In Defense of Utter Garbage and Other Thoughts

PSYCHOPLASMICS could have been a podcast. If, y’know, had I the time, equipment, money or even the slightest idea at all of how to begin making one of those.  Or maybe even a YouTube channel, except we run into the same problems, and between you and me, folks, I don’t think YouTube needs yet another goof on there rattling on about movies and how great he thinks DARK SOULS is. I know a couple of guys who do that already and I don’t really want to be barging in on their turf, anyway. Still, it had to exist in some form. It was an itch that needed to be scratched and saying “no” to it was not an option. So, I looked into setting up something on blogspot, was pleased to discover that I was already signed up as part of my g-mail account, and then a little miffed to find that I had been beaten to the name THE CATHODE RAY MISSION. Fortunately, David Cronenberg movies have plenty of other weird, catchy sounding names and terminology to swipe.

Well, that covers the “how” this blog came about but maybe you’re curious about the “why?” Most likely not, but this is my little corner of the internet, so I’m going to tell you anyway. Simple: I was checking twitter one day a few weeks ago and ran across some friends talking about a certain Stallone movie, you know the one, and this prompted me to dig out my copy, snagged years ago out of a discount bin. When it was over I was amazed and pretty baffled by what I watched. I mentioned in my first post that COBRA never takes itself less than one hundred percent seriously and I think that grim straight-faced tone is major reason why I don’t remember that movie being nearly that batshit insane the last time I watched it. I went and made some comments about this on twitter, but it turns out that wasn’t enough. I found that I had more that I wanted to say and it wouldn’t leave me alone. So, couple weeks ago, while I was helping my sister out with watching her kid during the day, I swiped her laptop and started hammering on that COBRA review. It took about three or four attempts before I could get it to where I deemed it acceptable and I stayed up so late finish it up and polish it a couple of nights that the amount of sleep could be considered a glorified nap but it was worth it, I think. Could’ve been better, sure; it always can. I think it’s a little long and scattershot; the result of me trying to work in every single comment I could think of and rewriting big chunks of it right up to the morning I posted it. Still, I think it a makes fun little read. More importantly to me, people responded to it. They thought it was a fun little read. They liked the observations I made and they enjoyed talking with me about it. That is a kick, right there. That’s what makes all the time and effort I put into that worthwhile and that’s why I’m going to keep on doing it. Because when I’m struggling with writing something and I think that I don’t know what I’m doing and wasting my time, I have something I can point at and tell myself, “Calm down, you panicky git. People like this. Write more for them.”

And yes, this is all due to COBRA. Not JAWS, which is my favorite movie of all time. Or something by Peckinpah, who is my favorite director. Or anything by Kurosawa, Kubrick, Bergman, Melville, Leone, Coppola, Kobayashi, or Scorsese. The movie that made me want to take up writing about movies for the first time in years; to actually give serious consideration to seeing if I could make something out of my writing, was a friggin’ Stallone shoot-‘em-up from the producers that gave us THE AMERICAN NINJA series, a stack of Chuck Norris movies, and competing films about the lambada.

 Really, though, what’s so wrong with that?  Why not COBRA? (Why *not* Zoidberg?) There's this mindset, probably been around as long as we’ve had the arts and entertainment but has become more visible to me with the advent of stuff like YouTube or sites like Cracked.com or Buzzfeed or social media in general. Two of them, really, though they’re connected. One is the whole idea that movies are some kind of math problem. That if you point out all the mistakes, the goofs, all the plot holes, how this would not work in real life etc. etc. and do it as loudly and with much snark and profanity as possible, you’ve “solved” the movie. What “solving” it gets you I can’t tell. That you can notice a mistake? Show what a smartass you can be? Nothing wrong with that, I guess. There are probably places you can put that to better use. This is everywhere, too. “Honest” movie trailers, “Everything Wrong With…” videos, “How It Should Have Ended,” 248 PLOT HOLES YOU MAY NOT HAVE NOTICED BECAUSE YOU WERE ACTUALLY ENJOYING THE MOVIE, on and on and on. Like they’re all hoping to be the one who discovers the next “You know that if Indiana Jones wasn’t in RAIDERS it would have ended the same way?” Then there’s this whole idea of liking things “ironically.” That it’s okay to like this dumb movie but you have to do it at a remove. That you’re not really enjoying this stupid thing, you’re enjoying saying “Look at how stupid this is! Isn’t this stupid?” This is why we have three SHARKNADO movies. Three of them. Contemplate that on the Tree of Woe.

