By the mid-1980s, violent crime in America had been spiraling out of control for two decades. Murder doubled from 5.1 homicides per 100,000 people in 1960 to 10.2 homicides per 100,000 people in 1980, a number that exceeded even the highest crime rates of the prohibition era. Nor were these stats merely a fluke, crime rates would continue to rise year after year until they hit their all-time highs in the early 1990s. Initially, it was not hard to find bleeding hearts who wanted to solve the problem with government handouts, subsidized housing, a bigger budget for inner-city schools, and other solutions along those lines. However, by the middle of the 1980s, these were a dying breed. Sure, some still existed in isolated suburbs and various ivory towers, but Americans who actually lived and worked in decaying urban centers were fed up. Those that had not been victims of crime themselves lived in fear of one day becoming victims. The law-abiding citizens wanted something done and they wanted it done yesterday.
In politics, this longing paved the way for countless law-and-order politicians (of all political persuasions), who promised a swift crackdown on lawless thugs in exchange for votes and power. However, the entertainment industry was far slower to respond than their political counterparts, indeed the big studios seemed almost reluctant to convert these simmering tensions into dollars and cents. Perhaps this was because Hollywood was overwhelmingly composed of the sort of touchy-feely liberals that would call the law-and-order set fascists. The sort that would argue (perhaps correctly) that crime could be more effectively controlled by better education and unleaded gasoline than through jackboots and lengthy jail sentences.
So, for decades you only had thoughtful vigilante films like Dirty Harry (1971) where the titular detective’s brutality was treated as understandable but nonetheless monstrous. When Harry gives in to his base instincts at the film’s conclusion we are not meant to see it as anything heroic, but rather as something tragic. Even this, in 1971, proved far too transgressive for the tastes of Hollywood’s ruling orthodoxy, and the first Dirty Harry movie was labeled as “fascist cinema.” Reeling from the hostile reception, the film’s first sequel did everything it could to retcon both Dirty Harry’s ending and character. In Magnum Force (1973) Harry found himself still a police officer despite tossing his badge into the San Francisco Bay, and moreover he spends the entire movie battling a sinister conspiracy of vigilante cops who were doing more or less the same thing he was at the end of the first film.
The next major film that tried to fill Dirty Harry’s shoes was Death Wish (1974), an uncommonly thoughtful action movie that depicted a (formerly) pacifist architect on a one-man crusade against all the hoods in New York City. The thing that differentiated Paul Kersey from “Dirty” Harry Callahan was that his film did not attempt to make his motivations sympathetic or even understandable. He was simply deranged. Sure, he had a better reason than most to start killing random thugs after his wife was killed and his daughter raped by a gang of crooks. However, Kersey made no effort whatsoever to chase down the specific criminals responsible, instead, he targeted any punk stupid enough to try to mug him. You’d have to be insane to see Kersey as anything other than a doomed, tragic figure on a fast track to pointless self-destruction. For god’s sake, it’s in the film title! How do miss this? Nonetheless, critics panned Death Wish (1974) as nothing more than odious wish-fulfillment for fascists. Despite making back its budget five times over and leaving ample room for a sequel, the big studios made no effort to produce any for almost a decade.
If mainstream Hollywood was averse to capitalizing on this goldmine, then independent companies were far more willing to cash in. It began on the extreme ends of cinema, with grindhouse exploitation films like The Exterminator (1980) and gritty arthouse films like Ms. 45 (1981) turning a tidy profit compared to their meager budgets. However, the subgenre would reach new heights with the infamous Cannon Films. The first order of business was a few sequels to Death Wish (1974) that essentially gave Kersey the opposite treatment as Dirty Harry in Magnum Force (1973). Where Harry was retconned into a model police officer who occasionally mouthed off about protocol, Kersey was lionized, transforming rapidly from a monstrous villain, to a conflicted anti-hero, to (by Death Wish 3 (1985)) a full-blown champion of justice. The moral complexity of the character was stripped away, bit-by-bit, until all that was left was a fantasy of revenge for every decent law-abiding citizen who had ever suffered at the hands of criminal scum.
Yet even Death Wish 3 (1985), the most absurd film in the Death Wish series, and one of my favorite action movies pales in comparison to today’s film: Cobra, the crown jewel of the Cannon Films vigilante oeuvre. Cobra is not only more ludicrous than Death Wish 3 (1985), it is somehow even blunter about its messaging to the audience. Indeed, I would go so far as to say that few films from any era have so brazenly exploited audience fears and frustrations. Moreover, few have been as viscerally enjoyable or as endlessly quotable as Cobra.
