End of the Road for 'Black Cobra'

Black Cobra 3: The Manila Connection (1987)
Starring: Fred Williamson, Forry Smith, Debra Ward, and David Light
Director: Don Edwards
Rating: Five of Ten Stars

Chicago police detective Robert Malone (Williamson) travels to the Philippines to work on a joint CIA/Interpol mission to recover or destroy a cache of stolen weapons and prevent a hi-tech blackmailer from exposing CIA operations around the world.


"Black Cobra 3" is an improvement over "Black Cobra 2", but it's not quite as good as the original in the series. Once again, the one thing that made Malone more than just another third-rate action hero has been left out... his pet cat. In fact, he's even less of a character here than he was in the previous installments of the series--here, he's simply a generic action hero who beats up or guns down scads of bad guys because duty to country and the son of an old army buddy calls. (Those are fine motivations, but a little bit of character flavor for Malone would have been nice.)

Speaking of the script, overall it's a little better than the two previous outings, but ultimately it ends up disappointing because it is so predictable. There's a mole in the CIA that's leaking every move Malone and his colleagues make to the bag guys, and there's only one possible suspect for who it might be. (Yeah, the writer makes a halfhearted attempt to spread the suspicion around, but it seems clear that no great degree of thought went into this script other than "how to get the characters from one fight to the next, and from the shoot-out to the exploding secret hideout?"

The fight scenes are as well photographed in this film as they were in the two previous films, and there seems to have been enough of a budget this time out to do some rehearsals and real choreography. The bigger budget is also evident in the many shoot-outs and explosions, not to mention the escape-by-helicopter during the film's climactic battle in the secret mountain hide-out of the villains. (The fact that Fred Williamson's acting seems better in this film than the previous outings may also be a result of a bigger budget; he's being paid enough to actually work instead of just showing up and running lines.)

One that that isn't better in this installment is the dubbing. Often, lip movements are noticeable different from what is heard on the soundtrack--even for the English-speaking actors who did their own dubbing like Williamson--and early in the film the attempt to match the dialogue to the lips is so badly done that it sounds like the voice actors either didn't understand the lines they were speaking, or they were being directed by a drunk Christopher Walken impersonator of limited talent. The random pauses in the middle of sentences, and the weird inflections make very simple exchanges tricky to follow.

"Black Cobra 3" is the end of a trilogy of action movies that teeter on the brink between mediocre and bad. The most remarkable thing about the series is that the main character, Malone, seemed to devolve into more of a generic action hero as the films progressed instead of grow. That's noteworthy, as most series characters tend to become more defined, not less.

'Black Cobra 2' is worse than the original

Black Cobra 2 (1988)
Starring: Fred Williamson, Nicholas Hammond, and Emma Hoagland
Director: Stelvio Massi
Rating: Four of Ten Stars

Police Lt. Robert Malone (Williamson) is sent to the Philippines to study Interpol techniques after blowing away one hostage-taking drug dealer too many. Always a trouble magnet, Malone and his new Interpol partner, Inspector Kevin McCoal (Hammond), soon find themselves up against a shadowy group of violent Middle Eastern terrorists who are pursuing the beautiful daughter of a small-time thief, Peggy Mallory (Hoagland), for unknown reasons. Before you can say "Please Hammer, don't hurt 'em!" there's gunfire, explosions, silly plottwists and 350 kids held hostage in a building that's rigged to explode... and only Malone and McCoal can save the day!


A fellow movie-lover whose taste is usually to be relied upon told me that each "Black Cobra" film is better than the one than the one before. Well, this is one instance where she was wrong.
"Black Cobra 2" is NOT better than the movie it's a sequel to. While star Fred Williamson is a little less wooden in his second outing as no-nonsense action cop Robert Malone (who gets referred to as "Bob" by the love interest in one of the many sour notes in this film... I'm sorry, but this character is NOT a "Bob." Not even his mother would call him "Bob"), and there is a single very unexpected plot development as the film enters its third act, just about everything else about this movie is so laughably bad that it makes the only other "odd-couple buddy cop" picture I can think of that's on this low level of quality, "The Glimmer Man", look like "Lethal Weapon". Plus, they got rid of the one thing that made Malone a neat character in the original "Black Cobra"--that little cat of his.


