Cop Game (1988)

There once was a man named Vladimir Koziakin, and about this man’s personal life I know very little (read: nothing).  What I do know is that he produced one of the most entertaining, engrossing, and lovingly remembered books of my youth.  I’m of course speaking of Movie Monster Mazes, the 1976 tome that not only reinforced my love of monsters but also gave me new creatures to track down (if only their films would play on one of our stations; bear in mind this was back when we had maybe thirteen channels that could be tuned in on our television, and you were subject to whatever their programmers wanted to/could afford to run).  The premise is self-evident; there were fifty (“a panoramic journey through FIFTY (not Forty-Nine) FIFTY Monstrous Mazes!”) puzzles in the shapes of different cinematic fiends (as common as Godzilla, as obscure as The Monster of Piedras Blancas).  The accuracy on a few of the pieces would drive monster perfectionists insane (He spells Ghidorah as “Gidra” and calls Ray Harryhausen’s Ymir “Giant Ymu”), but I didn’t care.  I was too intent on running through the mazes (in pencil, of course, because the book cost ninety-five cents [!], and it’s not as if the book was easy to come by [that I recall]), erasing the lines, and doing it all over again (the erasures made their own permanent paths on the paper after a while, but the artwork was still attractive enough on its own to warrant paging through again and again).  There is a PDF of the book you can find online, the great tragedy of which is that many of the mazes have already been solved.  I’ve made it my mission in life to digitally remove all that and print each of these pieces to do again (and to share them with my monster-loving godchild if I can get him to lift his head up from his Nintendo DS or whatever the hell that thing is).  It’s good to have goals.  The relevance of this circuitous circumnavigation to Bruno Mattei’s (under the pseudonym of Bob Hunter) Cop Game (aka Cop Game: Giochi di Poliziotto), is that the film’s plot is so convoluted, you’ll almost certainly need to use the rewind button (the modern film viewer’s equivalent to a pencil eraser on a maze) to get all the way from start to finish with some idea of the plot intact.

During the final days of the Vietnam War, officers are being picked off one by one by former (maybe current?) members of the Cobra Force.  Enter special investigators Morgan (Brent Huff) and Hawk (Max Laurel) who are charged with getting to the bottom of this mess.  And they’re not afraid to break the rules in order to do it.

Post-Vietnam-War, movies set during almost any conflict tend to have a very dim view of the governments who send the soldiers off to fight in them as well as of war itself (though the latter notion in cinema has been around for much longer, it rose in prevalence around the time of this war and carried on ever after).  Typically this stink eye is focused on America, and there is far more anti-colonialist subtext at work (and not wrongfully so in both regards, I think).  Gone is the homogenized “rally round the flag, boys” depiction and attitude of good men fighting the good fight for a good reason.  Having the bloody footage of a war broadcast into homes on a daily basis not only peeled away the clean cut façade of warfare and changed the public perception of the men and women who fight, but it also forced filmmakers to steer toward more realistic portrayals of war time, even when the stories were fantastic in nature.  Things became grottier.  Characters became less idealized, and many began to lean far more to the dark side than to the light.  Italian filmmakers, combining the neo-realist movement developed and popularized by auteurs such as Vittorio De Sica and Roberto Rossellini with the sensational, primal elements which would quickly transform into a sleazy aura that became like a signature writ in giant, glowing, neon letters for exploitation hounds the world over, tucked into this new approach with gusto.  

Naturally, different filmmakers achieve different levels of success with this approach, and, if you know anything about Mattei you know he does his level best to hit all the right notes, though rarely do his compositions orchestrate the way I’m sure they were first envisioned.  I’m also quite confident that his motives were more monetary than artistic, and I have zero problems with this.  So, we get a lot of exterior shots of the Philippines standing in for Vietnam, and the footage from the streets adds the appropriate flavor to the proceedings.  The attitude is present with Hawk telling Morgan that he comes “from a country of assholes,” that America is “playing cowboys and Indians” in Vietnam, and most presciently, “After you get back home, you will forget all about me.  But I will still be here, drowning in a sea of shit.”  Shooman (Robert Marius) commands the Cobra Force, and is alleged to have destroyed a village full of women and children in bloodthirsty pursuit of the Viet Cong (a trope of Vietnam War films inspired by the infamous My Lai Massacre in 1968). 

