10 years ago, I chose to end the second 31 Days of Gore with a great movie, which has become a bit of a tradition since then. The movie I chose for that year’s honorable spot was William Lustig’s Maniac Cop. I had planned to marathon all three movies that very day, but discovered the sequel was almost impossible to source in an acceptable format (both the DVD I had and the version that’s still on streaming services is pan-and-scan dogshit). Today you can get the UHD which boasts proper widescreen, native 4K, and Dolby Atmos sound, the latter of which doesn’t help (or hurt) the movie at all. It’s a great way to watch the film now, which I had originally taped off of Cinemax over thirty years ago (I still have that tape, by the way).
Spoilers for the first film ahead….
At the end of the original, Bruce Campbell and Laurene Landon survived the nonstop killing spree when Maniac Cop accidentally impaled himself on a pipe and plunged his escape vehicle into the river. The sequel opens only days later, when the two survivors visit the police commissioner, learning that they’ve been cleared of all charges (you’ll remember that Campbell’s character went on the lam after being wrongfully arrested for his wife’s murder). Unfortunately, the cop couple must report to a psychiatrist before they can return to active duty. This is especially hard for Landon’s character, who openly maintains that Maniac Cop isn’t dead. Campbell’s character, a realist, begs her to play along with the cover story so they can get their old jobs back.
Part of what made the first film work so well was a cast of veteran cop actors including Tom Atkins, William Smith, and Richard Roundtree. This time we get another great cast with Robert Davi as a no-nonsense homicide detective, Michael Lerner as the crooked police commissioner, and Cladia Christian as the police psychiatrist. (Danny Trejo and Clarence Williams III appear as prisoners later on.) It’s not long until the rest of the police department realizes that Maniac Cop (once again played by the formidable Robert Z’Dar) has actually returned from the grave and the second phase of his massive killing spree has already begun.
My favorite scene in the first half of the film (reminiscent of a great gag in the climax of Body Parts) is when Maniac Cop handcuffs Christian to the door handle of a sedan before dropping the shifter into a neutral and shoving the car down a hill. Your average screenwriter/director duo would be content with a few seconds of excitement there, but Cohen and Lustig milk the scenario for all it’s worth, having the car speeding downhill for what feels like miles. And when Maniac Cop shows up at the police station in a scene that’s clearly, uh, “inspired” by Terminator, he dispatches his victims with a gusto unmatched by any slasher I can think of. The gunshots and the squibs in that scene feel like they’ve been cranked up to 11. Cohen and Lustig save their biggest spectacle for the finale, in which (minor spoilers) a fully aflame Maniac Cop lumbers down a cell block of Sing Sing, dispatching his victims by bear hugging them with his burning body, one after another. Yes, the stunt double is clearly the wrong size, his fire-resistant clothes and mask are a little too obvious, but a stunt has never been done like this before. It reeks of Cohen’s ability to take an obvious trope in a B-movie and turn it on its head.
On top of cramming in all this entertainment value into the breakneck pace, characters still find the time to reveal key insights to their backstories. The film even gives a poignant monologue to a newsstand operator (Robert Earl Jones, the father of James Earl Jones) who witnesses one of Maniac Cop’s kills. It’s just… who the hell does that in a movie like this? Larry Cohen and William Lustig, that’s who. Easily one of the greatest sequels ever made.
