One of the more notorious 1980s horror movies was Maniac from 1980, which was like an 80s gored-up version of Peeping Tom, where you took the point of view of the titular killer, who scalped his victims to provide hair for his mannequins. It was directed by William Lustig, who also directed this little number, which will be notorious for precisely nobody, which goes to show what you lose in going from a noun to an adjective. This one is in solid B-movie territory, as evinced by the fact that the hero (or rather, one of them, because there are different heros for the two halves of the movie) is Bruce Campbell, most famous as the muse for Sam "Evil Dead" Raimi (who also shows up as a TV reporter), who is just a millimeter away from leading man material (somehow a tiny bit too strange, a tiny bit too cheesy), and now has a thriving career being himself and going round various conventions, often performing marriages for his fans. If this has been his sole output, however, he would not have half so many fans, as the role gives him no quippy one-liners or catch phrases, or indeed any chance to flex his comedy muscles.
The writer of the film is the prolific B-movie screenwriter Larry Cohen (famous for It's Alive, where the monster is a baby, or Q, The Winged Serpent, where it's a quetzelcoatlus that lives in the attic of a New York skyscraper, or, in a late-career mainstream breakthrough, Phone Booth), and I have to say, it's not one of his most imaginative. The basic plot is that there's a giant guy dressed up as a New York Cop going round killing random people (the first person he kills is a poor woman running away from two muggers who thinks he's going to help her, but has her neck snapped instead). This, understandably, exacerbates the public's already tense relationship with the fuzz, and, in fact, gets an innocent (well, ACAB) cop shot by a terrified civilian as a result. This can in theory be blamed on our first-half hero, Detective Frank McCrae, played by one of those "I know that guy!" actors, Tom Atkins,
who seems a bit old for the role, particularly as the reason the public knows about the Maniac Cop is because he leaked the story to a far-too-young-and-sexy (well, with allowances for ridiculously unflattering 80s hair) news anchor with whom he has, it is strongly implied, dallied. (He looks old enough to be at least her father, and to his credit, he shows no interest now.) McCrae is the voice of reason and decency, who (a) doesn't believe the culprit is any of the schmucks his higher-ups want to pin it on (like the two muggers), and (b) is very quick to believe that it's a rogue cop, to the horror of those aforementioned higher-ups (which include Richard "Shaft" Roundtree).
When we are first introduced to Bruce Campbell's Jack Forrest (yeah, tried real hard with that name), it is as a purposeful red herring, because we watch him from behind putting on his police uniform, just as the film has opened with closeups of the maniac cop strapping on various items of equipment. And, indeed, his neurotic wife suspects him of being the maniac, and keeps a scrapbook of all the newspaper clippings about the murderer. After Jack leaves the apartment, we see part of the reason the wife believes this: the phone rings and a female voice taunts her with accusations about Jack being the killer. This drives the wife to follow Jack as he goes out into the night (supposedly on patrol) and she finds that he is instead going to a sleazy motel where she bursts in on him in bed with a blonde (who turns out to be another cop, and is pretty much co-hero of the second half of the film). Jack, to his minor credit is pretty ashamed once caught, but it's too late as his wife runs out into the night... and into the arms of the real maniac cop. Once her garotted corpse is found in the very room in which the tryst occurred (by a cleaning lady who is, very unrealistically, not a non-English speaking immigrant, but another "don't we know her from somewhere?" type), Jack is slapped in jail, although McCrae is already convinced he's innocent, and goes to check on the blonde (Theresa Mallory, currently undercover as (of course) a prostitute), just in time to help her fight off the maniac. (But she's already emptied a whole clip of bullets into him, so the extra couple that McCrae contributes can't be what swings it.)
McCrae is convinced that Jack must have been set up by somebody in the force, and somebody who knew about Jack and Theresa's affair. But the only person she told was a mousy long-serving desk jockey with a bum leg called Sally Noland... Anyway, McCrae pretty quickly works out who the real Maniac is, and his connection to Sally Noland, the only hitch being that he's supposed to be dead. So he arranges a meeting with the coroner who supposedly conducted the autopsy, just before the maniac storms the cells killing all and sundry, except his intended targets, Jack and Theresa. However, Jack is now a suspect in multiple murders - including (alas) McCrae's.
So he must take over the mantle of hero for the remainder of the film. We start with a visit to the coroner's to find out the mystery of how a dead man could be murdering so many people.
We learn that he wasn't exactly physically dead, but the coroner was pretty convinced he was brain dead. Then it's back to Police HQ for a bloody showdown, that transitions to a car chase to the pier and the usual "is he really dead?" ending to set up Maniac Cop 2.
Why the Criterion Channel of all things was showing this, I'll never know (Jami zeroed in on it when I asked her to pick a film - she ignored all the classics of the Czech New Wave and the like). It's not cheesy or weird enough (unlike some of Larry Cohen's other creations) to be truly interesting. It is competently made and acted, I'll give it that, but it kind of fumbled the opportunity for social commentary, and our killer didn't really kill with panache, which you want in your inhuman slashers. If there's nothing else on, it can't hurt, but I wouldn't seek it out (unless you're a Bruce Campbell completist).
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