniform with a face like a clenched fist. The premise is thin and proud of it. A killer cop murders civilians, the department suppresses the eyewitnesses, and the city turns on its own patrolmen. Somewhere beneath the gore there is a modest civic complaint: the institution will protect itself and destroy the honest man inside it. Matthew Cordell, we learn, was framed for brutality while investigating corruption at city hall, then butchered in a prison shower by the men he helped convict. That is a real grievance, and the film states it plainly, then returns to the stabbing.

The casting is a genre buffet of its moment: Tom Atkins, Bruce Campbell, Laurene Landon, Richard Roundtree. Roundtree's presence is welcome and entirely unremarked upon, which is how 1988 handled such things. The women exist to be imperiled, deceived, or killed offscreen, and Landon's Mallory spends most of the running time being chased through rooms. Nobody is asked to consider their body, their mind, their carbon footprint, or the economic system that produced the hijacked van. The police force is corrupt, but the objection is to specific bad actors, not to capital itself. This is an exploitation picture with a grudge, not a sermon.

Campbell has since called it not a good movie. He is correct, and it hardly matters. The film delivers a hand emerging from the river and a dead man who does not breathe, and that is the transaction it promised. On the ledger of modern social instruction, it contributes almost nothing, having been assembled two decades before anyone thought to ask. We file it under camp, and we move on to the next tape.