From the lamely done chase scene that opens the film to the climactic hostage rescue that closes it, the film's extremely low budget is painfully evident. Further, while the director and his cinematographers are clearly experienced hands at filming martial arts sequences, there's no hiding that catches up with the best of us (like, oh, Fred Williamson) and that more rehearsal time than I'm sure the budget would allow was needed to make the hand-to-hand fight scenes look natural.

And then there's the dialogue. I don't think I've EVER seen so much purple prose in a single movie. The love interest Peggy Mallory was being so over-the-top sappy every time she brought up her father that if I'd been Malone or McCoal, I would have arrested her for the murder of her father; no one talks the way she talks, unless they're being deeply sarcastic. (An extension of the dialogue problem is the voice actors that were used in the badly synched dubbing of the non-English--and even some of the English--speaking actors. Some of them are as bad as the lines they were reading, particularly the woman who was doing Inspector McCoal's young son. It was rather creepy to hear what was obviously an adult woman's voice coming from the mouth of a 7-year-old. Someone get that kid an exorcist!)

To perfect the overall horribleness of the film, there is the fact that there is NO chemistry between any of the actors appearing on screen. While none of the leads are particularly terrible, there's no real sense of connection between any of the characters and there's no reason for the audience to believe that any sort of feelings develop between any of them, other than perhaps mild annoyance. Each character is okay if taken as a 1980s action film stereotype, but when they are put together, they don't work, because the actors aren't connecting.

With a badly written script that overreaches the film's meager budget and a cast of stars that have no shared on-screen chemistry, "Black Cobra 2" has little to recommend it, except as a possible inclusion for a Bad Movie Night--but only after you've already tapped Steven Seagal's offerings. There are a couple of surprising moments in the film--which I can't talk about without spoiling the plot, but one earns the film an additional point on the scale all by itself--but they aren't enough to make this movie worth seeking out.

'Black Cobra' is unoriginal, save for the cat

Black Cobra (1987)
Starring: Fred Williamson, Eva Grimaldi, Karl Landgren, Vassili Karis, and Maurice Poli
Director: Stelvio Massi
Rating: Five of Ten Stars
Tough-as-nails police detective Robert Malone (Williamson) must protect a beautiful fashion photographer from a gang of psychopaths after she takes a picture of their leader (Landgren) during one of their many murder sprees. But can even Malone succeed against a gang willing to kidnap a police chief's daughter to get get what they want?

"Black Cobra" is, for most of its running-time, a perfectly average low-budget action film mostly ripped off--oh, sorry... inspired--by the early "Dirty Harry" pictures. In fact, the Dirty Harry connection is so strong that the movie looks and feels like it dates from the 1970s (despite the fact it was made in the late 1980s) and Williamson delivers a speech that's a near verbitum copy of the famous "do you feel lucky?" speech from "Dirty Harry". So, if you're not too picky, this film will entertain with its not-terribly-original plot, setting, and characters. (Although, I think Robert Malone is probably the only movie tough guy who is cowed by his pet cat, a touch that I found to be one of the nicest elements of the film and probably the only bit of originality in it.)

On the other hand, the film really goes south in its last 15 or so minutes, so you're well-advised to stop the film after it copies the demise of Scorpio scene from "Dirty Harry", because you see a nonsensical return of a dead villian, one of the worst and completely illogical car chases ever put on film (how DID they get from an upscale restraunt into an abandoned string of warehouses?), and more proof than you'd ever want to see in a wide-release film that the filmmakers really had no idea how to bring things to a satisfactory close.


With so-so acting (Williamson was better even in "Fist of Fear, Touch of Death" than he is here), a script with everything except a tiny kitty-cat begged, borrowed and stolen from other films, and a pathetically executed ending, "Black Cobra" isn't a movie to go out of your way for; it barely rises to the Five Rating I'm giving it. But it's got enough well-handled cliches to be fun, and it would definately be a fine addition to any Bad Movie Night line-up.