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Maniac Cop 3

Maniac Cop 3: Badge of Silence (Review)

Maniac Cop 3: Badge of Silence

Maniac Cop 3
1993
Written by Larry Cohen
Directed by William Lustig and Joel Soisson

Maniac Cop 3
The final chapter of the Maniac Cop trilogy is a disappointing finale that fails to live up to the standards of the prior two films, but does sort of make up for it with the last reel and the simply crazy stunts. While Maniac Cop 2 was Frankenstein meets The French Connection, Maniac Cop 3: Badge of Silence is Bride of Frankenstein meets The French Connection!

Maniac Cop 3: Badge of Silence had a lot of problems getting made. The original script from Larry Cohen focused on Santería rituals and had a black detective lead character. Funding for the film require presale rights money from Japanese distributors, who were very happy with the prior two entries and were mysteriously dragging their feet on this installment, but wouldn’t give the exact reason. When the suggest was made to bring back white actor Robert Davi, suddenly the Japanese distributor was on board for funding. So…yeah. That meant the script had to be heavily rewritten to switch out the character, thus changing some supporting characters. They started shooting with only 70 pages of script (which is ~70 minutes of film, but probably less), not enough for a full feature. The producers were frantically trying to add pages as production went on, and an increasingly distracted and annoyed William Lustig (who was also working on a different film as producer at the same time) was losing interest in Maniac Cop 3. This eventually lead to him leaving production and Joel Soisson stepping in to film the scenes needed to pad out the running time. Which means the Frankenstein theme extends to the film itself!

The padding is obvious in a few cases, scenes seem to go nowhere or go on far longer than they should, and a few others are repetitive and just repeat the same information or give us extra evidence certain people are jerks. It becomes a distracting mess, and Maniac Cop spends most of his time hanging around a hospital killing whoever stands in the way of saving his promised bride, another cop who was shot in the line of duty. She’s supposed to be resurrected as his bride, but he keeps characters from pulling the plug on her, which is sort of weird. Maybe the Santería priest who brought Maniac Cop back from the dead needed some time to recharge?
Maniac Cop 3
I saw Maniac Cop 3 at the Yerba Buena Center for the Arts in their Bay Area Now 7 program, under the Invasion of the Cinemaniacs! heading, specifically the part curated by Jesse Hawthorne Ficks of Midnite for Maniacs, who hosted two William Lustig triple features (a sextuple feature?) spread across two days. All three Maniac Cop films screened on Saturday night, while Friday featured Maniac, Vigilante, and Hit List. William Lustig returned for the second night of screenings and gave some more entertaining Q and As, some of which is peppered into the Maniac Cop reviews.

Maniac Cop 3: Badge of Silence again takes place soon after the prior entry. The dirt is barely shoveled into Matt Cordell grave before he’s raised again by a Santería priest, who needs the Maniac Cop for “dark days” ahead. What exactly those dark days are, we will never know, because nothing like that happens.
Maniac Cop 3

Prepare to get your Lincoln on this year…

Yes, folks, there are at least three (3) Lincoln movies coming your way in 2012, and two of them involve Lincoln fighting various monsters in history mashup genre bending tales of what if history. Or just dumb stories about Lincoln killing things. Either way, the movies are coming, and you’ll just have to deal with them!

First up is Abraham Lincoln, Vampire Hunter, based on Seth Grahame-Smith’s novel. Seth Grahame-Smith is the guy who started those awful mashup books that mix public domain stories with werewolves and zombies and crap. Soon everyone rushed to make a cheap buck, and now the bookstore shelves are littered with this garbage, making it harder to find novels about space babes kicking butt. I mean, harder to find William Shakespeare books. Yeah, that’s it! So Lincoln had a secret journal where he killed vampires, and vampires caused the Civil War and are responsible for slavery! Timur Bekmambetov directs, and Benjamin Walker, Mary Elizabeth Winstead, Rufus Sewell, Jimmi Simpson, Dominic Cooper, and Alan Tudyk star.

Not to be outdone, the Asylum has their own Lincoln killing things movie: Abraham Lincoln vs. Zombies!

Just check out this poster:
Abraham Lincoln vs. Zombies

And also there’s a boring true life biography of Lincoln coming out, called Lincoln. Steven Spielberg directs it and Daniel Day-Lewis is Lincoln. Joseph Gordon-Levitt, Jared Harris, Tommy Lee Jones, Jackie Earle Haley, James Spader, and Sally Field also star. It will probably be good and get Oscar noms. If you’re into that sort of stuff.