Traditional Christmas Movies: Cobra

It's Christmas, and Los Angeles policeman Lt. Marion "Cobra" Cobretti finds himself at the center of a spate of murders, all carried out by a cult of serial killers. After a model named Ingrid Knudsen escapes an attack by the cult, Cobra takes her into protective custody. The pair fall for each other as they shelter in a small town, but soon enough, find themselves fighting for survival once the cult finds them.

As I’ve mentioned before, my aunt lived in L.A. a million and a half years ago, and for a good part of that, she lived in this fortress-like loft in eastern Downtown L.A., long before the neighborhood even considered trying to be gentrified. During this time, it was a pretty common occurrence for the streets around her building, as well as her apartment itself, to be used in a lot of film and tv shoots.

As a kid, it was fun to see somewhere you knew on the big screen, especially when it was in Los Angeles, and you lived in the very middlest part of middle America. It was like you were six degrees from Hollywood. The only downside was that, at one point, she was approached by this production, and they wanted to film parts of this movie in her apartment, and she said no. She turned them down.

I have never truly forgiven her. 

Because, here’s the thing, Cobra is basically this cinematic Habsburg Jaw. It is the distant end child of a long, long line of genre films that have fed upon themselves for too long, a tortured and misshapen thing twisted by cocaine and stardom, and an incestuous confluence of worn-out cliches from the Stallone/Schwarzenegger era of the One Man Army genre. It is a wheezing, delusional po-faced fool, unable to muster even a 90 minute runtime without collapsing. It is a cheap stupid artless and silly affair, one that lacks all deliberate humor, even the attempt, and yet is still chock full of hilarious moments. It is an astounding piece of shit long past its sell by date, but also…

It’s terrible in a way where it’s kind of amazing.

But again, just so we’re clear on the subject of how terrible this film is, President Ronald Reagan loved it at the time, and even watched it at Camp David. So, yeah, obviously it’s fucking terrible if one of Satan’s primary forms loved it. I just want to make sure that no one is confused as to whether or not it’s a good film. It’s not. I mean, not at all. It’s a terrible film, but it’s also amazingly terrible, so that much at least is kind of noteworthy. And sadly, because my aunt turned the film down, I missed out on my chance to be a part of its legacy! Damn it!

Anyway…

The film opens with a weird guy (not Stallone) walking into a Los Angeles area grocery store. Inside, he pulls out a shotgun and starts shooting the cantaloupes, watermelons, and coffee beans, all in slow motion, while the customers panic.

The Los Angeles Police Department (LAPD), gathered outside and completely helpless, decide to call in Los Angeles policeman Lt. Marion "Cobra" Cobretti of their elite "Zombie” Squad. I missed the explanation of why it’s called that. Cobra arrives, driving a modified 1950 Mercury with a vanity plate that says “Awsom 50” because he’s just that cool. He wears his sunglasses inside too, and always has an unstruck match stuck in his mouth. Again, because he’s just that cool. When the gun man threatens to blow up the grocery store, Cobra answers, all cool like, “go ahead… I don’t shop here.” Finally, after pausing for a refreshing Coors tall boy, Cobra taunts the gun man as a lousy shot, then, after running as fast as he can in brand new Levis and Hair Metal cowboy boots, Cobra throws a knife right into the gun man’s heart. Then Cobra shoots him multiple times. All of this happens right after Cobra says his tagline “You’re the disease… and I’m the cure.”

With the crisis now over, Detective Monte—a real smug college boy type wearing glasses who thinks the way to deal with criminals is to respect their rights and the legal process and to not shoot them—reprimands Cobra for disregarding police procedure, and Cobra admonishes him right back, and a group of reporters too, for their general naivety and their frankly unrealistic belief in the Constitution or the Bill of Rights. Because Cobra knows the truth. He’s from the streets, y’see, so he knows there’s only one way to deal with the criminal scum of this city… and that’s the hard way (shooting them).

Lucky for Cobra, but unbeknownst to the LAPD at the time, the grocery store gun man was actually a part of a cult of serial killers that despises modern society, and believes in culling the weak. I hope Cobra asked Santa to leave some bullets under the Christmas tree for him this year, because ’tis the season of giving, and Cobra has some lead to deliver…

Meanwhile, Ingrid Knudsen is a top model working in LA, and regardless of how it may appear on screen at times, her character is NOT taller than Cobra.

Unfortunately for Ingrid, one night while driving home, she happened across the cult of serial killers while they were on a killing spree, and saw their leader’s face, the infamous Night Slasher, so now the cult is after her.