(Note: "This Guy Will Not Shut Up About CONAN / THE TERMINATOR / ROBOCOP" was also a possible title for this blog. Reviewing them here would likely be superfluous because of how often I'll refer back to them.)

To quote one Crow T. Robot, these approaches need to get a stepladder so they can jump off my butt. Both of them come from the same source, which I think is the absolute worst thing to happen to discussion of any form of art: this smug need to prove how much smarter you are than what you constantly consume. I hate that so much for one simple reason: it’s all about detachment. It’s all about unwillingness to come at something at its level and see what it was aiming for, how it fits together and how it ticks. Why would you do that? It adds nothing to the experience. You don't win a prize by doing this.

  

Let me tell you why I watch movies. I don't throw on The DOLLARS trilogy because they’re full of realistic gun battles and a historically accurate depiction of Civil War-era America. For me, A FISTFUL OF DOLLARS is that close up on The Man With No Name’s face. Seeing his hat brim come up and that look in his eyes and knowing he’s done joking about those goons apologizing to his mule and things are about to set off. Or in THE GOOD, THE BAD, AND THE UGLY, when Tuco’s lies to save face over his disastrous reunion with his brother and Blondie, knowing he’s lying, smiles and hands him a cigar. It's that feeling you get in JAWS when you hear Chief Brody yell in victory when he finally blows up ole Bruce. (God, if winning by the skin of your teeth has a sound…) It’s Robocop turning to the OCP President and telling him that his name is Murphy. Monument Valley in all its glory in a John Ford western. When the music really kicks in during the truck chase in RAIDERS OF THE LOST ARK. They're about how striking this person or this place or this camera motion looks. They’re about the ghost of a smile on a face, the light of greed in a person's eyes, a touch between two people, colors, sounds, rhythms…and yeah, sometimes, it’s simply “that blowed up real good.”  You cannot boil this down to some formula because what is exchanged between the screen and the audience is unique for each individual. Somebody can see something truly beautiful and life affirming in a cheap MAD MAX knock-off out of Italy as much as someone else can in an “important” movie from an “important” filmmaker. There is no distance between the two.

Which brings us back to COBRA. COBRA is trash. It’s a bad movie. Here’s the thing, though, whether or not something is “bad” does not determine whether or not it’s entertaining or interesting. It does not mean that there is nothing worth saying about it. People who are a lot smarter than me and have written more about art than I probably ever will have emphasized that and y’ know what? I’ve seen it proven time and time again. It’s going to be the unspoken mantra of this blog. I’ll take it one step further. As far as I’m concerned, if you can’t engage with a trashy movie, I don’t believe you’ll be able to with a legitimately great one. Need proof? Scroll back a couple entries. DIRTY HARRY is a good movie. COBRA takes all the wrong lessons from it to a ridiculous extreme. By talking about what the latter does in handling the same subject matter helps underline how the former handled it more than if I was talking about it alone. Had I not spent all that time working my brain to piece together what appeals to me about COBRA and all its lurid, fascist nonsense, I either could not articulate why I loved THE APARTMENT so much or I would have had a much harder time doing it.  You know what’s something I’m considering writing about for this blog? M.D. GEIST. Have you people seen M.D. GEIST? There’s a reason it’s called “The second worst anime ever made.” And yet you can look at M.D. GEIST and use it talk about the anime industry at the time it was made or parse out what was going on with the American anime fandom that made that it successful enough to get a sequel produced for the Americans despite it being unappealingly awful in everyway. You can say something about Albert Pyun movies, for crying out loud, even if it’s only “how can this guy keep screwing up what should be at least watchable via the bizarre concept alone?” To discuss any form of art and make no effort to understand the hows and whys of it is insulting and lazy and I will not contribute to that.