In a classic example of Cannon’s risk-averse approach to filmmaking, the studio picked up both its star, Sylvester Stallone and director, George P. Cosmatos, fresh from their joint success with Rambo: First Blood Part II (1985). No doubt Golan and Globus were expecting to duplicate the earlier film’s massive commercial success, hell they even gave Cosmatos the same budget to work with, a cool $25 million. While Cobra was reviewed poorly (earning six Razzies, proving that the Golden Raspberries are just as full of shit as the Oscars), and failed to gross the same $300 million as its predecessor, it still was a massive hit both at home and particularly abroad. Indeed, it’s not hard to observe its influence on the hard-boiled cop movies of Hong Kong.
The film opens with the image of a gun, while the film’s star and screenwriter, Sylvester Stallone, reads out a list of crime statistics in an unsettlingly monotone. “In America, there’s a burglary every 11 seconds, an armed robbery every 65 seconds, a violent crime every 25 seconds, a murder every 24 minutes and 250 rapes a day.” He says before the gun turns to face the audience and shoot them right in the face. One does not have to have a degree in film analysis to see the messaging here. ‘These are all the crimes that are committed every day in America, how long do you really think you will last before you to are a victim of one of them?’ The opening plays directly on the fears the audience was most likely carrying around with them before they sat down in the cinema. Even those living a more charmed life, where they didn’t need to worry about such things in their day-to-day life may also pause for a moment and contemplate just how the world really is.
However, that is about as much as the film is going to ask the audience to consider the real world, as Cobra’s plot is, frankly, ludicrous. The film revolves around an army of psychopaths led by the enigmatic serial killer called the Night Slasher, who are trying to bring about a New World by killing random people. For reasons that have more to do with capturing a cool shot than making any logical sense, they gather in drained swimming pools and clang their axes together menacingly. Amusingly, one of these hunters of the New World is a pudgy guy in a business suit who looks woefully out of place. Let’s get this out of the way before we go on, their plan makes no sense. How does the Night Slasher expect to topple the government by murdering a few random taxpayers? Moreover, it’s not at all clear what he and his army of psychos plan to do if they succeed. Hell, Charlie Manson had a more coherent plan of action than these jokers.
Still, there is something rather impressive about their leader, The Night Slasher played by Brian Thompson. Part of it is, no doubt, the actor’s bizarre and memorable physical appearance. Mr. Thompson has a face that is simply, one of a kind. A mess of twisting angles that seems tailor-made to give audiences a faintly satanic impression. Combined with his rather impressive physique, he would make an intimidating and imposing villain in any action film. Yet, there is something more to his performance, a certain degree of care and reverence put into his character that even Stallone, the film’s screenwriter, did not see. Indeed, according to an unverified story, Stallone’s instructions about the Night Slasher’s motivation we’re limited to a single sentence: “he’s evil.” Thompson has done quite a lot with such a limited instruction.
The action kicks off with one of the Night Slasher’s psychos attacks a crowded grocery store and takes everyone inside hostage. This is a move calculated to reinforce the fear imparted by the film’s opening, as everyone regardless of social class, race, religion, or political party can expect to find themselves in a grocery store at some point soon. It’s one of the few activities that every member of society engages in. “This could be you taken hostage by a gun-toting lunatic” the film warns, even though I can think of few public places easier to escape from than your average supermarket. Hell, I’ve even managed to accidentally walk into one before it had opened! We’re not exactly talking about Alcatraz here. Indeed, later on, we see numerous hostages just standing about paralyzed with fear and making no effort to escape even though their nameless captor is nowhere to be seen and could not possibly stop them if they were to try and book it.
The cops quickly have the store encircled, but the mealy-mouthed Detective Monte (amusingly played by the same actor as Scorpio from Dirty Harry (1971)) in charge is more interested in negotiating with the psycho than rescuing the hostages. After a fruitless standoff that only ends with a few more dead taxpayers, the captain gets sick of this shit and calls in The Zombie Squad. What is the Zombie Squad? Well, as its second command, Sergeant Gonzales (another Dirty Harry (1971) alumni), puts it: The Zombie Squad is “The bottom line.” It’s a whole department of Dirty Harries that the LAPD calls upon periodically when it’s better to annihilate psychos and scumbags than try to rehabilitate them. The department seems rather small though, the only two members we see in the entire film are Marion “Cobra” Cobretti himself and his partner and second in command Sergeant Gonzalez.
