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Maniac Cop 3: Badge of Silence
[Blu-ray 4K]
Blu-ray ALL - America - Blue Underground Review written by and copyright: Eric Cotenas (1st February 2022). |
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The Film
 Having cleared undead maniac cop Matt Cordell (Hellhole's Robert Z'dar) of the crimes he was framed for, Lieutenant McKinney (The Goonies' Robert Davi) hopes that by burying the cop with honors, it will put him at rest at long last. He thought wrong, for a Palo Mayombe a Santeria off-shoot high priest (Live and Let Die's Julius Harris) has brought Cordell back from the grave again (for unclear reasons). Before McKinney can even suspect that Cordell is back and on the rampage again, his friend Officer Katie Sullivan (The Doors' Gretchen Becker) nicknamed "Maniac Kate" for her aggressive conduct is shot in the line of duty and left comatose with the press smearing her reputation (and concealing evidence of her innocence) and the city eager to sweep a lawsuit by junkie suspect Jessup (Watchmen's Jackie Earle Haley, who else) under the rug. Cordell comes to believe that Kate is a kindred spirit and hides in the hospital, killing off anyone who tries to tries to take Kate off life support (including Desperate Housewives' Doug Savant as an arrogant surgeon and Medium Cool's Robert Forster as the unethical head of trauma). It is actually Jessup's doctor Susan Fowler (Project X's Caitlin Dulany) who tells McKinney about the mysterious large cop who watches over Kate at night; but they have no idea what Cordell intends for Kate or for Jessup who he has set free and armed in the upstairs jail ward. Maniac Cop 3 is a mess, or rather "a morass of bad ideas" (as original director William Lustig describes it on the disc's extras) beyond the basic premise of a Bride of Frankenstein follow-up to Maniac Cop 2 (which Lustig had pitched as "Frankenstein meets The French Connection"). The pacing is uneven with obvious dialogue scenes not only obvious in their padding, but in the way they are inserted into other sequences creating a cross-cutting style of editing that stretches out action that should be quick. Unlikable characters are also given very little set-up beyond what almost immediately prefigures their comeuppances: from Savant's arrogant surgeon, Forster's callous head of trauma, Paul Gleason's city hall functionary, and Jessup's scumbag lawyer to the pair of nasty news photographers who taped Kate's shooting and edited the footage. It seems that Cordell only waits around so long to take Kate in order to pad the plot with a little violence and a lot of exposition, with providing McKinney with the information to clear Kate so secondary that it occurs offscreen. The recycling of footage from the first Maniac Cop in Maniac Cop 2 worked to clarify the backstory with flashbacks for those who had not seen the first film, but the recycling of footage from the latter film here just seems cheap with a six minute opening sequence that includes only a smattering of intercut new footage to the lazy use of the tail end of the shot of Cordell and Turkell climbing to the roof of a building as coverage for the shot of Kate climbing to the roof of the pharmacy. It has the overall feel of one of a nineties Dimension Films productions before this film's production company Neo Motion Pictures rechristened itself Neo Art & Logic and joined the Weinsteins in a flood of direct-to-video Mimic, Hellraiser, and Dracula 2000 sequels in that it feels like they either cut the film to the bone or never had sufficient coverage (see the extras below for more). The only ones who come out of this looking good are the cast and cinematographer Jacques Haitkin (A Nightmare on Elm Street) whose work here is consistently gorgeous and moody. Joel Goldsmith's score is evocative of Jay Chattaway's work but feels cheaper and uninspired. Although set in New York, the film is obviously lensed at least partially in Los Angeles since the abandoned church location is the same one seen in Prince Of Darkness (and it seems an intentional reference to the John Carpenter film since the "St. Goddard's" sign remains).
