Post by Eddie Love on Feb 21, 2011 11:23:33 GMT -5
I’ve never read a novel called A Running Duck (?) by Paula Gosling. But I can now say that I’ve seen both the film versions of it. You may have as well.
COBRA, released in 1986, re-teamed Sylvester Stallone with his director of the prior year’s FIRST BLOOD II: RAMBO. This film is a self-conscious rip-off of DIRTY HARRY and as a moronic 80s curio it’s tacky, lame and fairly irresistible.
A serial killed named The Night Slasher is terrifying the streets of L.A. There’s no pattern to his victims or crimes, anyone and everyone is at risk. The brass are stumped, so much so that they’re ready to break the glass and call in their last resort – Marian “Cobra” Cobretti. Shades sporting and leather-clad, Cobra isn’t the gay hustler he so closely resembles but is, in fact, a tough-as-nails cop with a hatred for criminal scum and the judges and police bureaucrats who are their weak-kneed enablers. He and his partner (Reni Santoni, donning a silly newsboy cap in every shot) work on the Zombie Squad, so called because “every dirty job that comes along…”…no!...wait – that’s Dirty Harry. The Zombie Squad prowls the dark night and probes the rotten underbelly of L.A.’s streets. (PEPSI)
When we first see Cobra he’s facing down a crazed, motive-less gunman who’s shooting up a supermarket. It turns out this guy is a member of the strange cult (or possibly just an axe-wielding aerobics class) we see inter-cut throughout the movie. Their leader is the dreaded Night Slasher. We watch as he takes yet another victim in his senseless series of killings. Afterwards, while on the shooting range with his partner, Cobra opines that there’s nothing they can do, “just wait for him to strike again.” Really??? Nothing??? There isn’t any kind of, oh…I don’t know…investigative police techniques that could be brought to bear on the situation? Seventeen murders and they’re just gonna hope they get lucky and catch this guy red-handed in the act? (COORS)
No such luck, but they do happen upon a new-wavey model / video vamp who witnessed the Slasher’s last murder. When Cobra realizes the Slasher is bent on tying up this loose end…permanently! he swings in to protect her, catch the Slasher and nail the killer’s source inside the L.A.P.D. (Of course, Cobra’s idea of protecting the woman extends to taking her along on suicidal high-speed chases where the likelihood of the loss of life or limb seems extremely high.) Ultimately, Cobra goes to war against the Slasher and does so with lots of illegal firepower, including…um…grenades? (COKE)
Of course, while DIRTY HARRY was an ironic character study of a right-wing authoritarian, COBRA is much further down the food chain and his warmed over Reagan-era talk-radio beefs are laid out without much fanfare or real conviction by Stallone. And Sly looks ridiculous in his bizarre get-up that no real cop would wear. However, while he may not be investing much here, he delivers a clearly spoken performance. There's none of the mumble-mouthed line-readings that were already the go-to parody of him.
As the damsel in distress, his then wife Bridgett Nielson is so nondescript that I can’t clearly picture her and I watched this last night. Rounding out the cast is the great Andrew Robinson, (like Santoni a holdover from HARRY) and, as a less than subtle allusion to that film, he plays the liberal police officer we’re to believe somehow hamstrings Cobra. (Enough to justify his getting sucker punched in the face at the end? While he wears glasses no less? I’m not sure.) (COORS)
The best parts of COBRA, the flashes where we feel the filmmakers aren’t just phoning it in, include some fairly gritty, all-too brief scenes of Cobra and the Zombie Squad out on the sleazy streets of Hollywood. And the ridiculous notion of the criminal death cult is like something out of The Shadow or Fu Manchu. In fact, it’s so lurid and preposterous – and fun! -- that you wish it were actually drawn out more. In the final confrontation, the Night Slasher offers up some kind of deranged mission statement for him and his crew, but I couldn’t really make out what is was. (PEPSI)
Which isn’t the only question left open by the film. Once the Slasher’s crew has taken to the streets of Northern California in an all-out war with Cobra, why on Earth would they still give a shit that Bridgette can identify their leader? At this point the murderously anarchic band is robbing banks in broad daylight and shooting people right and left – why would they also be hunting a witness from a prior crime? The cat’s out of the bag, folks – they did it! (Also what did the guy who shot up the store in the beginning have to do with anything?) (COORS)
Still, at less than 90 minutes, COBRA is an enjoyable guilty pleasure. It’s not particularly good, but it’s never dull. There are even a few nagging little touches that under fuller examination could have been pretty cool. There’s a bit where these prop robots featured in the model’s fashion shoot (or video shoot, I couldn’t tell what it was) are intercut with Cobra working the streets and it’s done so enigmatically and for so long, you’re like – “What the Hell am I looking at?” Also the Slasher’s attempt on the model’s life at a hospital is a pretty cool sequence, derivative, but what you’d expect from an example of the genre that gives the killer his name. Later, when Cobra goes to war with the Slasher and his minions, it’s like a zombie movie. In both those sequences the film has more in common with horror pictures than it does urban crime thrillers like DIRTY HARRY. I don’t feel the filmmakers had any consciously fun genre bending in mind, they’re thinking about the paycheck, but it's kind cool nonetheless. (PEPSI & COORS)
(And, oh yeah, there’s a lot of product placement in this movie. It’s fairly bold (maybe not as bad as the dive-bar scene in LICENCE TO KILL where the neon signs advertising different brands of beer leave little room for the patrons to sit down.) But it’s bad.)
