Maniac Cop III: Badge of Silence is a 1993 horror action film, and the second sequel to Maniac Cop, directed by William Lustig and Joel Soisson from a screenplay by Larry Cohen (It’s Alive, Q: The Winged Serpent, The Stuff). It stars Robert Davi, Paul Gleason, Jackie Earle Haley, Robert Z’Dar, Caitlin Dulany and Gretchen Becker. The film was originally rated “NC-17“, and some extreme violent acts were cut to get an “R” rating.
A priest practicing voodoo resurrects Matt Cordell (Robert Z’Dar), who takes his badge and comes back from the dead to do his bidding. Meanwhile, a pair of cameramen who are hoping to make it big, come across a convenience store robbery, where a police officer named Katie Sullivan (Gretchen Becker) intervenes in a hostage situation, where she manages to wound the suspect, but realizes that the clerk is his girlfriend, and she had let him in purposefully to rob the store. There is a crossfire, and while Kate is severely wounded, she ends up killing the clerk in return. When rushed to the hospital, she is rendered comatose and brain dead, much to the chagrin of investigating officer Sean McKinney (Robert Davi), who had caught the report of Katie using excessive force in a hostage situation, seeming to make the clerk an innocent victim, and in response threatening to free the badly injured Frank Jessup.
Meanwhile, stalking Katie’s progress, Cordell goes to the hospital to watch her. He kills one of her supervising physicians with defibrillator paddles, and the physician set to sign the warrant to cut Kate’s life support, by exposing him to high amounts of X-Ray radiation. The reporters who had framed Kate are then murdered as well…
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“Out of all three Maniac Cop films, Badge of Silence is the most misunderstood and underappreciated. This is understandable, as a poor script and studio interference has resulted in an uneven mess in which Cordell almost seems like an afterthought. The main focus of the story is McKinney’s efforts to clear the name of his friend, whilst the powers-that-be attempt to hang her out to dry as an example against police brutality. But the inclusion of Houngan seems a little ridiculous, as this takes the story in a direction that does not fit with the tone and mythology of the series. In fact, this is yet another example of filmmakers being forced to unnecessarily explain the reasons behind their antagonists, usually because all other ideas have been exhausted.” Christian Sellers, Retro Slashers
“Maniac Cop 2 was a pretty fantastic action-horror hybrid and some of what we get here is outstanding but you can definitely tell which sequences were directed by William Lustig and which were directed by producer Joel Soisson, he just doesn’t have the action-chops of Lustig but he gives it quite a shot with the crazy police cruiser vs. ambulance car chase at the end of the movie, it’s completely fucking nuts…” Ken Kastenhuber, McBastard’s Mausoleum
