Review of Maniac Cop (1988) by Harry W — 28 Jul 2013

Maniac Cop begins as an interesting story about a killer police officer and the controversial events that occur following the exposure of his presence to the public, but it deviates back and fourth between trying to find the killer and Officer Jack W. Forrest, Jr. attempting to clear his name after being named key suspect. Larry Cohen doesn't write his high-concept story theme into an interesting one and then Maniac Cop gets trampled by William Lustig's frustrating direction, so a simple and clever story gets turned into a poorly structured low-budget slasher movie which presents new ideas to the genre and leaves them there to drown in a random series of murders and tedious investigations.

Although slasher fans may be pleased by Maniac Cop, Bruce Campbell fans will feel robbed because his character has little to no essential role in the story and he gets reduced to about 20 minutes of screen time, and although his performance is good as usual, he had no compelling dialogue to deal with and no interesting story dynamics which resulted in his presence having no specialty or use of his iconic acting skills, and thus his performance is a routine dramatic one which is strong but not clever. Nothing in Maniac Cop is clever, even though it could have been. Instead it fell directly into slasher film cliches from start to end without any attempt to look at the serious drama that comes with a killer police officer, and so it merely becomes a overly visually dark and unoriginal slasher with the only claim to fame being that it stars Bruce Campbell and Richard Roundtree.

But one of the most frustrating parts in Maniac Cop is the script. The filmmakers are so concerned with emphasising the murders that they practically forget to write a script and so the quantity of dialogue in Maniac Cop is minimal.

Although, the ideas Maniac Cop are good and to a certain extent I did enjoy it. The plot was a more clever and high concept one than the average slasher film, and Maniac Cop was indeed well acted thanks to a talented cast.

Also, there were some thrills in the atmosphere and it had a strong horror feel to it which was pleasing.

For its low budget it sure does have a convincing police feel to it which was also surprising.

But the varying pacing and lack of consistency prevent Maniac Cop from being a good film.