Oddly for Stallone, we never got another outing of him as Cobra – but did you see the remake of it? You may have and never even known it. Released in 1995, FAIR GAME is a slick action yarn that was pretty thoroughly done in by the critics and ignored by audiences, but it’s actually a likable thriller.
We’re a decade later and a coast away from COBRA, though, like that film, FAIR GAME opens with a bloody orange sunrise. We watch as a lovely woman jogs along the beach in Miami. The peace is shattered when shots are fired, seemingly at random. The woman, a lawyer, is slightly injured and back at the station gives her statement to a police officer with whom she exchanges some teasing banter. When the officer visits her swank condo to follow-up on the investigation, he watches as the place is incinerated in another attempt on the young woman’s life. They’re subject to two more ambushes and, eventually, the cop and the young woman are forced to go it alone and determine who it is who’s out to kill her.
There are some perfectly fine action scenes in this picture, most notably an ambush at a motel safe house where the insanely high-tech bad guys are able to visualize their prey as heat sources within the building. A shoot-out in a parking garage that soon follows is also cool, and other scenes are good as well; the action is never simply perfunctory. And yet, they never feel like bloated intrusive set pieces we see so often now.
The big deal when this film was released was its ushering in (and out) the big screen career of then super-model Cindy Crawford. Yes, her acting isn’t much to shout about, though she’s more tentative and stiff than outlandishly untalented. Like lots of unschooled film actors, she doesn’t seem to know how to calibrate her performance to the needs of the continuity, so something really intense may have just happened in the prior scene, and she doesn’t appear to register it in the next. Much of her dialogue seems to have been re-recorded as well, though not by another actress.
There is one hysterical moment where she is shown wearing a lawyerly business suit that culminates in a barely perceptible skirt, otherwise the filmmakers go out of their way to keep her bra-less in wet and grimy tank tops and with her hair in teased dishevelment. Yet for all her vaunted reputation as a stunner, she comes across as more pretty than anything else, in fact, she’s oddly wholesome throughout. When she vamps it up to snooker info out of a computer geek, it's a little cringe-worthy.
The cop is played by William Baldwin an actor without much charm, but with a refreshing lack of overblown intensity. He has a few nice moments where he injects some John McLane style everyman touches to his heroics. The villains here are Russian mobsters, very much in vogue as the heavies at that time. They’re led by Steven Berkoff, the actor with the distinction of performing the 80s hat-trick of villainy by facing off against Rambo, Axel Foley and James Bond. Elsewhere in the cast, Salma Hayek has an early role as the cop’s loud Latina girlfriend and I doubt it’s something she keeps at the top of her resume.
What I like about FAIR GAME, in addition to the solid action, is that it attempts something you almost never see; the romantic thriller. At the center of the film is a couple and, for once, the fireworks aren’t bromantic in nature, and we actually watch the attractive pair come together over the course of the plot. And their relationship doesn’t simply revolve around the tiresome bickering you see most often today.
In addition to their source material, COBRA and FAIR GAME share in common the fact they’re both enjoyable little pictures, they’d make a cool double bill of cinematic time capsules from their respective decades. One captures the grime and neon of the 80s, the other the slick sheen of the 90s. You may feel a little guilty, but you won’t feel bad about it.
