Maniac Cop

Year of Release: 1988
Genre:  Action / Horror
IMDB Rating: 5.8 / 10
Level of Awful: Surprise!
Breast-O-Meter: 0 / 5

WHAT IT’S ABOUT:

You know, this one really could have gone one of two ways. Being made in the 80s and with a title like Maniac Cop, the odds were really stacked against it. Thankfully everything was alright in the end and what we have is a delightful adventure in 80s horror about a maniac cop with superhuman abilities killing people left, right and centre. It reminds us that the 80s was a simpler time for our beloved horror genre: there aren’t all the complicated twists and turns in the plot, nobody’s trying to outsmart the last Saw movie and, generally, its sole purpose for existing is to give you a little fright. And quite frankly, at this stage in the b-horror game, anything made in the 80s that’s a step up from Cannibal Hookers is OK in my book 🙂

No, give it some time. Maybe my chest will grow on you.

Now, as everybody knows, New York is an absolute death trap. The Grim Reaper follows you wherever you go and the next step you take might just be your last. Everywhere you look there are hookers and pimps and gang members and drug dealers and the occasional pissed off old lady with a solid walking stick. It makes sense then for this to be the setting for our movie. We begin one night where an innocent waitress at the local bar is on her way home when she’s attacked by two dodgy Puerto Ricans (oh yeah, can’t forget to mention them). Since the man standing ten feet across the road refuses to do anything but shrug our damsel in distress takes flight, fleeing for her very handbag. Taking refuge in a little playground the Puerto Ricans begin looking for her. Thankfully she spies an enormous policeman standing just at the edge of the park and she goes screaming over to him, begging for his help. Fearing that her skull is far too attached to her spine the policeman promptly lifts her up, crushes her larynx and breaks her neck and throws her to the ground. His good deed for the day done he disappears, and thus the plotline of Maniac Cop is born.

Oh, I hate it when that happens. Now they'll need to redo the whole pavement.

Detective Frank McCrae is displeased to find out that a maniac dressed in a policeman’s outfit is running around the town killing people and he’s determined to find out who’s doing this and put them behind bars. Unfortunately New York is just about to go to the polls and vote for a mayor and this apparently means that the incumbent mayor seeking re-election will go out of his way to hamper any and all good police work. More on this in a moment, first we need to discuss a little subplot going on at the other end of the movie. So here we have Jack Forrest, a young cop in a troubled marriage. One night he goes out on his patrol and as soon as he’s out the door his home phone rings and the caller tells his wife to follow him. She duly does, finds herself at a motel, finds her husband in bed with another cop named Theresa, threatens them both with a gun and then runs out the room. But the Maniac Cop is waiting for her and, as soon as she walks out of the building, he drags her into a van and kills her. Being a clever lunatic he figures he can frame Forrest this way and the mayor will have him arrested since he desperately needs to put someone behind bars to make it look like he can do his job properly.

Turns out it was a gun in his pocket.

Of course locking any old fool behind bars rarely means that the killer has ever been captured and, while Jack waits patiently in his cell, the maniac cop continues his reign of terror. McCrae is trying to figure everything out and suspects that whoever’s doing it must have been a one-time member of the force with a bone to pick. This being the 80s and the police headquarters only have a single computer, however, is making finding a specific lunatic who may fit this description a little hard going. It also doesn’t help that the maniac cop seems to be very well-connected and knows all about Theresa and stalks her one night while she’s working undercover as a hooker. When he tries to kill her she and McCrae both shoot him multiple times, but to no avail. To prove that he has superhuman qualities the maniac cop later breaks into the police headquarters where Jack’s being held and kills everyone in an attempt to frame Jack even further. With nobody believing them about what’s going on it falls to Jack, Theresa and McCrae to uncover the identity of the maniac cop before it’s too late and his dastardly plot comes to fruition.

LIFE’S LESSONS LEARNED:

• In the 80s even the coroners had mullets.
• People who enjoy killing often keep on killing.
• Irony is people telling you to drop dead while you’re trying to escape from a killer.
• In the 80s the only way to get city hall to do anything was to make a story bigger than AIDS.
• When someone’s scared of you the best thing to do to calm them down is to scream at them.
• When a man’s caught having an affair the first thing he wants to know is why the wife followed him.
• Coroners give out all kinds of information first and ask for IDs later.

MANIAC COP TRAILER

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