Likewise, we get the populist components such as plentiful gun fights, chases, and brawls.  Hawk and Morgan break a suspect’s fingers to get him to talk (in broad daylight and full view of anyone wandering by).  What feels like a large chunk of run time takes place intercutting back and forth to scenes in a strip club (with French cut bikini bottoms and fashionably torn half shirts aplenty, but somehow no nudity) which feels more Eighties than anything else in this film, barring Huff’s dangly left earring.  Morgan and Hawk are flippant to their direct superior Captain Kirk (yes, really, and played by the late, great Romano Puppo) and everyone else they encounter, dress exclusively in street clothes, and don’t give shit one about any collateral damage they cause while doing their job.  The film does manage to balance these two perspectives (gritty, yet overwrought) fairly well, but it also piles on plot points nigh unto the breaking point.  In fact, once you add on the idea that a Russian spy named Vladimir has infiltrated the American armed forces, may or may not be a heroin dealer, and may or may not have had a hand in or is just spreading rumors about the village massacre and what any of this has to do with the initial murders, your head will be spinning, especially since the filmmakers don’t care about connecting scenes or ideas until it’s absolutely necessary.  Luckily, the aspects of the film that work (Mattei knows his way around action sequences, and there is a quasi-Noir angle that I enjoyed) do so well enough that the labyrinthine story and the writhing the script has to do in order to attempt resolving it become like frosting on the multi-flavored layer cake that is Cop Game.

MVT:  Huff loves giving everybody guff (yes, I made this sentence rhyme; sue me).  He is jaw-clenchingly anti-everything, so much of the joy in watching his character do his thing lies in how relentlessly hard-headed he is in every single way.

Make or Break:  Without giving away exactly why it’s so outstanding, there is a car chase in this film that I would attest can stand up to any in the history of cinema.  Okay, that’s an outright lie, but it’s so much damned fun, I couldn’t help loving every second of it.

Score:  6.5/10     

Zuma (1985)

Just recently, the ruins of a temple were discovered at the El Paraíso site in Peru, and they are estimated to be about five thousand years old.  This is no real great shakes, since (to my knowledge) Peru is rife with ancient ruins (no offense to any Peruvians who may be reading).  What this story does do, however, is brings up the idea that archaeology is still important in this modern world.  In an era when we have (or think we have) all this knowledge at the touch of a button (and we won’t get into a discussion about the unreliability of information on the internet this time around), there are still people kneeling under the hot sun, slowly scraping bits of dirt from long-forgotten relics of dead civilizations in the pursuit of some insight into how we became what we are.  

Real archaeologists toil away at tasks which are almost the equivalent of trying to empty the ocean with a teaspoon, yet in films, this tedious, nigh-thankless profession is romanticized to an insane degree.  When cinematic relic-diggers aren’t raiding lost arks or going on wild crusades, they are excavating ancient monsters that revive, and only their quick wits and iron wherewithal can return these beasties to their graves.  Naturally, we can argue that just about every profession can be (and probably has been) glamorized on film to some degree, and I’m sure that, while real archaeologists love the attention films like Indiana Jones And The Temple Of Doom bring to their avocation, they’re also sick to death of having to answer questions from goofs in regards to the existence and “actual” properties of quasi-mystical objects.  Then again, I’m not an archaeologist, so maybe they’re not. 

Phillip (Mark Gil) and Isabel (Dang Cecilio) are archaeologists who have just uncovered a remarkably pristine temple in the side of a mountain.  As the men peregrinate around, Isabel is drawn to a secret room, inside which is a large sarcophagus.  As she paces closer to the tomb, a pair of large rubber snakes appear from inside, scaring the bejeezus out of the poor lady.  When the men investigate, however, the tomb is empty.  Meanwhile, a bunch of dead bodies are found outside the site with lethal amounts of venom in them.  Soon thereafter, the eponymous Zuma (Max Laurel, who looks vaguely like Milton Reid of Dr. Phibes Rises Again fame) stalks the streets of the Philippines, hungering for the hearts of virgin women.

