Face-Off: 10 to Midnight vs. Cobra

Sylvester Stallone plays COBRA himself, Marion Cobretti, a ’50s throwback who wears sunglasses, chews toothpicks, and as a member of the Zombie Squad takes the jobs no one else on the police force wants. Cobra alternates between being a stoic ass-kicker and bantering with friends, delivering lines that feel like they were improvised. Stallone was also the writer, so I guess improvising counts as a rewrite. When he’s fighting villains and dealing with rude citizens, he comes off as being super cool, but at other times he’s a bit too preoccupied with other people’s eating habits – and he rations his own pizza eating by cutting up slices with scissors. Cobra is a little awkward, but he is one Stallone character I wish we had seen more of. Cobra deserved sequels.

Cobra has an entire cult of killers to contend with, but the primary villain in the film is Brian Thompson as a man known only as the Night Slasher… and Thompson is super creepy in the role, a hulking brute who’s dripping with sleaze and sweat. With his customized knife in hand, the Night Slasher is on a bloodthirsty mission to wipe the weak off the face of the earth so that he and his fellow cultists, “the hunters”, can take over and establish a New World Order. He’s a very intimidating character who has made the ill-advised decision to go up against a cop who is definitely not one of the weak.

The murders committed by the Night Slasher and his hunters are presented like something straight out of a slasher movie, as these sharp-implement-wielding maniacs pick victims at random and bash through any obstacle to get to them. People are stabbed and slashed with the Night Slasher’s knife, chopped with axes, smashed into with vehicles. Some of these attack scenes are quite unnerving. When one intended victim escapes, the Night Slasher follows her to the hospital, Michael Myers-style, to finish the job, killing anyone who crosses his path as he makes his way toward her room. After he fails again, the film shifts into action mode.

Stallone and his RAMBO director did not disappoint in the action department. The film could have been as simple as “Cobra vs. the Night Slasher”, but by making the villain a cult member Stallone was able to add in large scale action sequences… and increase the body count. Cobra kills a few dozen bad guys in sequences like a supermarket shooting spree (which is even more disturbing now than it was in 1986), an attack on his own apartment, a vehicular chase through the streets and alleys of Los Angeles, another destructive chase sequence later in the film that feels like Stallone’s take on RACE WITH THE DEVIL, and a final confrontation with the remaining cultists in a foundry complete with sparks, open flames, and molten metal.

There’s not a lot of dialogue in COBRA, but Cobra does tend to drop one-liners to show how cool he is under pressure. If a bad guy threatens to blow up a store, he’ll say “Go ahead, I don’t shop here.” If they have too much ego, he’ll tell them “You’re a disease and I’m the cure.” He tells another who thinks the flawed system will take it easy on them that “This is where the law stops and I start.” Cobra isn’t the only one with memorable lines – the amount of times the Night Slasher refers to him as “pig” during their final confrontation is pretty memorable, too.