‘Cobra’ or — Reality-Breakingly Bad?
‘Cobra’ (1986) is a film so mind-bogglingly god-awful I’m convinced Sylvester Stallone and George P. Cosmatos set out to make the most knuckle-headed movie possible on purpose. It’s the only rational explanation for what I watched last night, which would also be the only rational thing to say about whatever the bloody hell ‘Cobra’ actually is.
Lieutenant Marion “Cobra” Cobretti (Sly Stallone) heads the LAPD’s “Zombie Squad”. It’s called the “Zombie Squad” because… well, that’s never fully explained although I expect it’s because that to be in it you need to be medically brain-dead.
Cobretti is a blatant late 80’s amalgamation of Dirty Harry, Snake Plissken, The Man with No Name and the bad guys from ‘Magnum Force’ (1973) all rolled into one. He’s also a fucking tool.
When ‘The New World’ cult starts terrorising the city for some unexplained reason Cobretti’s “Zombie Squad” is called in to deal with the problem in his own particular way. This results in Cobretti’s superiors tearing him a new asshole for dealing with the cult in his own particular way even though they were the ones who called Cobretti in to deal with the cult in his own particular way.
What follows is an incomprehensible, fascistic mess that gives new meaning to the words “rampant idiocy”.
At one point there’s a car chase. How does it end? With Stallone driving his car head-first into a yacht. The thing is nobody made him do this; the bad guys didn’t force him off the road or anything like that. No, Stallone is just driving along in hot pursuit when he suddenly yells out to Brigette Neilson “Look out!” and drives his car head-first into a yacht… seemingly ON PURPOSE!
Then there’s the violent editing of humorous robots into the movie for no discernible reason. It’s part of a montage where Stallone is questioning the city’s residents at night but with flashes of humorous robots randomly inserted, so the entire sequence goes — Stallone — ROBOTS! — Stallone — ROBOTS! — for three minutes. It transpires it’s because the film is attempting to effortlessly transition into a fashion shoot but is edited so aggressively the effect is practically avant-garde.
It was only after an hour or so that I realised not only did I not understand what the hell was going on in ‘Cobra’ but that we were now so far gone that the film wasn’t even going to bother telling me what the hell was going on and that ‘Cobra’ and I were forever destined to remain firmly bound together in the realm of the truly incomprehensible. But why?
Apparently, the original cut of the film was over two hours long. So how did they decide to shorten it? By cutting out as much of the plot as possible. All that was left was excessive violence, but this violence was deemed too violent so all that was cut out as well. So if you’re wondering why ‘Cobra’ makes zero sense it’s because there isn’t enough of it left in order to do so. Yet it’s also undeniably hypnotic in its beautifully lit, uber 80’s stupidity. I think kinda love it.
It’s like waking up one morning to discover your dog is in the kitchen cooking you pancakes for breakfast — you don’t know what the hell is going on but you’re too curious about how bad the inevitable mess will be to tell it to stop.
‘Cobra’ is a movie so profoundly moronic it left me terrified its rampant stupidity would start leaking out into my own personal reality. Could that actually happen? Could a movie be so galactically cretinous that it could start seeping its deranged lunacy into the very fabric of my life?
I went for a walk this morning in order to clear my head of the remains of ‘Cobra’. There was a VW pick-up truck parked outside the post office on Great Western Road. It sported a bumper sticker. It read — THICC DADS WHO VAPE FOR CHRIST.
The process had already begun.
