Lots of fun (uh, unless you're a cop)
It's been a long while since I'd seen the first Maniac Cop, and I was going to rent it but decided against it and got The Relic instead. D'oh; the next day, the new TV guide came out and sure enough, The Relic's on TV tonight (on a channel that doesn't butcher its movies, too). Sigh.
I seem to remember Maniac Cop being enjoyable, but not as much as this one. Maniac Cop 2 is a totally absurd and outrageous action movie with horror movie overtones, and as such, a real hoot. I remember Maniac Cop 3 being more in the vein of part 2; too bad I can't find that one to rent anywhere.
Officer Cordell, played by he of the Van Dien/Jolie-like jaw Robert Z'Dar, was murdered in prison, but even death isn't going to keep him from getting his vengeance against the dirty politicians and lawyers responsible for putting him in there. He's pretty nonspecific about that revenge, though, since in the first third or so of the movie we've already seen him murder the survivors from the first film (including Bruce Campbell) and one very unfortunate shopkeeper. His new adversaries are, natch, a hard-boiled cop (Robert Davi) and a police psychologist (Claudia Christian).
The major characters aren't really all that interesting, easily summed up with a line or two of dialogue ("If you wanna psychoanalyze someone, psychoanalyze the lawyers and judges who put that kind of scum back on the streets!" pretty much tells us everything about Davi's character), though the actors performing them do so with conviction. But there are a lot of interesting minor characters like the blind newsstand owner, or the stripper-strangling serial killer (an unrecognizably bearded Leo Rossi) that Cordell teams up with.
But yes, the real draw of this movie has to be the action scenes, which are exciting, outrageous, and could probably only happen in a movie about a zombie cop. Cordell shoots up a police station late in the film in a not-so-subtle Terminator homage, except here it's bloodier and sillier (watch that guy fly through four walls!). Christian gets handcuffed to the steering wheel of a speeding car from the OUTSIDE, making for a wholly implausible but thrilling little runaway-car scene. And of course there's the car-crushing bus chase and a flaming Cordell picking people up, setting them on fire, and throwing them around like basketballs.
I admit, I wasn't really clear on just why Cordell teams up with that serial killer, and making him into a sort of tragic hero in the end just makes one wonder what the hell Larry Cohen (who wrote the screenplay) wants to make of him. But the action scenes more than make up for any shortcomings in the story. Many bigger budgeted action filmmakers (the Bruckheimer/Bay crap machine, for example) don't believe in the thrills their movies might provide, and basically hide their lack of imagination behind a blur of bad editing designed to con the viewer into believing he's seen something more interesting than it actually is, and damn those movies can get boring fast once that's figured out. Cohen and director William Lustig believe, and deliver.
Watch for Danny Trejo for a two-second, no-dialogue appearance as - you guessed it - a prisoner. Just don't stay for the awful rap song played over the closing credits.
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