One lesser known but extremely cool horror series that’s worth revisiting is the Maniac Cop franchise. Directed by William Lustig and scripted by Larry Cohen, the Maniac Cop trilogy got off to a great start in 1988 with a film that stars Tom Atkins, Richard Roundtree, William Smith, Laurene Landon, and Evil Dead franchise hero Bruce Campbell, with Robert Z’Dar as the title character. Although Campbell emerges as the hero in the first film, he’s killed off early in 1990’s Maniac Cop 2 – which, despite losing Campbell so quickly, still manages to be one of the best horror sequels out there. Things don’t get questionable until 1993’s troubled Maniac Cop 3. But even though the first two movies are awesome, Campbell doesn’t seem to have the fondest memories of them, as he revealed during a recent interview with Variety.
Variety gathered lines from several of the movies and TV shows Campbell has worked on and tested him to see if he could remember which project each quote came from. He did a great job overall… but one line that stumped him was, “I tried to stop her. But she had a gun.” Which came from Maniac Cop.
Reminded of the film, Campbell said, “Maniac Cop? Were there any memorable lines in that movie? See, this is the only one you could pull. ‘I tried to stop her. But she had a gun.’ That’s how memorable Maniac Cop is. The guy who wrote this movie, by the way, Larry Cohen, I think is his name, wrote a bunch of exploitation stuff and he claimed that his dialogue was actor proof. His dialogue was so good, no actor could screw it up. I had a different take. Your dialogue is so bad, it’s actor proof, because no actor can say your dialogue. Thanks for playing, Larry. I made them kill me on the second one. They were like, ‘Hey, come on back,’ and I was in the middle of a divorce. Never catch an actor in the middle of a divorce because they don’t care about life anymore. I said, ‘Give me this number or kill me.’ And they went, ‘Okay, we’re gonna kill ya.’“
Are you a fan of Maniac Cop? What do you think of Bruce Campbell being killed off in Maniac Cop 2? Let us know by leaving a comment below.