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Emotional Problems: Maniac Cop 2 and Maniac Cop 3: Badge of Silence

The Maniac Cop sequels are fascinating for their competing sensibilities.

Emotional Problems: Maniac Cop 2 and Maniac Cop 3: Badge of Silence
Photo: Blue Underground

The Maniac Cop sequels, 1990’s Maniac Cop 2 and 1993’s Maniac Cop 3: Badge of Silence, are fascinating for their competing sensibilities. Maniac Cop 2, a nasty tongue-in-cheek slasher set during Christmastime in New York City, has both director William Lustig’s and screenwriter Larry Cohen’s grimy fingerprints all over it, boasting wild chase sequences, gruesome murders, and a quite fiery finale. Maniac Cop 3: Badge of Silence, on the other hand, is a Frankenstein’s monster of failed ambition and creative differences.

Cohen’s original script concept for Maniac Cop 3, which was to feature a black detective, was discarded when Japanese investors objected to its basic premise. Moreover, Lustig left the project with under an hour of usable footage in the can, which prompted producer Joel Soisson to step in as director and complete another half hour to reach an appropriate feature-length runtime. The film now carries the infamous “Alan Smithee” credit as its director.

As stories, both films are essentially excuses to execute brazen, violent set pieces with grindhouse flair. Maniac Cop 2 picks up where the original film left off. Matt Cordell (Robert Z’Dar), the titular lunatic who, after being impaled and seemingly drowned in the first film, emerges as a zombie-like creature who’s once again set on vengeance for being framed and then murdered in Sing Sing prison years prior. As conceived this go-round, Cordell is a cross between Jason Voorhees and Arnold Schwarzenegger’s Terminator: a mute, mutilated lunk who viciously dispatches his foes. Shortly after killing a convenience store clerk in a darkly comic sequence as mean-spirited as anything in Paul Verhoeven’s RoboCop, Cordell finds his way to a newsstand where he scratches off the first name on his hit list: Officer Jack Forrest (Bruce Campbell), whose heroic efforts in the first film are nonexistent here.

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Killing off a main character so early encapsulates how Lustig and Cohen treat the moving pieces of genre filmmaking as a push and pull between convention and unpredictability. Their vision of New York City in 1990 differs little from how Lustig conceived it a decade earlier in Maniac, where noirish city streets are overrun with violence and drugs, which is understood to be the visible outcome of corrupt bureaucrats and negligent police officials.

It’s Deputy Commissioner Ed Doyle (Michael Lerner), and his unwillingness to confront Cordell’s mistreatment and murder in the past, that breeds an inhuman monster in the present. Yet Maniac Cop 2 isn’t a satire in the vein of Verhoeven’s work, nor is it a nightmarish descent into kaleidoscopic madness as in several of Abel Ferrara’s films from the period, as it’s a significantly more a straightforward genre work with tinges of melancholy and humor.

Take the film’s most remarkable set piece, in which Cordell torments two police officers, Susan Riley (Claudia Christian) and Theresa Mallory (Laurene Landon), by first chasing them with his car, then handcuffing Susan to the opened passenger door of a car as it careens down a steep hill, all while Theresa wields a chainsaw at Cordell’s head. The whole thing borders on the ridiculousness, but Lustig doesn’t adopt a winking or campy tone throughout, and so the action, especially in its swift bursts of deadly violence, feels weightier as a result.

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To a certain extent, that same tone defines much of Maniac Cop 3, though it boasts fewer memorable sequences than its predecessor and, in the last half hour, borders on tedium with its rather routine slasher mechanics. The film brings back Detective Sean McKinney (Robert Davi), who in Maniac Cop 2 was told by Officer Riley, “I can’t let someone out on the street with a gun who has emotional problems.” In many ways, this line defines the ideas inherent to both films: Even given the fact of infrastructural corruption, “emotional problems” plague everyone, but it’s how individuals translate those emotions, whether into communal good or destructive violence, that determines the well-being of the collective.

McKinney, though, is now less of a loose cannon than a seeker of the truth as he tracks down Cordell, who’s been resurrected by a voodoo priest (Julius Harris) for reasons that remain muddled, especially given that the priest figures only nominally into the larger story. Maniac Cop 3 carries the mood of a serviceable but forgettable giallo. Its convoluted plotting and often striking visuals evince its makers’ stylistic bona fides but little else. As a whole, the Maniac Cop series wrestles with questions of policing within a hybrid of slasher and noir.

Maniac Cop 2 and Maniac Cop 3: Badge of Silence are now available on 4K UHD.

Clayton Dillard

Clayton Dillard is a lecturer in cinema at San Francisco State University.

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