Speaking of our titular hero, he makes his entrance now in dramatic fashion, arriving on the scene in a 1950s sports car that has been painted steel gray. The result is a vehicle that resembles nothing so much as an especially luxurious tank or possibly a land-bound submarine. The vanity license plate that reads “AWSOM 50” is just the ridiculous icing on the absurd cake. Cobra doesn’t waste any time sneaking into the market, though he does pause for a couple of sips of a warm Coors beer (disgusting). Naturally, he gets the drop on the psycho (he has no name given, the movie’s credits list him as Supermarket Psycho) and blasts him. As a rule, the one-liners in this movie are fantastic, and Cobra comes out at the start with one of the best: “Bring in the Television camera, right now” The psycho cries out, to which Cobra replied: “Can’t do that… I don’t deal with psychos, I put ’em away.” If that wasn’t enough a second later he adds “You’re a disease… and I’m the cure.” Now, if that ain’t poetry then I don’t know what is.
The reign of the Supermarket Psycho may be over, but one dead dirtbag won’t make much difference for a Los Angles as FUBARed as the one in Cobra. Before long the Night Slasher himself is on the prowl for more victims. Along with a couple of accomplices, he flags down a car under an overpass and murders the occupant with a nasty-looking combat knife. As the lunatics are finishing up, a car appears, driven by an aspiring fashion model named Ingrid. For some reason the Night Slasher steps into the middle of the road and stares at the driver as she passes, giving her ample time to soak up all the details of his unique appearance. Following the encounter, The Night Slasher is worried that she can now identify him, so he orders his army of psychopaths to hunt her down and kill her.
This is, without a doubt, the dumbest part of the entire movie and not in a fun way. Why does the Night Slasher not wear a ski mask or stocking over his head for this particular attack? For the rest of the movie, he is always incognito whenever he is tracking down potential victims. Why does he stand in the middle of the road like a moron while Ingrid drives by instead of hiding his face in the ample shadows of the overpass? The only reason any of this happens is so the rest of the movie can take place, as the Night Slasher’s attempts to murder Ingrid will drive the rest of the plot. Obviously, this is a lousy reason and a sign that the screenwriter has just given up on this issue. Come on Stallone, I’m sure you could have come up with a way that Ingrid could see the Night Slasher and get away without having your antagonist drop 30 IQ points in the process. Cobra is not a tightly plotted drama, but this sort of crap is downright inexcusable even in a movie that aspires to nothing grander than some cheap thrills.
Fortunately, Cobra makes up for this poor writing decision with what has to be the most nonsensical montage ever committed to film. We begin with shots of Cobra and his partner Gonzalez shaking down leads in the rough streets of LA as Robert Tepper’s Angel in the City plays. Then, inexplicable in sync with the synthetic drumbeats of the soundtrack, the film cuts to brief glimpses of chrome robots! Only a scant few moments elapse before this strange sight is visually explained but in that brief window, the audience is left to go wild with their speculation. Is the Night Slasher not the real threat here? Is LA on the verge of a robot invasion? Am I actually watching an unreleased 1950s sci-fi movie? Eventually, the film explains itself, the robots are props that Ingrid is using for her fashion shoot, a revelation that cannot help but be a disappointment given all the fanciful ideas we were presented with. Still, though, it’s a baffling decision that creates just the right amount of bewildering amusement. Best of all though is the way the montage ends with a lingering shot on the robot mannequins, as the lights in the studio go out. The mood is almost melancholy as we’re left to imagine what might have been.
Naturally, The Night Slasher catches up to Ingrid after the shoot along with some of his psycho soldiers. After murdering the sleaze-ball modeling agent trying to screw her in exchange for career advancement, the Night Slasher comes after Ingrid herself. She escapes but narrowly, leading her to be hospitalized and interviewed by Cobra and the Zombie Squad (which seems way out of their wheelhouse). Cobra quickly puts two and two together and realizes that Ingrid can identify the enigmatic Night Slasher. She may be the police’s best chance at finding the scumbag and putting an end to his reign of terror.