COBRA, released in 1986, re-teamed Sylvester Stallone with his director of the prior year’s FIRST BLOOD II: RAMBO. This film is a self-conscious rip-off of DIRTY HARRY and as a moronic 80s curio it’s tacky, lame and fairly irresistible.
A serial killed named The Night Slasher is terrifying the streets of L.A. There’s no pattern to his victims or crimes, anyone and everyone is at risk. The brass are stumped, so much so that they’re ready to break the glass and call in their last resort – Marian “Cobra” Cobretti. Shades sporting and leather-clad, Cobra isn’t the gay hustler he so closely resembles but is, in fact, a tough-as-nails cop with a hatred for criminal scum and the judges and police bureaucrats who are their weak-kneed enablers. He and his partner (Reni Santoni, donning a silly newsboy cap in every shot) work on the Zombie Squad, so called because “every dirty job that comes along…”…no!...wait – that’s Dirty Harry. The Zombie Squad prowls the dark night and probes the rotten underbelly of L.A.’s streets. (PEPSI)
When we first see Cobra he’s facing down a crazed, motive-less gunman who’s shooting up a supermarket. It turns out this guy is a member of the strange cult (or possibly just an axe-wielding aerobics class) we see inter-cut throughout the movie. Their leader is the dreaded Night Slasher. We watch as he takes yet another victim in his senseless series of killings. Afterwards, while on the shooting range with his partner, Cobra opines that there’s nothing they can do, “just wait for him to strike again.” Really??? Nothing??? There isn’t any kind of, oh…I don’t know…investigative police techniques that could be brought to bear on the situation? Seventeen murders and they’re just gonna hope they get lucky and catch this guy red-handed in the act? (COORS)
No such luck, but they do happen upon a new-wavey model / video vamp who witnessed the Slasher’s last murder. When Cobra realizes the Slasher is bent on tying up this loose end…permanently! he swings in to protect her, catch the Slasher and nail the killer’s source inside the L.A.P.D. (Of course, Cobra’s idea of protecting the woman extends to taking her along on suicidal high-speed chases where the likelihood of the loss of life or limb seems extremely high.) Ultimately, Cobra goes to war against the Slasher and does so with lots of illegal firepower, including…um…grenades? (COKE)
Of course, while DIRTY HARRY was an ironic character study of a right-wing authoritarian, COBRA is much further down the food chain and his warmed over Reagan-era talk-radio beefs are laid out without much fanfare or real conviction by Stallone. And Sly looks ridiculous in his bizarre get-up that no real cop would wear. However, while he may not be investing much here, he delivers a clearly spoken performance. There's none of the mumble-mouthed line-readings that were already the go-to parody of him.
As the damsel in distress, his then wife Bridgett Nielson is so nondescript that I can’t clearly picture her and I watched this last night. Rounding out the cast is the great Andrew Robinson, (like Santoni a holdover from HARRY) and, as a less than subtle allusion to that film, he plays the liberal police officer we’re to believe somehow hamstrings Cobra. (Enough to justify his getting sucker punched in the face at the end? While he wears glasses no less? I’m not sure.) (COORS)
The best parts of COBRA, the flashes where we feel the filmmakers aren’t just phoning it in, include some fairly gritty, all-too brief scenes of Cobra and the Zombie Squad out on the sleazy streets of Hollywood. And the ridiculous notion of the criminal death cult is like something out of The Shadow or Fu Manchu. In fact, it’s so lurid and preposterous – and fun! -- that you wish it were actually drawn out more. In the final confrontation, the Night Slasher offers up some kind of deranged mission statement for him and his crew, but I couldn’t really make out what is was. (PEPSI)
Which isn’t the only question left open by the film. Once the Slasher’s crew has taken to the streets of Northern California in an all-out war with Cobra, why on Earth would they still give a shit that Bridgette can identify their leader? At this point the murderously anarchic band is robbing banks in broad daylight and shooting people right and left – why would they also be hunting a witness from a prior crime? The cat’s out of the bag, folks – they did it! (Also what did the guy who shot up the store in the beginning have to do with anything?) (COORS)
Still, at less than 90 minutes, COBRA is an enjoyable guilty pleasure. It’s not particularly good, but it’s never dull. There are even a few nagging little touches that under fuller examination could have been pretty cool. There’s a bit where these prop robots featured in the model’s fashion shoot (or video shoot, I couldn’t tell what it was) are intercut with Cobra working the streets and it’s done so enigmatically and for so long, you’re like – “What the Hell am I looking at?” Also the Slasher’s attempt on the model’s life at a hospital is a pretty cool sequence, derivative, but what you’d expect from an example of the genre that gives the killer his name. Later, when Cobra goes to war with the Slasher and his minions, it’s like a zombie movie. In both those sequences the film has more in common with horror pictures than it does urban crime thrillers like DIRTY HARRY. I don’t feel the filmmakers had any consciously fun genre bending in mind, they’re thinking about the paycheck, but it's kind cool nonetheless. (PEPSI & COORS)
(And, oh yeah, there’s a lot of product placement in this movie. It’s fairly bold (maybe not as bad as the dive-bar scene in LICENCE TO KILL where the neon signs advertising different brands of beer leave little room for the patrons to sit down.) But it’s bad.)