Video
Released to direct to video by Academy Home Entertainment (and to Image Entertainment laserdisc and HBO the same year) in unrated form, Maniac Cop 3 hit DVD first in 1999 from Platinum Disc Corporation in a fullscreen transfer (presumably the existing video master and partially opened up/partially zoomed in). First Look released it on DVD their own short-lived label (since absorbed into Millennium Entertainment) in 2004 in an anamorphic widescreen 1.78:1 transfer. Blue Undergound's 2013 Blu-ray/DVD combo was 4K-mastered and represented the first time that the film has been issued on home video in its correct 2.35:1 aspect ratio. The HD master went a ways towards giving the film a more cinematic veneer, but it still looked like a Dimension Films-style DTV sequel of a decade or so later. The company's new 2160p HEVC 2.35:1 widescreen with DolbyVision-graded UHD and the remastered 1080p24 MPEG-4 AVC 2.35:1 widescreen reveals slivers more information on the sides and a little less on the top and bottom to maintain the 2.35:1 ratio, but in contrast to the UHD/Blu-ray combo Maniac Cop 2, this appears overall brighter than the earlier HD transfer. The blues of the night scenes are a bit cooler, skin tones are less "rosy" while whites are less blue, and it gives the night exteriors feel like they have a tad more depth. Compared to the Millennium transfer, Blue Undergrounds slices only a sliver more off the top and more at the bottom of the frame (the left and right sides of the frame are more or less identical between the two transfers).
Audio
Audio options on the 2013 Blu-ray were DTS-HD Master Audio 5.1 and a lossy Dolby Digital 2.0 surround track of the original Dolby Stereo track while the new disc features the new disc includes Dolby Atmos and a lossless DTS-HD Master Audio 2.0 rendering of the stereo mix. The Atmos is a more spacious rendering of the previous 5.1 mix with some distant sirens and reverberating gunshots almost sounding in the viewer's room rather than just moving from one speaker to another. Subtitle options are the same as the 2013 edition with English SDH, French (Canadian), French (Parisian), German, Italian, Japanese, Korean, Mandarin (Simplified), Mandarin (Traditional), Portuguese (Brazilian), Russian, Spanish (Castilian), and Spanish (Latin American).
Extras
While the UHD/Blu-ray combo of Maniac Cop 2 offered no new extras, Maniac Cop 3 also ports over all of the extras from the 2013 edition; however, there is a brand new audio commentary by director "Alan Smithee"; that is, Lustig and replacement director Joel Soisson; and it is an entertaining listen. Lustig describes the film as "not the best time of my life" since he had been replaced on True Romance by Tony Scott and did not want to make a Maniac Cop sequel. They discuss working with scripter Larry Cohen who envisioned the film as a take on Bride of Frankenstein because he wanted to create a role for his girlfriend. Lustig observes that Cohen was more effective a writer when he was writing to get funding, and less so when a project already had a budget. Lustig wanted to do the film as a Blaxploitation homage with a black lead and was advised that the Asian investors had an aversion to black stars; as such, Lustig told them he had Davi before contacting the actor who happened to be available (although Lustig did not actually want him). He notes that aspects of the script relevant to the black lead remained; what with Cordell being brought back by Santeria. Soisson is more diplomatic about both Cohen and Davi. When it comes to discussing Lustig's parting of ways with the production, Soisson describes it as the "most charming fuck you." Soisson's own comments about his work on the production overlap with the documentary that was included on the 2013 Blu-ray and carried over here in "Wrong Arm of the Law: The Making of Maniac Cop 3" (25:03) where Cohen also offers a slightly different perspective on the shambles of a production. Soisson states that he threw together the script from Cohen's ideas and that Lustig's rough cut ran only running fifty-one minutes. He directed additional static padding dialogue scenes the ones that caused Lustig to walk off the production and directed the new scenes. Of the "Alan Smithee" credit, Lustig states that the film had no director in the sense of someone in charge of shaping the overall vision, and it shows. The actors Davi, Z'Dar, Becker, and Dulany are on hand here with brief remarks of course were kept ignorant of the behind the scenes troubles and speak of the production crew as a whole as being supportive. The disc also includes ten minutes of seven relatively unimportant deleted scenes which are mostly scene extensions, although one of them does explain a jokey reference to Elvis in the final cut. Unlike the deleted scene in Maniac Cop 2, the scenes here are of similar visual and aural quality to the feature (the sound to all of the scenes is in Dolby Digital 5.1). The disc also includes the film's theatrical trailer (1:49), a poster/still gallery, and the film's original synopsis (text screens).
Packaging
The UHD/Blu-ray combo case is housed in a new slipcover.
Overall
You can't keep a good "maniac cop" down but you can put him in a bad movie, and that's what happens with Maniac Cop 3, making the leap to 4K courtesy of Blue Underground.
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