Dir. William Lustig & Joel Soisson (1992)
A voodoo priest, for some reason, resurrects the Maniac Cop, who continues to be a Maniac Cop.
CAUTION: MAY CONTAIN SPOILERS
In today’s lesson on “Going To The Well One Too Many Times,” William Lustig and Larry Cohen reunite to make the third in the Maniac Cop series. In this installment, a voodoo priest resurrects Officer Matt Cordell. Like the previous installments, the film is supplemented with gratuitous scenes from the previous installment, sort of an Inception for shitty horror movies. This was a rough one, especially when the first two were aggressively decent movies. Robert Davi is good, as usual, but you kind got the feeling that he knew what a huge piece of shit this movie was going to turn out to be and checked out about halfway through.
The story eventually comes to revolve around a female officer who was gunned down during a robbery, and how the city scapegoated her into allegations of excessive force. This pisses off Cordell, who was victim of the same circumstances (although, to be honest, I have a hard time believing that he absolutely used excessive force when he was alive, what with all of the random killings that he committed since he’s been undead.)
Does this look like someone who doesn’t commit police brutality to you?”
And honestly, at this point… I quit. You know what, this movie sucks. It’s not worth the time it takes to watch it, so thankfully for you fine folks, I watched it for you so that you don’t have to. I honestly believe that Cohen and Lustig watched Child’s Play, thought that voodoo was the cool new trend in horror, and said, “Hey, how can we jam this into a shitty cop movie?” It’s not entirely Lustig and Cohen’s fault; the production was an ordeal, and Lustig quit before the finished product was filmed. That’s part of why they had to cram so much of the second movie into this, and part of why its an incoherent steaming pile of shit.
Who this movie is for: Fans of the first two who don’t know when to quit, Completionists of William Lustig movies, People who love police brutality so much that they’re willing to sit through this to get their fix
Bottom Line: This movie is terrible. Like, really bad. It’s not worth the watch, even if you’re a huge horror fan. It’s not worth the watch to say you’ve seen it. Just pretend that there’s only two Maniac Cop movies that were pretty good and anxiously await the reboot coming soon!
