Maniac Cop 2 is a great way to celebrate Christmas.
BACKGROUND
A lot of sequels aim to be bigger and better than their predecessors. “Bigger” is usually no problem, it’s the “better” part where they often fall short. Few have achieved both of their goals – but one sequel that did manage to be both bigger and better than the first movie was Maniac Cop 2. Director William Lustig and writer Larry Cohen had established undead, homicidal former police officer Matt Cordell as a new force in the horror genre with 1988's Maniac Cop. Two years later, they brought him back to the screen with an increased budget, a larger body count, some mind-blowing stunt and action sequences… and you won’t believe who they decided to kill off in the first half.
Made on a budget of $1 million, the first Maniac Cop only managed to gross $671,000 during its theatrical run. It was the VHS rentals that made the movie a hit. Medusa Pictures was especially pleased with how well it did for them when they brought the movie to video in the UK. So they offered $400,000 to pre-buy the UK rights to a sequel. The original producers at Shapiro-Glickenhaus Entertainment were out of the picture for the follow-up, but Lustig and Cohen didn’t have trouble finding more financiers. Distributors and production companies were so eager to help make Maniac Cop 2 happen, the filmmakers managed to raise a budget of $4 million. Lustig then set out to make that extra money count. With a budget four times larger, he would make sure the sequel had four times the production value.
This despite the fact that he wasn’t even sure they should make a sequel in the first place. As he admitted to Fangoria magazine, “I really couldn’t figure out where the hell to go with it. I really thought we had played out the concept in the first film. And then Larry Cohen delivered the script to me and it really blew me away. He really found some original concepts, original set pieces that could involve the Maniac Cop; not just the action scenes, but these really clever twists, too. ... The action is also probably three, four times the level of the first film. Basically, rather than doing a rip-off of the original, the approach we’ve taken is to cultivate the potential for a series of pictures.”
SETTING
The sequel keeps the big city setting of the original film: this is all still taking place in Lustig’s beloved New York City – and it’s the NYC of the ‘80s, when the city still had a lot of gritty edge to it. Maniac Cop 2 started filming in December of 1989, so you can still say that this one captures the '80s, but filming continued into February of 1990, so it actually captured the days that marked the transition into a new decade. Of course, entering the '90s didn't clean up New York immediately, so there's still a coating of grime and sleaze to the whole thing, even if the overall movie has a cleaner look than its predecessor. (Thanks to the enhanced budget.)
As with the original, the production split filming between New York City and Los Angeles (with a bit of New Jersey thrown in for good measure), but you can't really tell when a scene was shot in L.A., and there are a lot of New York exteriors on display.
While the events of the first movie took place around Saint Patrick’s Day, Maniac Cop 2 picks up months later, just in time for Christmas. So both of these movies make for great holiday viewing, on separate holidays. New York City isn't having a white Christmas in Maniac Cop 2, but the characters are bundled up for the winter and Christmas decorations are on display.
KILLER(S)
As revealed in the first movie, the Maniac Cop himself is Matt Cordell, a New York police officer who was known to be a bit trigger-happy, but became something of a celebrity - and a hero to other officers - due to the notable busts he made. Then he got too close to bringing down crime bosses with connections in important places. City Hall turned against him, had him convicted of rights violations, and sent him off to Sing Sing, where he was locked up with the criminals he had busted. He was ambushed in the shower and cut up so badly he was believed to have been killed. But he wasn’t quite dead. He was kept alive by the need for vengeance.
The sequel finds undead Matt Cordell still stalking the streets with his blade-concealing billy club, terrorizing cops, citizens, and criminals alike as he seeks revenge on the corrupt system that wronged him and turned him into a monster.
Robert Z’Dar reprises the role, and his appearance in this one shows that he’s losing the battle against decomposition. The producers asked a half dozen makeup artists to come up with a new design for the character. Dean Gates was the winner, and the new, more ghoulish look he provided for Cordell is great; much more effective than the character’s appearance in the first film.
This time around, he's not the only killer in the movie. There's also Turkell, a serial killer who has been strangling the city's exotic dancers. Lustig thought his Maniac star Joe Spinell should play this character. Basically, he would have been playing the Maniac all over again. Unfortunately, Spinell passed away before production could begin, so Lustig turned to another actor he had worked with before: Leo Rossi. Sure, Rossi had appeared as a different character in scenes that were shot for the TV version of the first movie, but that didn’t matter. Have him grow a bushy beard and put on a Southern accent and he became the perfect Turkell. While preparing for the role, Rossi was even thrown out of a strip club because he unnerved one of the dancers by making sustained eye contact with her.
Turkell sees himself as a heroic figure, "a crusader of the night," and he believes Cordell to be a kindred spirit. When these characters cross paths, he becomes Cordell's own Igor or Renfield, a lackey as the maniac cop's mission of revenge ramps up. This character was part of an effort to shine a different light on Cordell. As Lustig explained, “What we’re doing this time is creating more sympathy for the character. In the first film, the Maniac Cop was more like Jason, a soulless character killing people. What we’re using the Turkell character for is to open up a dimension to the Maniac Cop and give him more of a Frankenstein-like sympathy.” He described the film as “Frankenstein meets The French Connection.” Cordell still comes off as a very bad man, but it is clear why he’s doing all of this.
FINAL GIRL
There was a creative speed bump when it came to bringing back Bruce Campbell and Laurene Landon as the heroes of the first film, police officers Jack Forrest and Teresa Mallory. Speaking to Variety decades later, Campbell revealed, “I made them kill me on the second one. They were like, ‘Hey, come on back,’ and I was in the middle of a divorce. Never catch an actor in the middle of a divorce because they don’t care about life anymore. I said, ‘Give me this number or kill me.’ And they went, ‘Okay, we’re gonna kill ya.’“ During production, he told Fangoria that he’d usually get a little pissed off when heroes are killed in sequels, but it made sense in this case. The continuing character is the Maniac Cop, not his adversaries. So Cohen wrote the death of Jack Forrest into the script. He didn’t want to kill off Teresa Mallory, he wanted her to be hospitalized with a devastating injury so she could be brought back in the next sequel. But she appears to be quite dead in the movie, and she didn’t make it into Maniac Cop 3.