So this is what you are going to get with PSYCHOPLASMICS. Doesn’t matter if it’s a blockbuster or this obscure, bizarre curio that no one else has ever heard of, if it gets its hooks in me, I’m going to write about it. NINJA III: THE DOMINATION has as much pull around here as THE WILD BUNCH or Scorsese’s MEAN STREETS. Know what? I may end up not writing only about movies here. You may see a video game wind up on here, or a novel, or a Hellboy comic or some crazy manga or a grocery list if clicks with me. Sometimes I won’t even talk about the whole movie or I could be talking about an entire category of movies that appeals to me. Already one of each is kicking around in my head. In the near future there’s going to be a post about why I love the opening to the Tommy Lee Jones movie BLACK MOON RISING so much and another about knock-offs of Kurosawa’s YOJIMBO. I hope. Remember the words of Al Swearengen, that announcing your plans is a good way to make God laugh, and let’s keep our fingers crossed.

Furthermore, you are going to get a lot of writing about “me” here. I’m not the most social guy in the world. I’m quiet and difficult to get close to (unless you’re a dog) and internalize a lot of things. I’m constantly worrying that this makes me come off as more off-putting than I really am and talking about it is a struggle. But I’m finding that with writing about something that I love, the movies, makes it easier to put these things into words. I’ll admit, I was terrified wondering what reaction you all might have to some of the stuff I wrote in that post about THE APARTMENT. That I was letting you see me bleed too much, that I was being maudlin and embarrassing myself. Turns out that my fears were unfounded. There was no reaction and people still liked what I wrote. But the important thing is, I was able to talk about things that have been nesting in my gut for years in a space with people I trust and now that’s out of there. If that’s what it takes, I’ll be maudlin and embarrass myself if I have to. (But not too often.) Even if my writing just stays this thing I do for fun and never opens up a way to a more professional gig, I’m already convinced that this will be good for me in the long run. Fingers crossed, though. I think I might actually have a knack for it and would love to see how I’d do with a good editor around to keep me in line. God forbid, I might even post something original here. (That’s not going to happen any time soon, you can breathe a sigh of relief.)

One more thing before I go and that’s to give credit to where credit is due. To my crew from the old Stomp Tokyo B-Movie Message Board and associates, PSYCHOPLASMICS would not exist at all without you. Those boards were where I got the first taste of people being interested in what I have to say about anything and as the years have gone on, you’ve affected me even more. Not just the writing that some of you have done, though that is a big factor, but knowing you and being friends with you have influenced and helped me in ways that I can’t list, not only with talking about movies but with life. At the very least, if it weren’t for you guys I wouldn’t have even considered in a million years seeing a lot of films that I love to death now. So, Gavin, Zack, Travis, Tim, Other Tim, Dave, Other Dave, Chad, Other Chad, (I’ll let ya’ll fight over who is who) Mike, Jessica and Scott, Sean, Lisa, Freeman, Amelia, Bryan, and so many others I could name…you are my audience and this whole project is for you guys as much as it is for me. Hope that it’s around for a long time. For the rest of you, welcome aboard and please click on my friends’ links up there in the corner, which you can now see because I changed the template and got rid of that damn pop-up sidebar. Give ‘em a read. <Subotai>It’s the good stuff.</Subotai>

Oh, and I’m coming to B-Fest someday. Count on it. Don’t know how, don’t know when, but you knuckleheads aren’t going to be able to hide from me forever. I’ll crate myself up and get myself shipped to Chicago if I have to. I’ll hitch a ride on the wing and scare the crap out of William Shatner if that’s what it takes.

Ok, one more thing. That whole deal about how RAIDERS OF THE LOST ARK would have ended the same way if you took Indy out of the story? Shut up. Enough of that nonsense. Try to actually imagine a version of RAIDERS that doesn’t have Indiana Jones in it. That’s a version where Marion gets killed, there’s no Sallah, no Captain Katanga, probably no Nazi accidentally Sieg-Hiel-ing a monkey, certainly wouldn’t have the greatest action sequences put on film. It’d be nothing but us hanging out with Nazis and this French jerk who then die horribly. All pointing out that proves is that there could be a take on RAIDERS that nobody would want to watch. Stop it.

