Viking Night: Maniac Cop
By Bruce Hall
October 22, 2013
BoxOfficeProphets.com
In fact, this is so impressive that I’ll bet you’re wondering how a movie that made $671,382 at the box office (yes, all the commas are there) could be so fantastically good. The answer is that with great power comes great responsibility. And as the awesome responsibility that is Viking Night falls to me, so does the equally awesome power to take away some of those stars when I see fit. And even though I came away pleasantly surprised, Maniac Cop still gave me a couple of pretty solid reasons to do just that.
Since this movie was released in 1988, the streets of Manhattan are still crawling with thugs dressed like they’re from a Latin revival of West Side Story. One night, two such kids try their luck with a barmaid walking home alone, except that she kicks their asses with what is clearly a prop purse. The terrified girl flees and runs straight into the arms of a street cop, who promptly crushes her neck like a bag of Doritos. Then, all of a sudden it’s late morning and the would be thieves are in handcuffs, explaining to a bunch of non-psycho cops how one of them appears to be a maniac.
But the police do not believe them because they're criminals, and because slasher movie logic.
Word of all this quickly reaches the desk of Detective Frank McCrae (Tom Atkins), who suddenly and inexplicably decides that the kids are telling the truth and that he also knows how the killer thinks. This is exactly the amount of information he immediately takes to police commissioner Pike (Richard Roundtree), who orders Frank to suppress the truth. But because he’s a dedicated cop who plays by his own rules, McCrae leaks the story to a local news station anyway, promptly causing the city to explode with paranoid hysteria. People are shooting cops just for walking down the street, and the Commish is not a happy man.
Eager to pin the blame on someone, the department finds a sucker in officer Jack Forrest (Bruce Campbell), a patrolman unlucky enough to find himself in the wrong girl at the wrong time. Jack claims he’s innocent, but McCrae isn’t buying it - at least not until the very next scene, where he totally changes his mind for no reason. Frank begins to suspect that the police are being lied to and that someone, somewhere has an interest in letting the killings continue. As the mystery (and the plot) both unravel, the horribly confusing and confusingly horrible truth combine into what is almost good stupid fun, except when it's not.
It’s not for lack of trying, at least for the first two thirds or so. If you do a little legwork on Maniac Cop, those of you who are into documentary filmmaking will recognize director William Lustig, while the other 99.9% of you won’t. You’ll get your hopes up when you see writer Larry Cohen’s name and then you’ll realize that no, he’s not one of THOSE Cohens. Still, the two of them put together a surprisingly entertaining thriller that also has an awesome title. But they built it on shaky ground. It's not that I was expecting Silence of the Lambs from this; quite the opposite. I'd never seen Maniac Cop before, and was just looking forward to the kind of movie that requires a few glasses of scotch to make any damn sense. Instead, I got better than expected overall production values, not the worst acting (but definitely some of the worst dialogue) I've ever experienced, not to mention some fairly effective camera work. I don't know what kind of documentaries Lustig makes, but they've given him an above average eye for horror.
And best of all, there is a cop who is indeed a maniac - exactly as advertised.
No, the reasons why Maniac Cop is about to lose two of those stars is because parts of it are indifferently made. Tom Atkins seems to approach his role seriously and as long as he's not in the room with Shaft (nothing impressive about Roundtree here), you'll start thinking Maniac Cop might be a serious thriller. In fact, once Campbell's character gets involved things are starting to feel like a soft, but fairly solid basic cable potboiler. So it's not Atkins' fault, but the minute detective McCrae gets his hooks into this case, things start going off the rails, a little at a time. I know it's hard to write about police work when you don't know anything about police work, but seriously? McCrae comes to all of his conclusions by just randomly - and correctly - guessing one thing after the other about the Maniac.
I'm not kidding. He just decides he knows things, and they turn out to be right. The story gives you no indication whatsoever as to where he obtained any of this information. I assume he was the first one to read the script or something. He almost literally trips over clues at times, but there's no irony about it - someone just didn't give a shit whether anything made any sense or not. I know it sounds like a small thing, but wait until you see it in action. It's baffling, and it takes you out of the story. And then there's the trouble Maniac Cop has with time. One of the most completely inept car chases you'll see if you live to be 200 is in this film, and it goes on for so long that you'll start to think maybe it's a joke. One shot it's night, the next one it's day...but not story time has passed for that to be true.
These are small, but distracting and amateurish things, even for a movie called Maniac Cop. But the net result is still a film that's way, way better than I had any right to expect. It goes completely bananas in the last act, like something that doesn't want to live anymore and couldn’t care less about consequences. Several things about the Maniac - including the reasons behind his rampage - are so hilariously confusing you'll be happy to root for this mess anyway. Imagine watching a three legged dog successfully fight off a bunch of four legged dogs. Wouldn't you be so happy for that dog? Well at the end of Maniac Cop you'll roll your eyes, send it back to Netflix and get on with your life. You'll understand why it only made $671,382 at the box office, but you won't hate yourself for watching it. I say that's high praise for a Two Star Viking Night award winner.