Cordell knocks off our previous heroes in the first half hour or so and a new pair of characters get wrapped up in the situation. Claudia Christian was cast as police psychologist Susan Riley and Robert Davi as Sean McKinney, a hard-boiled, hat-wearing, trenchcoat-sporting detective who's like a film noir cop who has somehow found himself in a horror movie. Lustig knew he wanted Davi for the role so early on, he told financiers he had cast Davi in the movie before the actor was even officially involved.
Killing off Jack and Theresa was a risky move. A lot of horror fans might feel like switching the movie off as soon as Bruce Campbell makes his exit, but they’re rewarded for sticking around. Susan Riley and Sean McKinney prove to be worthy replacements. Davi wasn’t tasked with doing much more than standing and around and acting cool, which he handled perfectly. Susan, on the other hand, is put through the wringer.
Not only does she get abducted by a group of escaped criminals, but there’s also a scene where she’s handcuffed to a runaway car. Christian reportedly didn’t get along with Davi or Lustig. It has also been reported that she suffered a miscarriage after filming the runaway car sequence. The filmmakers hadn’t been informed that she was pregnant, otherwise she wouldn’t have been involved with the stunt. Production had to shut down for a while, apparently causing a loss of $200,000. But, after recuperating, Christian returned to set and finished her work on the movie. Her time on Maniac Cop 2 may have been rough and tragic, but she did make Susan stand out as a smart, resilient heroine.
VICTIMS
Cordell racks up one hell of an impressive body count in this movie, but most of his victims are such minor characters that they weren't even given names. They just show up on screen to be murdered.
The only victims we really get to know are the ones who are a bummer to see exit the picture: Jack Forrest and Teresa Mallory. When he's not offing returning heroes, Cordell is blasting and smashing his way through multiple police officers - and at the end of the film, he bashes and burns his way through multiple convicted criminals as well.
DEATHS
Jack Forrest and Teresa Mallory are taken out with a blade through the throat and a broken neck. Other individual kills include a knock over the head with a billy club, a shooting, and a hit and run - but most of the deaths in this film take place in massacre sequences.
The fact that Lustig had a lot more money to play with on part 2 is plain to see when you watch the movie, which looks much more slick and polished, and contains some big set pieces. The rampage Cordell goes on in this installment allows for several awe-inspiring action sequences filled with thrilling mayhem and incredible stuntwork.
As mentioned, Susan is handcuffed to a car that is sent rolling downhill through traffic-filled streets as she dangles off the side - but she manages to survive the ordeal. Cordell wipes out an entire police precinct in one of the coolest assault sequences ever, which involves him shooting a whole lot of police officers and tossing them around, through doors and walls. There's something like twenty kills in that sequence alone.
Later, there's a raid on Sing Sing prison and some very impressive fire stunts as Cordell walks around attacking people while his body is engulfed in flames. Burning doesn’t bother him. Lustig said that, throughout production, they were experimenting with several first-of-a-kind special effects. The stunt people didn’t know what to expect, but they accepted the challenge.
CLICHÉS
Horror movie and action movie clichés collide in this one. We've got the unstoppable killer who can shrug off gunshots, fire, and explosions. There's the authority figures who won't listen, the psychologist who gets too close to the case, the detective who drops one-liners, gunfights, and cars that explode just because another vehicle has bumped into them.
POSTMORTEM
The first film had an incredible cast, and Lustig wasn’t slacking when he put this one together. In addition to the actors already mentioned, you get Michael Lerner, Clarence Williams III, Charles Napier, and Marco Rodriguez in supporting roles – and Rodriguez is even sort of doing a variation of his role in the Sylvester Stallone classic Cobra. A pre-fame Danny Trejo makes a cameo, and Sam Raimi reprised his role as a newscaster, but his screen time ended up on the cutting room floor and in the deleted scenes section of the eventual DVD and Blu-ray release.
Despite having a bigger budget and awesome action, Maniac Cop 2 didn’t get theatrical play like the first movie did. It went straight to video on December 13, 1990. Just three months later, members of the L.A.P.D. got worldwide attention for beating a man named Rodney King while arresting him. This situation would boil over and lead to the L.A. riots the following year - and Larry Cohen thought it gave Maniac Cop 2 the perfect opportunity for box office success. He told Psychotronic Video, “It’s crazy that Maniac Cop 2 isn’t in theatrical release with all this stuff going on with the police in Los Angeles. They’d make a fortune if they had that picture in every major inner-city area.” But it wasn’t to be. The lack of a theatrical release didn’t dampen Lustig’s enthusiasm for the film: he felt that Maniac Cop 2 was not only superior to the first movie, but to every other movie he ever made. He feels it’s his best work because “It was the film where I felt as though myself and my crew were really firing on all cylinders. And I think we made a terrific B-movie.”
They certainly did. Maniac Cop 2 was another success, paving the way for Maniac Cop 3. Unfortunately, that one was a troubled production that resulted in a compromised film… but that’s a story for another time.
The Maniac Cop trilogy is somewhat obscure, at least when compared to heavy hitters like Friday the 13th, A Nightmare on Elm Street, or Halloween, but the series deserves to be mentioned in the same breath with its more popular peers. Matt Cordell is worthy of being considered a horror icon, and Maniac Cop 2 was him at this peak. It’s one of the coolest sequels ever made.
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