A Little Something Extra:
”Automatic System Habit” by Garbage, because some days we need to hear Shirley Manson going on about how she wants to be “your dirty little secret.” We call those days every day.

COBRA (1986)

Director: George P. Cosmatos

Screenplay: Sylvester Stallone (Based on the novel “Fair Game” by Paula Gosling.)

Starring: Sylvester Stallone, Brigitte Nielsen, Reni Santoni, Brian Thompson, Andrew Robinson.

Running Time: 88 minutes.

Tagline: “The Strong Arm of the Law.”  

If COBRA was a different sort of movie, that the Scorpio Killer from DIRTY HARRY (Andrew Robinson) shows up as the we-do-things-by-the-book police captain would have been intentional. It was because of Harry Callahan’s refusal to do things in accordance with the rules, remember, that botched his arrest and lead to Scorpio walking free despite all the damning evidence against him. We get the impression that Robinson certainly understands this and, knowing what an utterly cockamamie movie he's in, chews the scenery accordingly. Everyone else involved in the making of COBRA, however, seems to have lacked that level of self-awareness. 

“Cobra” would be one Officer Marion Cobretti, (Sylvester Stallone) the pride of the L.A.P.D.’s “Zombie Squad,” where he seems to be an elite unit unto himself, a last resort type called in when diplomacy fails and a liberal application of high velocity lead is needed to resolve things. If there are any other members of the “Zombie Squad” outside of Cobretti and his partner Gonzalez (Reni Santoni), we never meet them. Cobretti we’re introduced to with the film’s opening, a gritty voice over that rattles off a string of violent crime statistics before he draws his .45 and fires directly into the screen. I’d say that’s a statement of intent. 



Though his superiors don’t approve of his hardline approach to crime, as is the habit of movie police captains, Cobra is given the go ahead to “do what he does best” in pursuit of the Night Slasher, a vicious serial killer responsible for 16 deaths that the regular police force have had no luck in catching. There’s a reason for that, though. The Night Slasher (Brian Thompson) isn’t just some psychopath operating by himself but the leader of an organized cult whose members have infiltrated the police department. Cobra realizes that they’re dealing with an army of killers but can’t get any of the higher ups to believe him. This refusal to buy into the multiple killers angle will continue after Cobretti comes under attack by groups of assailants several times. 

The big break in the case comes when model Ingrid Knudsen (Brigette Nielsen) unknowingly witnesses the Night Slasher’s latest murder. (Note to all would-be serial killers reading this, if somebody drives by your murder scene, it’s not a good idea to just stand out in the middle of the street so they can get a good look at your sweaty, wild-eyed face and drive off.) Now the Night Slasher’s next target, Ingrid is placed under Cobretti’s protection and he’ll do what he can to get her out of harm’s way.  No prize for you if you conclude that will involve a lot of stalking, car chases, explosions, and gun fire.

COBRA isn’t particularly subtle about the way it tries to update DIRTY HARRY for the muscles-and-machine-guns crowd, going beyond simply sharing the “hard-as-nails cop versus nameless psychopath” scenario. Even back in high school when I first caught it on TBS, I picked up on how laughably blatant the similarities were. When his superiors remind Cobretti that he’s a “cop who gets the jobs nobody wants,” you can’t help but hear echoes of Harry Callahan angrily muttering “...every dirty job that comes along.” Facing off with a psychopath that’s taken a supermarket hostage, he tells the creep in question to “go ahead...” before emptying a clip into the guy. By that point, co-opting two of the major supporting actors from DIRTY HARRY is just overdoing it. I’ve mentioned Robinson already but Reni Santoni was also in the previous movie and plays what amounts to the same character here. He even suffers a similar fate, getting badly injured during a major gun battle. I had to check more than once just to make sure that the two characters didn’t share a name.