This sets the stage for the rest of the movie, and what a film it is. The Night Slasher and his psycho army keep coming after Ingrid, with each attack becoming more absurd. First a stealthy assassination attempt in the hospital where she’s recuperating, then a prolonged car chase through the streets of Los Angles, and finally the film culminates with the entire psycho army of the New World descending on a sleepy motel in Northern California. This last sequence honestly looks like something out of The Road Warrior (1981) with the New World hunters standing in for Lord Humungous’ raiders. The battle spreads from the motel, to a nearby dirt road, to an orange grove, and finally to a conveniently abandoned but still fully functional foundry. Naturally, Cobra kills everybody until it’s just him and The Night Slasher left alone in the steel mill. In short order, Cobra gets the upper hand on his implacable foe.
The monologue of the cornered Night Slasher borders on completely incomprehensible. He tells Cobra that “You won’t do it pig. You won’t shoot. Murder is against the law. You have to take me in… Even I have rights. Don’t I, pig? Take me in. They’ll say I’m, insane… The court is civilized, isn’t it, pig?” Which just makes me wonder, where the hell has this guy been for the last hour and a half? Cobra has done nothing but murder criminals since the opening credits. In the previous scene, Cobra mowed down twenty or thirty of the Night Slasher’s psycho army without batting an eye. How could The Night Slasher ever get the impression that a cop who thinks hand grenades are an essential tool for law enforcement would balk at wasting an unrepentant psycho if he got half a chance?
It is as if the movie wants us to pretend that it is the same as Dirty Harry (1971) and that the hero here is somehow conflicted in his decision whether to remain an upstanding police officer or descend wholly into the role of the vigilante. However, Cobra, unlike Harry, has been effectively a vigilante from the word go. The Zombie Squad is portrayed as an extra-judicial execution force, whose sole purpose is to murder criminals that are too much trouble to bring in. Harry may have called a couple of robbers “punks” but he certainly wasn’t spouting off one-liners like “I don’t deal with psychos… I just put them away.” Cobra never gave a damn about the niceties of the law, he just wanted to blast criminals. As a consequence, there is no tension in this scene, we know that Cobra will kill the Night Slasher without a moment’s hesitation, and indeed that’s exactly how it plays out.
Still, the final kill of the movie is nonetheless memorable thanks to an admirable use of the industrial equipment on hand. Cobra hooks him onto a conveniently placed meat hook and then sends him along a rail through an arch of flame, barbequing the king psycho! Sure, it may not be as poignant as Harry blowing a football-sized hole in Scorpio’s chest, and then tossing his badge into the San Francisco Bay in disgust, but it is more than equal in terms of pure catharsis.
Stallone, who wrote the screenplay in addition to playing the main character, demonstrates an uncommon knack for the kind of goofy dialog that a movie like Cobra requires. As said before, the one-liners are sublime but equally important is how they are deployed. Stallone seems to understand what sort of character can and cannot get away with lines like “You’re a disease, and I’m the cure.” If Stallone put dialog like that into a lunatic like John Rambo or a schlub like Rocky Balboa, it would be absurd. However, coming from the mouth of a bonafide badass like Cobra in a morally uncomplicated world, it fits perfectly.
Indeed, Stallone deserves all the credit and blame for the script, as by all accounts it is his work almost entirely. Director George Cosmatos put it best in his director’s commentary when he says “By the way, this was based on a book, this movie. But it was all changed by Mr. Stallone, he rewrote the script. Thank God.” Officially, Cobra is based off on Paula Gosling’s debut novel A Running Duck (AKA Fair Game), but the book and the film differ wildly in terms of theme, tone, and characters. About the only thing they have in common is the plot revolves around a cop protecting someone from somebody else. For starters, in the novel, Ingrid is not a Swedish model, but an average office worker and she’s being stalked by an international assassin, not a serial killer. The cop protecting her is a shell-shocked Vietnam veteran who has more in common with John Rambo than Dirty Harry (1971). Moreover, most of the book is focused on the burgeoning relationship between its Not Cobra and Not Ingrid, an aspect that Stallone chose to minimize in his version, despite being married to his onscreen love interest at the time. Diehard Paula Gosling fans are one of the few groups that I would discourage from seeing Cobra, just watch Fair Game (1995) instead for a faithful adaptation of A Running Duck.
A word must be said about the character of Cobra himself. His surface appearance is exactly like what you’d expect, he’s a badass cop with an attitude problem and a fashion sense that’s about thirty years out of date. We don’t have much of a window into his personal life, save for a brief and extremely bizarre sequence when he returns to his impossibly lavish beach-front apartment. The scene begins with Cobra dropping off a newspaper in his barbeque, an odd move but maybe he intends to use the paper for kindling, so it’s at least explainable. However, once he goes inside and prepares a snack for himself by using a pair of scissors to clip off the end of a slice of pizza, things have undeniably gotten a bit strange. By the time Cobra fetches an egg carton from the freezer and produces his gun cleaning kit from it, the audience will already have begun to doubt their own eyes. What are we supposed to draw from this scene? Is Cobra secretly an alien trying to blend in with human society?