Oddly for Stallone, we never got another outing of him as Cobra – but did you see the remake of it? You may have and never even known it. Released in 1995, FAIR GAME is a slick action yarn that was pretty thoroughly done in by the critics and ignored by audiences, but it’s actually a likable thriller.
We’re a decade later and a coast away from COBRA, though, like that film, FAIR GAME opens with a bloody orange sunrise. We watch as a lovely woman jogs along the beach in Miami. The peace is shattered when shots are fired, seemingly at random. The woman, a lawyer, is slightly injured and back at the station gives her statement to a police officer with whom she exchanges some teasing banter. When the officer visits her swank condo to follow-up on the investigation, he watches as the place is incinerated in another attempt on the young woman’s life. They’re subject to two more ambushes and, eventually, the cop and the young woman are forced to go it alone and determine who it is who’s out to kill her.
There are some perfectly fine action scenes in this picture, most notably an ambush at a motel safe house where the insanely high-tech bad guys are able to visualize their prey as heat sources within the building. A shoot-out in a parking garage that soon follows is also cool, and other scenes are good as well; the action is never simply perfunctory. And yet, they never feel like bloated intrusive set pieces we see so often now.
The big deal when this film was released was its ushering in (and out) the big screen career of then super-model Cindy Crawford. Yes, her acting isn’t much to shout about, though she’s more tentative and stiff than outlandishly untalented. Like lots of unschooled film actors, she doesn’t seem to know how to calibrate her performance to the needs of the continuity, so something really intense may have just happened in the prior scene, and she doesn’t appear to register it in the next. Much of her dialogue seems to have been re-recorded as well, though not by another actress.
There is one hysterical moment where she is shown wearing a lawyerly business suit that culminates in a barely perceptible skirt, otherwise the filmmakers go out of their way to keep her bra-less in wet and grimy tank tops and with her hair in teased dishevelment. Yet for all her vaunted reputation as a stunner, she comes across as more pretty than anything else, in fact, she’s oddly wholesome throughout. When she vamps it up to snooker info out of a computer geek, it's a little cringe-worthy.
The cop is played by William Baldwin an actor without much charm, but with a refreshing lack of overblown intensity. He has a few nice moments where he injects some John McLane style everyman touches to his heroics. The villains here are Russian mobsters, very much in vogue as the heavies at that time. They’re led by Steven Berkoff, the actor with the distinction of performing the 80s hat-trick of villainy by facing off against Rambo, Axel Foley and James Bond. Elsewhere in the cast, Salma Hayek has an early role as the cop’s loud Latina girlfriend and I doubt it’s something she keeps at the top of her resume.
What I like about FAIR GAME, in addition to the solid action, is that it attempts something you almost never see; the romantic thriller. At the center of the film is a couple and, for once, the fireworks aren’t bromantic in nature, and we actually watch the attractive pair come together over the course of the plot. And their relationship doesn’t simply revolve around the tiresome bickering you see most often today.
In addition to their source material, COBRA and FAIR GAME share in common the fact they’re both enjoyable little pictures, they’d make a cool double bill of cinematic time capsules from their respective decades. One captures the grime and neon of the 80s, the other the slick sheen of the 90s. You may feel a little guilty, but you won’t feel bad about it.