Whenever I watch DIRTY HARRY these days, I’m always struck by how different it is from the popular image we have of it. Never do I get the sense that it’s as in favor of the ‘kill ‘em all and let God sort ‘em out’ approach like its reputation would suggest. At its core, it’s about one angry man’s frustrations as he runs up against the limitations of the system he swore to uphold. The violence is treated as shocking and brutal rather than thrilling and when Callahan finally corners Scorpio and blows a hole through him, it’s not played as triumphant but with an air of disgust for things having gone this far. You don’t leave a mark on pop culture the way DIRTY HARRY did, however, without inspiring other filmmakers to create their own dollar store knock-offs of the original. And since the majority of filmmakers out there aren’t as smart as Don Siegel or screenwriter John Milius, the imitators would take all the wrong lessons from it. Different Clint Eastwood movie, but Sergio Leone’s “How many sons-of-bitches do you think I’ve spawned?” about the spaghetti westerns that followed A FISTFUL OF DOLLARS comes to mind. 

COBRA does more than just ignore DIRTY HARRY’s moral murkiness to avoid forcing any ambiguity and consequence onto its violence; it grimly embraces a fascistic viewpoint that Travis Bickle would be nodding in approval at. As far as Cobretti is concerned, criminals are all inhuman garbage unworthy of life and society would be better off if we could bypass the (useless and corrupt) justice system and just execute them in the street. “You’re the disease, I’m the cure” is a catch-phrase, tagline, and mission statement all in one. The lengths that he goes to dispatch the various criminal scum he runs across...”with extreme prejudice” seems like too light a phrase to describe it. Shoot them. Stab them. Stab them and then shoot them. Run them over. Set them on fire. Drop them off buildings...by shooting them. Blow them up. Blow them up some more. Pistol whip them, impale them on a hook and then dump them screaming into a furnace. It’s wholly appropriate, then, that for its climax COBRA transforms into a miniature slasher movie with Cobretti stepping in for Jason Voorhees. 

We’ve got an action film where the nominal hero of the piece is just shy of being as much of a remorseless killbot as the T-800, so it begs the question, what are the villains like? They’re called the New Order, though never referred to as such in the movie, and we never really get a clear idea as to what their goal is. The Night Slasher gives some big speech about being hunters out to cull the weak from a sick society but if you want anything more than that, you’re out of luck. See, when COBRA came out in theaters, it was set to go up against TOP GUN at the box office and the producers were worried that it would get crushed by the Tony Scott / Tom Cruise juggernaut. In order to squeeze in a few more screenings at the Cineplex, a good half hour was cut from the movie, and any backstory for the New Order went with it. The film was further trimmed down to avoid an X rating for violence. What we’re left with is little more than a legion of cannon fodder that are here only to get mowed down by Cobretti.

Whatever information that got excised would have been useful because just what exactly the deal with these clowns is the most confusing thing about COBRA. Throughout the movie we see the New Order members gathered in a run down building taking part in a ritualistic ceremony where they clang together their weapons while standing before a larger version of the same skull sigil that every member is tattooed with. What this does this symbol mean and what’s the point of this ceremony? We never find out. Even more puzzling is the exact make up of the New Order. This has got to be one of the most diverse gangs of murdering psychos you’ll see in a movie, including doctors, construction workers, businessmen, police officers, crossing all manner of social and ethnic lines. What exactly brought them together? Just crazy, I guess. And why do they hold the Night Slasher in such reverence? When Brian Thompson tried to get Stallone to explain what the motivation of the character was, all Stallone told him that there’s “nothing to him, he’s just evil.” But “just evil” isn’t good enough for the Night Slasher to make sense at all for the role he’s given. He has to be more than just a savage brute. Having a nameless villain with vaguely defined motivation and history works dandy when he’s operating alone, like the Scorpio Killer, but if you’re going to sells us on your big bad being an uber-Charles Manson figurehead, you’re going need him to do more than sweat a lot and wave a big nasty knife around. In fact, a friend of mine was so unconvinced that the Night Slasher was the real villain when she saw this movie for the 1^st time she kept waiting for the eventual reveal that Andrew Robinson’s obstructive police captain was the New Order’s true leader. I can’t blame her, either, since his utter disdain for Cobretti goes so far beyond the standard horn-locking you expect you’d think it was setting him up as a red herring at the very least. Nope, he’s just here to act smug and then get punched out by Cobretti in front of a dozen or so witnesses. Besides, having the renegade cop’s captain turn out to be the leader of a gang of murderers would have been ripping off DIRTY HARRY’s sequel, MAGNUM FORCE, and that would just be getting ahead of ourselves. 

