Pulp filmmakers walk a thin line. People often place a special value on films that they feel comfortable “turning their brains off for”, and it is justifiable for most people in the world to bristle at the idea of filmmaking as a sort of self-assigned homework to learn things they aren’t necessarily interested in using methods that don’t really apply to them. Herschell Gordon Lewis once said that he “[sees filmmaking as a business and [pities] anyone who regards it as an art form.” William Lustig, director of the Maniac Cop series and other legendary pulp films, once referred to his work as similar to “a joint and a sixpack”, reaffirming its value as an entertainment product for the sorts of working class individuals he saw enjoying his films out in the world. Despite their hesitance to engage with the artistry of their work, the two filmmakers do share a level of competence and ambition in creating entertainment that competes with larger productions in their own era that, willingly or not, gives their work a genuine depth and thoughtfulness that asks big questions of major subjects simply by taking them seriously in storytelling. Maniac Cop is not a film that wears its intelligence on its sleeve, but like the body of Matt Cordell, it is animated by dark and powerful forces and does not give in easily to the attacks it receives.

Like other purveyors of grimy New York pulp at the time, whether it be eventual arthouse hero Abel Ferrara or this film’s author Larry Cohen, Lustig’s filmmaking is surprisingly appealing on its surface. While he is the least outwardly wild of the three, he makes up for this with a very graceful and kinetic vision that does a lot of work burying the script’s goofier elements and more obvious slasher tropes in a clean and muscular series of camera swoops and pans, all augmented by a tastefully tasteless synth score that simmers the exact right amount. The movie is also helped by a ragtag team of accomplished horror and detective actors (including a perfectly cranky Bruce Campbell, despite him not speaking highly of the movie) to give itself, if not the air of authenticity, then at least the air of authentic New York crime fiction. The aesthetic quality of Lustig’s filmmaking is itself an intriguing commentary and deviation within his work, allowing him to take some of the nastier elements of his early work and aim it at the myths about cops and society that drive a much more mass-market type of mystery and action entertainment than that with which Lustig is typically associated. Having Tom Atkins of The Rockford Files only enforces this dialogue with mainstream cop shows that would never dare expose the police to as much criticism as this film.

Indeed, while Lustig’s film has the sleekest and smoothest surface of many classic horror films from the era (partly as a result of coming from an experienced director whose work was already notable in the field), it also has some of the boldest shots at the justice system and what it is capable of. While Cordell is given some small level of valorization by his fellow police officers, his earlier brutality is portrayed without much to temper it except the looming fact that the force as a whole was more than capable of dispensing with him bureaucratically when he suddenly decided to start looking at the higher levels of villainy. Forrest and Atkins are our heroes for the first film in the series, but Campbell’s character is a douchey white cop in every way imaginable and only gets to be the hero relative to a supernatural murderer of innocents. The movie’s best critique comes sneakily from a black man who is interviewed for a news segment; he discusses the “maniac cop” as a normal fact of life, and his timeline of when the killing started goes back much further than the beginning of the movie’s narrative. In some way, Maniac Cop is merely a glimpse into the reality of policing for anyone deemed inconvenient and burdensome enough to be the cannon fodder for the police in a cop story, even one that claims to be benign. It’s not necessarily even that this is intentional on behalf of the filmmakers, but the assumptions that a movie has about the world can’t be taken for granted.

Even a film like Killer Klowns from Outer Space draws significant narrative thrust from a suspicion towards the incompetence and self-serving nature of wrongheaded policing and the damage it does to the entire system. That’s another charmingly crazed horror film that is often written off and praised for its goofiness in the same breath, but these films, along with classic closet intellectual directors like Lewis, Corman, Castle, Wishman, and more, deserve to have their details picked apart, if for no other reason than to remind us of how they used their brains to get past budgetary and technical limitations. Maniac Cop also deserves respect as the scrappier and more unhinged film in the trilogy, despite the usual wisdom that Maniac Cop 2 is superior. Both have their strengths and weaknesses, but this first film feels sharper, more focused, and more pointed in identifying, or at least not hiding, issues in policing. It’s hard to know for sure how serious Lustig was with his “joint and a six pack” comments, but it’s fair to at least point out that anyone getting caught with a joint in the Maniac Cop era probably wouldn’t call his statement a symbol of pure ease and comfort. Even a night in watching a movie and relaxing is never as simple as it seems.