The baddies' war on Christmas continues in another ridiculous '80s action vehicle, Cobra starring macho icon Sylvester Stallone. When neo-fascist motorcycle punks start terrorising his city, wonderfully named loose cannon cop Marion 'Cobra' Cobretti is assigned to put the bad guys down. At Christmas. George P. Cosmatos directs this 1986 cult classic madness from a script by Stallone himself, who allegedly worked in a whole bunch of crazy ideas from his rejected rewrite of his unused script for Beverly Hills Cop.
And what silly fun it is, with Stallone's lone wolf cop taking on the dangerous cases that sane people won't touch, tackling a bunch of nihilistic, sewer-dwelling musclebound punks who want to bring about some unspecified 'new world order' by basically murdering a lot of folk. They’re led by the incredibly evil looking ‘Night Slasher’, played by the distinctive Brian Thompson, most fondly remembered for playing a shape-shifting alien on The X-Files.
When one of Mr Slasher’s cronies terrorises Christmas shoppers at a store the cops decide to “call in the Cobra” and in he swaggers in his shades and leathers, chewing on a matchstick and clutching his pearl handled revolver emblazoned with cobra insignia, a uniform he clearly picked up when he graduated from Badass School. Cobra’s tactics involve shooting the shop to pieces before taking out the perp with his own bomb. Sorted. Then he struts outta there and gives an earful to the press who insinuate that his gleefully violent methods might be a little suspect. He gets results, goddammit! Then he goes home to eat pizza with a pair of scissors and clean his gun with a kit he keeps in with the eggs. He’s a complex hero.
Christmas isn’t a huge running theme in this one, but Cosmatos goes to great lengths to fill each scene with gorgeous holiday decorations and posters and graffiti and stuff, so it’s hard to ignore that this is all going down during the holidays.
Cobra ends up having to protect Brigitte Nielson’s fashion model Ingrid leading to some pretty frightening bits where she’s stalked in a hospital that feel more like an old school slasher film but as soon as Cobra is on screen it’s straight-up asskicking time.
It’s a film of many, many stunts, car chases and shoot-outs, each more absurd than the last. Cobra sets a dude on fire while telling him he has “the right to remain silent”. He doesn’t. Our stoic hero later impales a baddie on a big metal hook then rolls him into a fiery smelting plant during a colossal battle in one of those shadowy, steamy factories that only seem to exist in films like this - you know, the ones that are always abandoned, yet the machines have been left on, causing sparks to fly around stylishly and make everything look so, so cool.
Cobra is a loud, dumb, cheesy film and of course I love it. It effectively juxtaposes Christmas iconography with gratuitous harcore violence to make a heady cocktail that goes down smooth.
Comments