A brutal killer is stalking the streets of New York City; a man dressed as a police officer. He lures victims in with a false sense of security, traps them with the authority an officer of the law commands, and he murders them, whether they’re guilty or innocent. It took a couple of genre icons to get this idea into production and more icons to deal with the threat on the screen. This is the story of Maniac Cop, and we’re going to find out what happened to this horror movie.
It all began with the 1980 slasher Maniac. The mainstream feature directorial debut of William Lustig, the film caught a lot of attention when it was released, especially for the shocking moments of violence, featuring Tom Savini gore effects. Lustig followed that up with the 1982 action thriller Vigilante, which gained a cult following, but wasn’t a financial success at first. And then Lustig hit a six year dry spell. He would work on projects that wouldn’t go anywhere. He was getting offers to make movies in Los Angeles, but he didn’t want to leave his home in New York City. Then, his fortunes changed when he met fellow filmmaker Larry Cohen.
Cohen had almost thirty years of experience in the industry at that point and had made movies like the It’s Alive trilogy, Q: The Winged Serpent, and The Stuff. Over lunch one day, Cohen asked Lustig why he hadn’t made a sequel to Maniac. Lustig didn’t think a follow-up to that one would work… but nothing was stopping them from making a different movie with “Maniac” in the title. Beverly Hills Cop and RoboCop were recent releases at the time, so Cohen came up with the idea for Maniac Cop. Speaking with Fangoria magazine, Lustig explained, “Larry had the idea of doing a Friday the 13th-type movie that centered around a cop. Something less mean-spirited than the usual gore film, with intelligent characters and numerous clever twists.” He said that when Cohen first told him the title and tagline, he “laughed my head off. Who wouldn’t? A movie whose tagline is ‘You’ve got the right to remain silent forever’ is not something you’re going to take too seriously.”
Lustig was friends with filmmaker James Glickenhaus, who was very well off, thanks to a family business. One day, Glickenhaus mentioned to Lustig that he had just made fifty million dollars from that business. So Lustig asked him if he could have one million of that to make a movie and pitched him the concept of Maniac Cop. Glickenhaus just happened to be securing a production deal with Leonard Shapiro at the time, so he not only ended up giving Lustig a budget of one-point-five million dollars for Maniac Cop, but the film also became the first project for Shapiro-Glickenhaus Entertainment.
Oddly, Shapiro didn’t like the title. When he signed on to produce the film, it was in his contract that he wanted the title to be changed. Lustig told Guns, Guts, and Glory: “We fought over it. I said, ‘Are you crazy? That‘s the whole movie! It‘s the title!’ He said, ‘’It makes it sound so down,’ or words to that effect. And I said, ‘That‘s the fun of the movie, it‘s Maniac Cop!’” Of course, Lustig won that argument, and was very happy to be able to keep his attention-grabbing title.
Just one month after Cohen came up with the idea, while the script was being written, Lustig was already filming because the St. Patrick’s Day parade was going through the city and he wanted to get footage of it to increase his film’s production value. He had Bruce Campbell and his Evil Dead director Sam Raimi come to the city so they could be part of the parade footage – Campbell playing the film’s hero and Raimi making a cameo as a news reporter. The rest of the movie wouldn’t be filmed until the summer. But, thanks to the parade and some decorations, Maniac Cop became a St. Patrick’s Day movie.
What’s surprising, especially since Lustig was turning down L.A. projects, is that a lot of Maniac Cop was filmed in Los Angeles. The parade was in New York. So was the opening sequence, some establishing shots and attack scenes, and the helicopter footage. But, to keep the film on budget, a lot of it had to be shot on the West Coast. As Lustig commented to Camera in the Sun, “I didn’t do it because I wanted to. I did it because New York is expensive. Especially when you bring people in and put them up in hotels.”
The script Cohen wrote to go with the title tells the story of Matt Cordell, a New York police officer who may have been trigger-happy, but was seen as a hero to many due to the notable busts he made. But he got too close to bringing down crime bosses with connections in important places. City Hall turned against him and had him convicted of rights violations. He was sentenced to serve hard time at Sing Sing… and didn’t survive very long in prison, being surrounded by criminals he had put away. He was attacked and stabbed to death in the shower. At least, that’s what everyone thought. He wasn’t quite dead, kept alive by the need for vengeance. Now, he’s on a mission to wipe out the higher-ups and politicians that sacrificed him to protect themselves. Lustig cast Robert Z’Dar as Cordell, having been creeped out by his performance in the 1986 film The Night Stalker. John Naulin, who worked on Re-Animator and From Beyond, provided the Cordell makeup effects, which were designed to make you wonder if the guy is dead or alive.
