Maniac Cop III: Badge of Silence

To the shock of no one, the Maniac Cop once again crawls himself up from the depths of the grave to continue to wreck bloody vengeance. Except this time the circumstances are a little different. Rather than pulling himself out of the grave, he is instead resurrected by a voodoo practitioner who knows the undead cop’s desire to weed out police corruption is not yet stated.

And it turns out, he’s right. Not long after being brought back from the dead the Maniac Cop gets wind of the city railroading innocent fellow officer Kate Sullivan, who subsequently wound up in the hospital. Enraged by this injustice that so closely mirrors what was done to him, our zombie friend takes it upon himself to right this great wrong by tracking down everyone involved in her poor treatment and teaching them the error of their ways.

Let this be a lesson to every doctor with a shitty bedside manner.

So where the first Maniac Cop was a horror film, and the second focused more on action than horror, Maniac Cop 3 seems to have flipped this short series’ genre priorities yet again, and gone back to focusing on the horror aspect. Except this third film feels much more like a straight-up slasher than the previous outings. And while there’s not as much action as the last film, it does still have some hi-octane moments. It’s just that almost all of it has been relegated to the film’s climax, so the movie doesn’t feel as evenly paced as the last film. Still, I was actually kinda surprised by how entertaining the movie was, especially considering the track record for straight-to-VHS sequels, and that bonkers ending, which I’ll get to in a bit…

So, here’s an interesting side note about this movie: The film’s description on Tubi TV states, “A young female cop is framed for murder. She falls in love with the Maniac Cop, who seeks out justice for her, no matter the cost.” Which, as far as movie summaries goes, is completely and utterly wrong and misleading. Or at least one third wrong, because the “She falls in love with the Maniac Cop” part is completely false. That part of the summary makes the movie sound like it’s going to be about some very weird, creepy, undead romance. And in a way, it kinda is, but Kate actually has no part in it, simply by virtue of being unconscious for most of the film. In fact, it is actually the Maniac Cop who forms a one-sided crush on his compatriot and decides he’s going to be all “white-knight-y” and defend her honor by going around the hospital she’s in and strategically killing people, almost better than Michael Myers did in Halloween II. Which almost comes across as romantic and honorable, until you realize that, much like the first film, our corpse friend has ulterior motives, and what he really wants is for the Voodoo guy to turn Kate into his new, undead zombie bride, and then the movie goes right back to being super-duper creepy again. Which, to be fair, it was going to be either way with that particular plot point. It’s just somehow slightly less creepy to know that it’s the zombie who formed the crush on the poor, unconscious woman, and not the other way around. A little.

Still super creepy, though….

…Yet still a better love story than Twilight.

Suck it, Bella Swan.

But other than that disturbing little detail, for the most part the movie pretty much feels like your standard slasher sequel. You’ve got a silent antagonist stalking around (and through) a single location, and slowly isolating people so that he can begin picking them off one-by-one, all while the one dude with any sense tries to stop him. It’s a pretty standard formula all things considered, though the undead romance does give it a more unique angle to work with. Like the second film, it also has some returning characters to look forward to as well. Robert Z’Dar is back portraying the Maniac Cop (though you can no longer recognize him at all under all the prosthetics and make-up), and Robert Davi returns as Detective McKinney, the only police officer on the force who can now successfully boast about taking out a zombie and living to tell the tale (sorry, Bruce.) The movie also looks good, sounds good, and has a perfectly serviceable plot that does have a few questionable hiccups (How come there’s suddenly never anyone around to hear a victim’s scream in these hospitals? Where the fuck are all the nurses?…), but doesn’t really contain anything too egregious or out of the ordinary for a film like this. So really, the movie is a perfectly mediocre, but still entertaining, slash and dash.

I thought it was considerate of him to pile all the corpses in the ambulance for easy transport.

The film’s one standout is the ending, which tricks you into thinking it’s over, but then suddenly turns into a ridiculously outrageous, 5-minute long, high-speed chase. I usually try to avoid blatant spoilers like this, but I honestly thought this was just too funny, so I feel compelled to comment on it. After the Maniac Cop accidentally sets himself and a church on fire (as a zombie, his coordination is either spot-on, or completely shot), McKinney and his lady doctor friend are being hauled off in an ambulance. And right when you think the movie is ending, suddenly zombie-boy goes “screw that” and decides to chase after them in a police cruiser. Except the firemen hadn’t shown up yet I guess, cause this dingus is still very much aflame. And now, so is the cop car. So a flaming cop car is driving down the road next to an ambulance, and at this point you just know McKinney is silently cursing the entire universe, because they never covered how to deal with any of this shit in the academy. But then it gets worse (read: better for us), because as soon as the ambulance driver takes one look at the literal flaming zombie outside the passenger window, he proves himself to be the smartest guy in the whole series and decides to nope right out of that cluster by bailing out of the driver side door and into oncoming traffic. And at this point, I’m pretty sure the film has spontaneously decided to turn into a dark comedy, because by the time ambulance-boy yeets himself out of the car I’ve found myself to be a giggling mess, and I’m 99.9% sure it has nothing to do with that shot of vodka I had before the movie started.

Yeah, no, fuck that…

His reaction to this may be the most believable thing in the whole movie.

Anyway…then the movie kinda apes the climax to Jaws, an oxygen tank is involved, cars go rolling (yes, the cop car is still on fire), things go boom, and as McKinney and the doctor pry themselves out of their wrecked vehicle, with only some mussed hair on the doctor’s part to show for their entire flaming ordeal (McKinney’s hair is still flawless, btw), the detective picks up the severed arm of the Maniac Cop (yes, it’s still on fire), and lights his cigarette with it’s charred remains, before he and the doc walk off into the smoggy morning air of a early 90’s New York City hellscape. It may be one of the stupidest, cheesiest slasher endings I think I’ve seen, and it’s so dumb that it kinda makes me love the movie a little more than I probably should.

I don’t know if I’m supposed to laugh or cringe at this, I really don’t…

And thus is the end of the Maniac Cop franchise. It’s clear from the ending that they were open to doing more, but as of right now that’s never happened (beyond a sparse, 3-minute short from a couple years ago). Was it a good ending to the franchise? Eh, it was decent. Not as good as the first two films, but still fun. And the movie did essentially end with a literal BANG!, which is better than some series wind up getting, so it could have been worse. It’s not perfect, and it resorts to a couple of predictable cliches, but I still found it to be fun and entertaining. So if you’re a fan of slashers and the rest of the series, then this one is a solid watch with a ridiculously amusing ending.

Maniac Cop III is available on a variety of streaming services.

Maniac Cop III is also available on DVD and Bluray.

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