The director’s commentary offers little insight into the character’s motivation in this scene, only noting that Cobra eats his pizza in a weird way. Then again, the director’s commentary track for Cobra is not exactly the most helpful in general, as it mostly consists of Cosmatos describing the events on screen in his thick Greco-Italian accent. To be fair though, the commentary track was recorded nearly a decade after the original release, so it wouldn’t be unreasonable to think he may have forgotten a few details here and there. It also suggests that some of the rumors about this film, which say that Stallone was the real director of the film and Cosmatos was just brought along for a little help and an easy paycheck, may be true.
One of the persistent myths about anti-crime exploitation movies, like Cobra, is that they were code for anti-black racism. Yet a quick look at the films in the genre puts some lie to that. Dirty Harry (1971) does have its hero stop a few black robbers at one point, but most of the film is about Harry chasing a racist white serial killer. Harry is explicitly said to be a misanthrope who hates all peoples, cultures, races, and creeds equally, though he’s also shown to be the sort who befriends others regardless of these superficial characteristics. Paul Kersey in the first few entries of the Death Wish series finds himself regularly battling improbably diverse criminal organizations (real-life gangs are almost always racially homogenous). Later films in the series like Death Wish 4: The Crackdown (1987) and Death Wish 5: The Face of Death (1994) see Kersey killing whites almost exclusively.
Cobra is no exception to this general rule. Almost all of the Night Slasher’s psychos are white, and any minorities in their ranks are hiding behind ski-masks or biker helmets. Moreover, the rhetoric of the Night Slasher’s New World evokes a racial supremacist movement far more than anything in the film. He talks about killing the weak to create a paradise for the strong, which while not couched in specifically racial terms, nevertheless evokes certain social Darwinist ideals of racial supremacy.
It is interesting why this argument is trotted out again and again, despite the fact that so few of these movies feature racial themes of any variety. Indeed, even in retrospectives of the films decades removed from their original release, commentators still insist that they are invariably about white heroes blasting minority criminals. Just look at the more unhinged reviews of the Death Wish (2018) reboot for ample examples of that. Initially, I thought this was due to unexamined racism on the part of the film reviewers themselves. It was almost as if they just assume that all criminals are minorities (and possibly vice versa) and not let the facts of the films get in the way of their bigoted assumptions. As amusing as that theory maybe, I’m forced to admit it’s not the case, at least in the vast majority of these commentators.
The real reason is somehow even more wrong-headed. Most commentators simply don’t think about it at all and blindly parrot the notion that to be anti-crime is to be anti-black. Oddly enough this willful ignorance is the result of an attempt to appear deep and thoughtful. The writers almost always see themselves as exposing an unpleasant truth that the majority of the movie-going public would rather ignore. Moreover, by imagining a nonexistent racial subtext they allow themselves to feel morally superior as well. In the rare cases where they attempt a real argumentation based on the objective reality of the movie, you get something along the lines of Noah Bertlatsky’s review of Dirty Harry (1971), where the evidence and the argument run contrary to his thesis. Yet even then they cannot admit that they’re wrong, because if the film is not racist (or sexist, or homophobic, etc), they would have nothing to say about it.
The failing is unquestionably a failing imparted to these writers while at college, where they were encouraged to approach every topic under the lens of race, gender, sexuality, and (occasionally) class. All information was fed through these narrow lenses, and as a result, they don’t know how to effectively communicate without them. They do not understand what makes a good story, a compelling hero, a monstrous villain, or an interesting theme. Nor do they have the necessary historical information to ground a fifty-year-old movie in its proper context. They cannot even grasp the brutal thrill of a well-choreographed action scene! Critics like this only understand the logic of grievance. They cannot even correctly identify what is racist and what is not because they were indoctrinated into thinking everything, regardless of the evidence on the ground, was somehow evidence of some kind of prejudice. How else could they argue that a desire not to be victimized by criminals is evidence of white supremacy? Reading these reviews is like browsing through blog posts that insist that the Illuminati/Reptilians/Templars are secretly running the world and that every innocuous event is just more proof of their original thesis.