It would seem that I have inadvertently been on a bit of a comic book adaptation jag as of late, because Jun Raquiza’s Zuma (aka Jim Fernandez’s Zuma) is yet another one.  One thing which I have seen far more of from countries other than the United States is a predilection for comic book stories centering on characters that could just as easily be called villains as anti-heroes.  This is no exception.  Zuma is the son of the Mayan god Kukulkan, the feathered serpent, and his whole schtick is violating and killing female virgins.  Early on in the film, he rapes Galela (Raquel Montesa) while her boyfriend Joseph (Mark Joseph) is bitten to death by cobras.  Galela then becomes the thrall of Zuma (sort of like a distaff Renfield), trapping women for him to kill.  Zuma resembles a Filipino version of the Incredible Hulk with a double-headed snake growing out of the back of his neck.  But unlike the Hulk, who would typically do some good intentionally or not, Zuma’s purpose is to rack up virgin corpses to “fulfill the rituals of his faith,” though to what end the audience is never privy.  We would expect some attempt to humanize Zuma (even Diabolik had Eva Kant), but he’s little more than animated brute force, although I would be hesitant to call him an elemental force.  Even after Zuma’s daughter Galema (Snooky Serna, who, God help me, actually looks a little bit like Snooki Polizzi) turns up, Zuma would kill her as soon as have her live with him.  Like Rawhead Rex and other reborn Elder Gods, Zuma’s needs are not human, ergo his actions are never other than inhumane. 

Sex plays a large part in the film, yet its treatment is quasi-puritanical.  The characters that have sex in the film are never shown naked having sex.  Nevertheless, the women who become Zuma’s prey often have their tops ripped off for a cheap tit thrill.  It’s incongruous, but interesting to note that nudity is only depicted in regards to violent acts against women.  The image of a snake is phallocentric to begin with, and the fact that Zuma has two rather large snake heads hanging off his shoulders is telling.  What’s more, his snakes are usually alert and pointing straight out, an indication of tumescence and the faint notion that Zuma’s actions are guided by his loins (and being the scion of a “War Serpent” only adds to the idea of violence making up for sexual inadequacies).  Galema also has snakes like her father (cleverly woven into her pigtails), but she has trouble controlling them.  Her life has been dictated by the influence of these phallic appendages, and they have kept her docile up until her nineteenth birthday.  She is also a virgin, but it’s through the love of Morgan the young soldier (Rey Abellana) that she will become their master.  So, even in its strongest female character, the film is controlled by male influences and all that that entails.

But for as much insanity as Raquiza and company put onscreen, Zuma is a bit of a slog from a pacing standpoint.  At over two hours and ten minutes long, there is a ton of fat that could have (and should have) been trimmed.  Whole sequences pass by where characters literally do absolutely nothing and then suddenly act.  My best guess is that this is the result of its comic book origins, because the plot feels much less like one story than it does a stringing together of multiple episodes with one set of credits on either end.  As soon as any part of a story (I won’t say “the” story, due to the variegated nature at play here) gets interesting, the film’s gears are swiftly shifted (you can almost hear the filmmakers grindin’ ‘em ‘til they’re findin’ ‘em), and the audience is back at square one.  All well and good, but with each shift, there is a new set-up and build up, and it makes the going difficult.  Add to all of this, a deus ex machina that makes practically everything that came before irrelevant, and you have one hot mess of a film.  All of that said, I still found myself liking this movie, largely because it is so much larger than life and so incomprehensible.  It’s like examining a car crash photo and not quite being able to make out what exactly you’re looking at.  But you just can’t stop yourself from staring, can you? 

MVT:  As Forrest Gump might say, “Zuma is as Zuma does.”  Let’s face it; if Zuma wasn’t as visually bizarre as he is, it would be tough justifying watching all two-plus hours of this film.  A giant green man, in a shiny red loincloth, with giant snakes on his shoulders?  Color me intrigued.

Make Or Break:  The Make is the scene where Zuma has his way with Galela.  It’s outlandish on its face, but it also manages to be sleazy and creepy, and it depicts the sort of menace Zuma could have been throughout the film but never fully is. 

Score:  6.25/10