A long, long time ago, in a Hollywood far, far away, screenwriters used to do a loooooooooooot of cocaine. It's a drug that killed people, ruined families and was responsible for really, REALLY weird movies. COBRA is a reminder that despite causing addiction, withdrawal, overdoses and several horrible things, cocaine made people awesome for a short period of time. It's a movie that is almost impossible to take seriously. It takes itself VERY seriouslty, but the combination of age, bad storytelling, twitchy direction and drugs made it something greater than the sum of its parts, something magical. COBRA is so over-the-top, you can't call it stupid. But I have no problem calling it insane and awesome.
Marion Cobretti (Sylvester Stallone) is a tough-on-crime policeman investigating a series of murders tied to a mysterious serial killer nicknamed Night Slasher by the press. He is constantly pushed aside by another detective (Andrew Robinson), who believes ''Cobra'' is just a mindless enforcer, despite that Cobretti's insights about the case are obviously dead on. When young model Ingrid (Brigitte Neilsen) is targeted by the Night Slasher's army, ''Cobra'' decides she's not going to die on his watch because of incompetent police work and decides to personally assume her security. That puts him on collision course with the murderous cult and all hell breaks loose. The killers stumbled upon the ONE MAN who won't back down in front of their bullshit.
It's obvious from the first scene that COBRA was meant to be a Dirty Harry ripoff, it is visuelly almost identical to the opening of MAGNUM FORCE. That endeavor falls through at the second scene, though where a bunch of people are doing a stange, YMCA-like choreography, with axes, in the sewers. It's the most explanation we get about the murderous cult, but it's an image that comes back three or four times during the movie. Like several George P. Cosmatos movies, COBRA is the warped, deranged expression of the fears of conservative America. There are faceless killers out there, they take out respectable Americans without reasons and the world NEEDS someone to swap their right to an attorney for a bullet in the face. It's supposed to be an adaptation of Paula Gosling's novel A RUNNING DUCK, but I'm sure it has nothing to do with the novel. It's just a paranoid fable about a homicidal cop and a faceless, soulless menace. It's the type of material Costmatos had a magic touch for. He turned paranoid, convervative concerns into pulp art.
Pictured above - epic shootout
COBRA doesn't work as an urban vigilante movie today, unlike DIRTY HARRY or DEATH WISH, but it still works as pulp fiction. There are so many great, funny scenes you can single out. My favorite is when ''Cobra'' sits down, pulls grenades from a bag he is never previously carrying around, assembles an SMG that shoots like a .50 cal. and then fucks Brigitte Nielsen. Just like that, out of the blue. I loved the scenes where he bullies the random street gang member with low self-esteem. He is so mean to him. He even rips his tank top off for no reason whatsoever. The final fight with Night Slasher (Brian Thompson) also redefined epic. Details are also hilarious in COBRA. They don't make much sense, but they're entertaining as hell. In one scene, Cobretti walks into his apartment, pulls a leftover pizza from the FREEZER, cuts a perfectly fine piece of pizza with SCISSORS and eats it with his GLOVES ON?!?!?!
I wouldn't recommend trying to watch COBRA viscerally, like you would watch one of Chris Nolan's Batman movies. But it's a film that offers a wealth of exhilarating pulp scenes and incongruous details, built around the strange, magnetic aura of Sylvester Stallone. It's not particularly well-written or well-shot, but it probably is the best piece of bad cinema ever created. COBRA can turn most of its flaws to its advantage due to its reckless abandon to its ridiculous premise. It's a classic to pulp fiction junkies like me, a Citizen Kane of narrative insanity, but it'll also be a good-time movie to the more casual viewer. Think BIG TROUBLE IN LITTLE CHINA for adult audiences. In a day and age where everything has to be so serious, dark and edgy, COBRA stands out as being magnificently out of its mind.