Again, as I mentioned, she’s a professional model.

After an attempt on her life by the cult fails, Ingrid is placed under the protective custody of Cobra and his partner, Sergeant Tony Gonzales.

But the cult doesn’t let failure stop them, and there are more attempts to kill Ingrid. Luckily, Cobra is there. After a rip-roaring car chase that jets around the many sights and neighborhoods of LA, the wily Cobra begins to suspect that these killings may not be the work of a lone nut, but a whole group of them. His theory is met with scorn from that god damn college boy know-it-all, Detective Monte.

Suspecting a mole, Cobra and Gonzales decide to take Ingrid out of town. They take her to the small foundry town of San Remos, but unknowingly bring a secret cult member with them, officer Nancy Stalk. She calls the cult that night.

Meanwhile, Cobra and Ingrid very believably fall in love.

But as Short Round taught us all, there’s no time for love, as the cult roars into town on motorcycles the next day. In an orgy of violence and stunt spectaculars, Cobra kills many many cultists, as they crash, skid, and flip-over in brilliant fiery explosions, all to the staccato beat of Stallone’s mini armory. Unfortunately, Tony is just a sidekick, so he is quickly wounded. Cobra and Ingrid attempt to flee in a pickup truck, but the cultists make them crash.

The pair run for the small foundry town’s massive orange groves, and attempt to hide there, but eventually they manage to find a nearby fire and steam factory, and they rush inside, the big climax looming.

After killing two, maybe even three dozen more cultists, Cobra impales the Night Slasher on a big metal hook, so that he is then dragged into a big furnace, where he is slowly burned alive. After having spent the past few days killing off a hundred-plus serial killer cultists, finally, there are no more left. Cobra has sufficiently killed the problem into oblivion. And thus, Christmas is saved.

That’ll do, Cobra… that’ll do.

Detective Monte snidely tells Cobra that he’s “gone too far again,” and that’s all Cobra can stand, and he can’t stand no more. Cobra punches him out. Take that, college boy! After that, Cobra steals someone’s motorcycle and rides off with a top model sitting right behind him. And not only due to the fact that he’s just that cool, it’s also because he’s also a cop, a cop with a reputation for killing folks who cross him, so who’s going to complain, right? Who’re they going to complain to?

Cobra is an unfortunately rare gem these days, a Hollywood movie filmed almost entirely in Los Angeles. At the same time, this is one of those 1980s action movie that clearly wishes it had been able to be filmed in New York City, but it wasn’t. So, because it was filmed in Los Angeles, it restricts most of its locations to downtown LA, and a few highway underpasses, all to try to make LA seem like its gritty in the same way NYC is, that it grows up in a densely urban way, instead of spreading out in all directions in a nightmare of tangled highways, and endless traffic jams.

This is made all the sillier with the way the characters (especially during the car chases) seem to teleport between LA. locations. From Downtown to Hollywood to Mullholland and the Hills to Santa Monica and then over to the valley, you can get from here to there simply by wildly careening through a series of lefthand turns just before the light turns red.

Based on the novel Fair Game by Paula Gosling, who “co-wrote” this script with Stallone, which was largely inspired by Stallone’s failed original script for Beverly Hills Cop. Cobra is the only film where Stallone and Nielsen appear while they’re actually married to one another in real life. That they then divorced a year later is probably unrelated to the overall experience of this film... probably.

Cobra is like an idiot’s fever dream of all of the ridiculous and racist fears of “urban” crime, the kind of shit that suburban and small town white people truly believe actually happens in the “big cities” regularly, all brought together into this amateurish and dull action film. It is aggressively dumb. And all the while, it’s amazing how smugly self-assured it is too, all while being so fucking stupid. Not “amazing” as in “surprising” but “amazing” like “of course it is.”

And the funniest part is that Cobra is supposed to be right too. That’s clearly the film’s intent. Unapologetically. Not even a drop of shame. Cobra is right. He’s the one guy who recognizes the problem, and the only one being honest about how to deal with it. And because he’s a cop, this shouldn’t be questioned. But he’s being held back by the bleeding hearts and their whining about the ridiculous idea that “criminals” have rights too, that he can’t just blow up an entire city block to teach some game members a lesson, that he can’t just shoot wildly into a crowd as some bank robbers flee. And Cobra is confused. Do these people actually want crime to flourish? It’s like the world has turned against him. When Cobra was a kid, people respected cops, listened to them. Now, he has the badge, and they’re telling him that he can’t drive down city streets at 80 mph, all while leaning out the window and firing a machine gun at a possible car thief? What the fuck, people? Isn’t this America? Cobra has had enough, he can do whatever he wants, however he wants, when it comes to him protecting the city from crime, and you can either like it and smile, or enjoy a knuckle sandwich. Because Cobra is gonna do his job, the right way, whether you libs like it or not.