Lustig built an incredible cast around Z’Dar and Campbell. For the first hour of the film, it seems like troubled, hard-boiled detective Frank McCrae is the hero. That role went to Tom Atkins from Night of the Creeps and Halloween 3. Then, like Marion Crane in Psycho, McCrae is removed from the picture in a shocking moment and different characters have to step up. One is Campbell’s character, Jack Forrest, whose own wife, played by Victoria Catlin, suspects he might be the maniac cop. But he’s not a killer. Instead, he’s a cheater. He has been having an affair with fellow police officer Theresa Mallory, played by Cohen regular Laurene Landon. Of course, nobody believes that Matt Cordell is alive. So it looks like Jack Forrest is going to take the blame for his crimes. Veteran character actress Sheree North was cast a cop with a romantic connection to Cordell. Legendary character actor William Smith was cast as Captain Ripley. And, as the commissioner, we have Shaft himself, Richard Roundtree. Lustig said they were able to get an A cast for this B movie by giving the actors good characters to play and a good story for them to play around in.
Going for a cast like this was a great move. Not just because you can count on all of these actors to deliver solid performances, but also, it enhances Matt Cordell to see him causing trouble for such a cool group of actors. If he can take on these badasses, he’s quite a badass himself. Sadly, Bruce Campbell has turned his back on Maniac Cop over the decades, saying that, while he thought it was perfectly legit at the time, it’s not a good movie in hindsight. When the subject came up during a Variety interview, he took the opportunity to poke fun at Cohen’s writing. He said, “Maniac Cop? Were there any memorable lines in that movie? The guy who wrote this movie wrote a bunch of exploitation stuff. He claimed that his dialogue was actor proof. That his dialogue was so good, no actor could screw it up. I had a different take. Your dialogue is so bad, it’s actor proof, because no actor can say your dialogue. Thanks for playing, Larry.“
But, at the time of production, Campbell had no issues. And the filming of Maniac Cop went very smoothly, with Shapiro and Glickenhaus being very accommodating producers. The only issues came up late in the process. Lustig has said, “This guy showed up at dailies with a clipboard and a little light, starting to write notes to us. I neutralized him by giving him a big credit in the main title with the provision that he should go and take a walk. That was it, there was an attempt to collaborate and it was quickly neutralized. I‘ll give a credit – go away! He has this big credit in the main title and he was never there for production.”
Then, Lustig disappointed the person handling distribution sales by turning in a movie that was better than expected! Throughout production, he would downplay the quality of the film to them, saying, “I think it’s okay, it’s gonna work, it’s commercial.” His approach was to lower expectations and deliver something better than expected. But, the sales person felt that if Lustig had hyped it up properly, it could have sold for higher numbers. Oh, well.
Lustig did make this a great movie that deserved to be a big success. He has described Maniac Cop as “an action-packed horror with some real satisfying scares (and) a clever, tongue-in-cheek quality, even in its most violent moments.” And with this film, he and Cohen brought us one of the last great horror icons to come out of the ’80s, Matt Cordell. The film is rather atypical for a slasher, with its big city setting. This allows for some bigger sequences, like a jailhouse raid and a climactic car chase which builds up to a spectacular stunt involving a truck crashing off of a pier. The story is well-rounded, the mystery intriguing, and Lustig shot the film with a nice, dark, moody atmosphere, going for a noirish look. That atmosphere is greatly enhanced by a haunting score provided by Jay Chattaway, who gave Cordell a very unnerving, whistle-based theme.
Even though the movie was undersold to distributors, Maniac Cop was successful enough to launch a franchise. Released in 1988, it was followed by Maniac Cop 2 in 1990 – and many fans feel that sequel is even better than its predecessor. Then, Maniac Cop 3, which had a very troubled production, came along in 1993. In recent years, Drive director Nicolas Winding Refn was trying to revive the property with either a feature remake or a TV series. But for some reason, the revival never got off the ground. Which is a shame. We’ve lost Robert Z’Dar in the years since the original films were made, but Matt Cordell is still out there… and he deserves a comeback.
At least we got a pretty cool trilogy out of the concept. And it got started with an awesome slasher movie that is perfect for St. Patrick’s Day viewing.
A couple of the previous episodes of the show can be seen below. To see more, head over to our JoBlo Horror Originals YouTube channel – and subscribe while you’re there!