 

It’s fitting that COBRA was released in 1986 for two reasons. One, this was the same year that Cannon Films, the same studio that produced COBRA, would release the third DEATH WISH movie. Two, the following year would see the release of Paul Verhoeven’s ROBOCOP. (Warping 7-year old Bill Smiley’s brain in all the right ways. But let’s save for the (near) future, shall we?) That couldn’t have been timed better. That’s because when you look at the former two movies, you’d be hard pressed to find any other films that took the tropes and mentality of vigilante crime films to such extremes without crossing over into out-and-out parody. Obviously, the only place to go from here was to do an over-the-top send up and that crazy Dutchman delivered. Come to think of it, 1987 also saw the release of PREDATOR, and I could go on about how that riffs on this kind of movie as well. Probably will, too.

How much distance is there between Marion Cobretti and Alex Murphy, really? One’s a soulless machine programmed to shoot criminals in the face and spit out one-liners and the other’s a victim of corporate greed that gets turned into one. The big cyborg certainly displays more genuine humanity. Cobretti isn’t so much a character as he is every tough cop cliché distilled down to an ambulatory scowl and bullet delivery system. When in any situation that doesn’t call for murdering everyone in sight, there’s something downright alien about the way he acts. If his face flipped open to reveal he’s a tiny little extraterrestrial driving a human-like robot, I wouldn’t be that surprised. Who cuts up cold pizza with scissors or keeps their gun supplies in his freezer? Or the scene where he tries to flirt with Ingrid by handing her a giant prop hamburger and making nonsensical jokes about how she uses too much ketchup? Speaking of Stallone and Brigette, you’d think two people who were married at the time would have some chemistry but you’ll see more romantic sparks fly when Cobretti is assembling his machine pistol.  

I could have saved myself a lot of time and effort if, instead of writing anything, I just posted a clip or an animated gif of the moment when Cobretti guns down somebody and then sticks his pistol in his waistband, the engraving on the grip now positioned to make it look like there’s a huge snake coming out of his pants. That’s this movie in a nutshell. There is no denying that COBRA is one seriously bad movie. It’s incoherent, sadistic, and tries way too hard in all the wrong ways to prove to you that it’s the coolest thing ever. But I’m going to let you people in on something: I love every stupid minute of this dumb, dumb movie. For people like me who are devotees of trashy 80’s cinema and action films, COBRA is an embarrassment of riches. If the following year would bring the first tremors in a shift towards popular action movies taking cues more from Shane Black and John McClane than John Rambo, this is one heck of a note to go out on. Cobretti can’t just be a supercop, he has to be THE supercop, dressed all in black, mirror shades practically stapled to his face, chewing on a matchstick the whole time, wiping out whole armies single-handedly while wielding the coolest weapons and driving the coolest car. (A 1950 Mercury that actually belonged to Sylvester Stallone, the lucky bastard.) This is a man who gets referred to as “The Cobra” in casual conversation! And hey, why settle for simple product placement when you can have you your hero pause in the middle of a hostage situation to crack open a Coors and take a drink? (Coors! The beer of choice for Cops on the Edge nationwide!) Or have him live in an apartment that has a gi-normous neon Pepsi sign right on his balcony? The real mind-boggler here though is a lingering shot on a Toy ‘R’ Us commercial. I want to know who at Toy ‘R’ Us looked at this movie, a hard-R action film about a renegade cop going completely apeshit on a murder cult, and said “Yes, this is what we need to advertise our chain of children’s toy stores.” Then there’s the moment where COBRA stops everything to turn into a music video featuring Brigette Nielsen in some of the most violenty 80’s clothes and wigs you can image, posing with prop robots! You can watch that bit here.