That’s the whole plot of the film. It’s driven by its hatred of the very thought of someone having the audacity of pushing back on the privileged class.

At one point, just a tuesday evening as Cobra heads home, he rams a guy’s car because he feels like they’re not parked correctly, and the film’s like… “Finally, right? This guy doesn’t take shit from nobody!” He then rips the guy’s shirt, a big fuck you to the guy, because the guy is like “You rammed my car, asshole!” Cobra owes multiple hand grenades. Multiple! Hand! Grenades! Just… in his house. He steals, little things sure, but he does it in a way that implies that he clearly believes that he deserves it, and people should be happy to provide it to him, because he’s a cop, he stands on a wall. Plus, at one point, his lunch is cold pizza, but only after cutting the point of the slice off using a pair of scissors, which is inexplicable, and frankly, insane. Lt. Marion "Cobra" Cobretti is clearly a dangerous lunatic, and is also a clear example of the kind of toxic culture that permeates law enforcement agencies, and makes for an undeniable argument for defunding the police.

And the film is just like “nun uh… he’s cool. This is what cool guys do.”

This makes Cobra an absolutely perfect example of the very typical, very blatant copaganda that—between it and Cold War era American Militarism—absolutely dominated ’80s pop culture, and man, oh man, it is something to see so boldly expressed again.

Ah, the 80s…

Maybe the strangest part of this whole film is there‘s no sex scene, no slow and sensual, saxophone-accompanied bit of writhing about, no brief glimpse of red-painted boob in the fall of neon light through the motel’s window. Not that a sex scene was needed, or wanted, but this is the One Man Army action genre here, and these films always have a “sex break” right before ”shit gets real.” It’s even weirder when the film goes right up to the point where the sex scene is clearly just about to happen, where Ingrid and Cobra are sharing a dingy motel room while hiding from the cult, but it stops right before it happens. Like, Cobra walks over to the bed she’s laying on, and says something that I don’t remember, but it’s basically Cobra going “time for sex, lady,” and Ingrid is like “Oh, you betcha,” and then the film cuts, and it’s the next morning, the cult is roaring into town and shit is about to get real. And that’s it. What happened? Did the saxophone guy quit, and the director was like, “well, we can’t have a sex scene now,“ and didn’t even try? What makes this even more strange is that this is yet another film from the 80s that, at the time, was hit with complaints for being too violent and too sexual, and it’s just not. There’s no nudity. There’s barely any gore to speak of, the film often cuts away from that too. I mean, people at the time also thought NYPD Blue was ultra gritty, violent, and sexual, so maybe it wasn’t so apparent to me as a kid at the time, but maybe America was being run by a bunch goofy home-school nerd-virgins or something, but for the most part, this film shows nothing. It’s not even all that sexy.

For the most part…

But on the upside…

“That One Guy” is the main bad guy, the Night Stalker. His name is Brian Thompson and he’s been a bad guy or an asshole in a bunch of things that you’ve probably seen. He’s great. Much like Al Leong, Brian Thompson is an ‘80s movie staple, and is always a welcome addition to any film. All hail this hulking lantern-jawed motherfucker and his willingness to help make a bunch of short king heroes look cool, and to allow himself to be beaten, or blown up, by tiny women vampire slayers.

I also appreciated the clear homage to the Shining at one point, even if Brigitte Nielsen was a pale imitation of Shelley Duvall. Way to reach for those arty stars, Director George P. Cosmatos.

In the end, I‘m not recommending this film to anyone. It’s awful. Most people won’t like it, which totally makes sense, because it’s bad. But for some folks, it’ll be worth the watch, as sometimes a bad movie from a several decades ago is not only a fun time, but they can also provide an insight as to what it was like to live in that time. Believe me when I say, that there are few films as capable of providing an accurate glimpse of what America was like in the 1980s as the film Cobra.

And finally, just a little bit of extra bar trivia for your pocket here at the end, Stan Bush's epic piece of musical genius "The Touch“ was originally written for Cobra.

Thankfully, it found a much better home.