Psycho Cop (1989)
- Andrew Smith
- 3 hours ago
- 5 min read
"He's the last cop you'll ever meet."
Plot
When a group of teenagers decide to spend their vacation in a rural summer house, it seems like it's going to be the perfect time for some drinking, sex and general all round partying. However, they didn't plan on having their party crashed by Officer Joe Vickers, a Satanist and murderous cop intent on killing anyone in his way.
Review
The late 80s is the time when filmmakers seemingly decided to turn law enforcing patrons into psychopathic killers, intent on wiping criminals and everyone else off the map. Psycho Cop and the vastly superior Maniac Cop were both released within a year of each other (not sure which was in production first - I was only 7 then!) and both deal with the same sort of story: a cop goes on a murderous rampage. Only whilst Maniac Cop opted for the serious route with a quality cast and strong script, Psycho Cop seems to have been given what was leftover when everyone else had their fill of ideas. Turning the character of a psycho cop into another Freddy Krueger and setting the whole thing up in the hills is just two of many mistakes that this wretched film makes. It's the classic bargain bin slasher of the end of the decade, when creativity was all but exhausted from a sub-genre which was never high on originality to begin with.
There is no plot driving the first hour of the film and Psycho Cop doesn't actually get to any real exposition until the final five minutes. Even then, the whole film can be summed up by ‘Satanic cop kills people.’ The film opens with the cop killing a few people - the cold kill to establish the threat - and then we meet the teenagers for a bit. After a load of build up, the cop finally starts killing people but again we don't know who he is or what he is doing. There’s literally zero build-up to his character. No background. No motive. No connection to the other characters, Nothing. The chronic lack of characters doesn't help matters, nor does the remote location. Since they have no contact with anyone else, we have to wait until someone shows up late in the film by physically making an effort to go to the location before any explanation is given. By that time, it seems like an afterthought. The cop has done most of his dirty work, so any reasoning behind it is irrelevant by this time. Backstories to antagonists give the characters something to possibly work with – a weakness of some kind, something that could be used against them in the face-off or something to flesh them out for the audience (a crazy mother in Friday the 13th or a crazy father in The Mutilator for example, both out for revenge). But nothing here.
To be fair, the idea of a psycho cop doesn't need much explanation, it just needs something to give him a driving force for all of his actions. This guy is a total loon and fires off as many clichéd cop-themed one-liners as you can think of. "You have the right to remain...DEAD" and "you're obstructing justice" are just some of the many groan-inducing quotes said with cheesy relish by an overenthusiastic Robert R. Shafer. Turning a supposedly satanic police officer into a wisecracking stand-up comedian while he is tromping through the daytime woods is a massive misstep. The tone of a gritty authority figure gone rogue completely clashes with the campy vaudevillian dialogue. Psycho Cop wouldn’t be alone in trying to mould their antagonist into the next Freddy Krueger but it’s such a cliché in its own right that it’s a poor writing choice when filmmakers do. Keep him silent, keep him lethal. If he hasn’t got any motive, then keeping him quiet keeps the mystery going.
It doesn’t help the villain when the characters in Psycho Cop are so hyper paranoid too. They're constantly losing mundane items and immediately launching these exhaustive, panic-stricken searches. They don’t think something will turn up, they start looking for them straight away, such as when a girl loses her hairbrush outside and then proceeds to look in every single place she didn't go near during the day like the tool shed. As soon as another character leaves the scene, the others are like "where is...? what has happened to...?" The worst example is that of the caretaker. He introduces himself early on and then disappears, an early victim of the cop. But then characters spend most of the film looking for this guy they just met and worrying about where he may have gone, fearing the worst. He does have a life of his own you know, a home, maybe a wife and some kids to tend to! They are always thinking that they're being watched too (which they are, come to think of it). I can clearly see that the writers tried to make the characters a bit more believable - usually the dumb teens in these films don't miss their friends and just carry on with their partying. But this is going totally the other way and because they’re so on edge with the fake threats they’re inventing and trying to overcome these mundane logistical problems, it exhausts our emotional capacity long before the real killer arrives.
Being a slasher film, what's the crack with the staples of the genre - the gore, kills and nudity? Well, there's little gore, the kills are lame and there's no nudity! Visceral blood, creative practical make-up effects, and some quality nudity - that is the currency low-budget slasher films used to buy the audience's forgiveness for a terrible script. It is a distraction technique which Psycho Cop refuses to pay out. The cop kills his victims with whatever he can find - Taser guns, his own bare hands, his baton, etc. He's hardly going to win any Jason Voorhees awards for his creativity with a sharp instrument. He's a cop, sure, but visually someone getting hit with a baton doesn't carry the cinematic weight of a machete or a chainsaw. It's blunt force trauma, it's ugly, it's real, and it doesn't give the special effects department any chance to shine. It's just visually flat. Given some of the hot female cast, it's a crime that there wasn't a taste of nudity - hell they even have a bath at one point. Come on Wallace Potts, get your cast to stand out of the tub! Potts does try and build up a little suspense it has to be said. But his constant shots of the killer's boots or the killer walking in front of the camera to watch someone get a little tiresome given we know that it's the cop. There are no red herrings so quit with the fake tension building. The musical score isn't too bad - one of those simple 80s synth scores found so often in slasher films. It adds to the nostalgic charm and hits that specific auditory frequency of the era.
Final Verdict
Psycho Cop deserves a swift kicking from its superior officer - Maniac Cop. Dull, annoying and on for eighty-six minutes way too long, this is one stinker you wish would have been locked up with the key thrown away for good measure. Astoundingly, psycho cop Joe Vickers’ enthusiastic killing spree was enough to spawn a sequel to which Robert R. Shafer returned for in Psycho Cop Returns in 1992.
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Psycho Cop Director(s): Wallace Potts Writer(s): Wallace Potts Actor(s): Robert R. Shafer, Jeff Qualle, Palmer Lee Todd, Dan Campbell, Cindy Guyer, Linda West, Greg Joujon-Roche, Bruce Melena Duration: 87 mins |  |
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