You ever wake up in a fever dream, sweating bourbon and regret, and think, “I want to watch a movie where a zombie police officer teams up with a serial killer and then lights a strip club on fire”? Well, Maniac Cop 2 has got you covered. Unfortunately, it also wraps that lunacy in a blanket of indifference, generic plotting, and a third-act so stupid it could be used as a breathalyzer test.
Let’s back up. Maniac Cop 2 is the sequel to Maniac Cop — the 1988 B-horror movie directed by William Lustig that asked the immortal question: “What if Jason Voorhees joined the NYPD?” And to its credit, the first film had its charm — a kind of sleazy grindhouse sheen, with Bruce Campbell running around looking confused and Tom Atkins chain-smoking through his mustache. But Maniac Cop 2?
This thing is stitched together from the leftovers in Lustig’s fridge. The script — written by genre madman Larry Cohen — feels like it was tossed together on a cocktail napkin in between bitter laughs and unpaid bar tabs.
The plot picks up right after the first film, and by “picks up” I mean it kicks Campbell and Laurene Landon (the surviving leads) to the curb with all the respect of a landlord evicting squatters. Bruce Campbell, the supposed franchise face, gets unceremoniously offed within the first 15 minutes. We don’t even get a dramatic exit. He gets killed in an alley like a mugger in a made-for-TV crime special.
It’s the cinematic equivalent of firing your quarterback and then sending in a house cat to finish the game.
Enter Claudia Christian.
Now here’s the one beam of sanity in this crackpot hellride. Claudia Christian plays Susan Riley, a tough, skeptical police psychologist. She’s the kind of woman who can take a punch, pull a gun, and still look cool under the sweat and neon grime of 1990 New York. Christian brings presence. Not the kind of scenery-chewing lunacy you get from the villains, but a weary competence that says, “I’m here, I’ve read the script, and I’m going to try to salvage what I can.”
And she does, bless her. Whether she’s chasing leads, dodging bullets, or trying not to die in a strip club inferno, she manages to look like she belongs in a better movie. A real movie. You know — with things like logic, character development, and a budget larger than a Cracker Jack prize.
But Maniac Cop 2 isn’t interested in coherence. It’s interested in bodies flying through glass, brawls in prison showers, and a monstrous undead ex-cop named Matt Cordell wandering around like Frankenstein got a promotion.
Cordell (played by Robert Z’Dar and his enormous jawline) is back from the dead — again — and even more bulletproof than before. He’s basically a slasher movie Terminator, only slower and with a penchant for dressing like a cop from a Halloween superstore. He doesn’t talk. He doesn’t run. He just kills. And not creatively, either. Just stabs, chokes, and throws people through various structural components of buildings.
In an act of pure narrative nonsense, Cordell ends up teaming with a serial killer named Turkell — played by a sweaty, googly-eyed Leo Rossi, who looks like he’s been eating nothing but pork chops and crystal meth for three weeks. Turkell strangles exotic dancers and acts like someone who’s been banned from every Greyhound station in the country. And yet somehow, he and Cordell become a mismatched buddy duo like it’s some kind of undead Lethal Weapon.
There’s no chemistry, no reasoning, just “Hey, you kill people? Me too! Let’s burn down a police precinct!”
It’s stupid. Like, drool-on-your-shoes stupid. The kind of stupid that makes your TV sigh.
The direction is technically competent, but mostly uninspired. There are a few car chases that feel like they were filmed on leftover stock from CHiPs, and a few action scenes that might’ve looked cool if you were blackout drunk in 1991 watching this on VHS through a staticky cable feed. The lighting is all cop-show blues and strip-club reds, and the music sounds like rejected cues from a Sega Genesis game.
But the real problem is tone. This movie doesn’t know if it wants to be a horror film, an action flick, or a buddy comedy about two murderers and the women who can’t stand them. One minute you’re watching a prison riot, the next you’re watching Claudia Christian getting punched in the face by a reanimated cop corpse, and five minutes later, Turkell is giggling like a pervert on a Tilt-A-Whirl.
It’s chaotic, yes, but not the good kind. It’s not Mad Max chaos. It’s more like someone spilled beer on the script and filmed whatever pages were still legible.
And then there’s the finale — a flaming, flailing, explosion-happy mess that ends with Cordell on fire, driving a car off a dock, and plunging into the harbor like the world’s angriest S’more. It’s supposed to be epic. It’s supposed to be cathartic. Instead, it just feels like a mercy killing. You don’t cheer. You just nod and say, “Yeah, that tracks.”
Final Verdict:
Maniac Cop 2 is what happens when you give a stunt coordinator a script, a six-pack, and a VHS copy of The Terminatorand say “Go nuts.” It’s loud, dumb, and occasionally entertaining — mostly when Claudia Christian is on screen trying to inject a little dignity into the madness.
But everything else? A mess. The story’s a joke, the killer is a walking gimmick, and the tone bounces around like a racquetball on meth. It’s not scary. It’s not smart. It’s just there — a relic from a time when sequels were made because somebody found an extra roll of film in the back of a van.
1.5 stars out of 5.
One star for Claudia Christian. Half a star for the sheer balls it took to make this thing. And no stars for Judd Nelson not showing up to get killed again.
If you’re in the mood for mayhem with no meaning — and have a deep affection for undead cops who can’t act — you could do worse. But probably not by much.