Sometimes a movie can get by on sheer excess alone. Despite the critical drubbing it received on release, COBRA has maintained a fairly sizeable cult following since. You might be surprised to learn that cult includes someone like Nicholas Winding Refn, the director of everyone’s favorite arthouse anti-hero movie DRIVE, and he even cites COBRA as a major influence. Comparing the two movies with this in mind, it’s actually not that surprising. They share quite a bit, from its story of a matchstick chewing stoic versus the Los Angeles underworld to the visuals it uses to depict the seedier side of the City of Angels. A good bit of COBRA’s skuzzy charm comes from how it looks, everything drenched in harsh lighting and neon reds, disorienting camera angles and Peckinpah-esque intercutting smattered throughout. You’d have to turn to William Friedkin’s TO LIVE AND DIE IN L.A. to find another screen version of this city that’s as stylishly sleazy. Add in the horror movie tone it often times takes and COBRA feels almost like an Italian giallo that someone inserted a bunch of car chases and shoot outs into. (Amusingly, we must note that it’s the hero with the black gloves.) Dario Argento’s COMMANDO, ya’ll.

Speaking of Arnold Schwarzenegger…the other most iconic action star of the 1980’s would have to be discussed here. COBRA is often mentioned alongside COMMANDO as both movies are pretty representative of the Reagan-era action movie form but they’re somewhat different beasts. COMMANDO was clearly made with an understanding of the movie that it is: a live action cartoon starring an invincible superhero. Heck, Jeph Loeb, the original scriptwriter, went on to make his name in superhero comics. COBRA, conversely, no matter how ludicrous or comical it gets, always behaves as if it’s nothing less than one hundred percent serious business. Ironic for a movie that started out as a discarded script treatment for BEVERLY HILLS COP. (I’d go into that but Crom, this review is long enough already.) But COMMANDO isn’t the Schwarzenegger movie I want to talk about here. You see, when Stallone rewrote his BEVERLY HILLS COP script into COBRA’s screenplay, he credited a number of the story elements to a novel by Paula Gosling titled “A Running Duck,” which would be published again as “Fair Game.” I don’t really believe that “Fair Game” was what Stallone was working from when he wrote COBRA because a look at “Fair Game’s” plot synopsis reveals very little in the way of similarities beyond the most basic. On the commentary track, George P. Cosmatos straight out admits that Stallone threw out everything from the book. (Another choice quote: “This movie did not win an Oscar.” No kidding.)  I think Stallone just credited Gosling to avoid getting hit with any kind of litigation. Huh, that sounds familiar. 

So what was really on Stallone’s mind? I’m embarrassed to admit that I didn’t pick up on this until I chanced on watching these two movies within a couple days of each other. It didn’t dawn on me before, I think, because in my mind COBRA was “that DIRTY HARRY rip-off.” Shall I stop keeping you in suspense? Like DIRTY HARRY, it had a huge influence on subsequent action films. It, along with CONAN THE BARBARIAN, was one of Schwarzenegger’s star making roles. It, like COBRA, dealt with a woman being protected by a man from a single-minded killer that’s terrorizing Los Angeles. You might even say this killer can’t be bargained or reasoned with. It took a while to finally click but oh boy, when I did realize just how much COBRA is a stealth remake of THE TERMINATOR in DIRTY HARRY drag, I couldn’t stop cracking up about it. Hey, come to think of it, Brian Thompson was in that movie too! This gets considerably more obvious when COBRA gets out of the city and into its last act, in which a romantic interlude at a roadside motel segues into a motorcycle / truck chase before a final showdown in an industrial complex where the machinery is put to use in dispatching the villain for good. Good grief, COBRA’s poster is practically a player two color swap of the iconic one-sheet for James Cameron’s movie! If the Night Slasher emerged from the furnace Cobretti feeds him into at the end, his burning flesh sloughing away to expose a robotic endoskeleton…it would make as much sense as anything else.

I mean, come on now!

A Little Something Extra:

“Night Force” by synthcore group Power Glove, which features sound and dialogue samples from COBRA. The perfect soundtrack for whenever you feel like cruising through the city’s neon-lit underbelly at 3 a.m.