COBRA (1986)

“In America, there’s a burglary every 11 seconds, an armed robbery every 65 seconds, a violent crime every 24 seconds, a murder every 24 minutes, and 250 rapes a day,” growls Sylvester Stallone’s voiceover, as macro photography ogles a handgun: the silver steel barrel, the cobra waiting to pounce painted onto the grip, the bullet shot straight into the camera lens.

Now, just where Marion “Cobra” Cobretti (Sylvester Stallone) learned these concerning statistics remains a question, and if it does feel a little like conservative scaremongering, then we are put at ease with the neatest of solutions: “Crime is a disease. I’m the cure.” Cobra, a one-man wrecking crew brought in by exasperated LAPD strike forces when their methods just aren’t cutting it, may have seen too much violence in his time… or he might just be watching too many alarmist news channels.

Stallone, who wrote the film’s screenplay, isn’t so concerned with infallibility, accountability, or even accuracy when it comes to Cobra. He springs first and asks questions never. He might get things wrong, he might be a menace, and he might commit acts of police brutality before he’s even brushed his teeth in the morning, but to pull at any baffling thread of Cobra the film or Cobra the man would undoubtedly result in the monosyllabic grunts as he starts up his spiel again: “In America, there’s a burglary every eleven seconds…”

Cobra, a vanity project for Stallone sandwiched between Rocky IV (1985) and Rambo III (1989), is an orgiastic melange of ultra-violence and one-liners. Cobra pulls up to a supermarket siege in his vintage 1950 Mercury Monterey, director George P. Cosmatos almost mocking when including an insert shot of Cobra’s dizzyingly uncool licence plate that reads ‘AWSOM 50’.

Already, the stuffed shirts in charge are nervous about what Cobra will do regarding taking the law into his own hands. It does lead one to question just why they’d keep someone in their employ that exclusively makes life far more difficult and violent, but as with everything in Cobra, the answer is Stallone intoning some variation of “I use everything I’ve got,” or rambling about how the justice system is too light on criminals.

Cobra dons black reflective aviators, the world we see in the glass a suggestion of what he’s going to obliterate next. A match permanently rests in the corner of his mouth; a long black duster and black leather gloves complete the ensemble of a man stuck in a mode of self-conscious posing. The supermarket siege goes just about how one might expect it to. Displays of 7-Up and Pepsi explode in shotgun blasts, civilians crash through shelves, and, in a brief respite before taking down the bad man, Cobra sips on a refreshing can of Coors, the label neatly facing the camera.

Before being dispatched, the perpetrator makes a statement about being the “hero of the new world!”—it sounds vague, but nothing that comes after is any clearer. The shooter, it turns out, is part of a strange cult that consists of dozens of people who go out and kill indiscriminately, before returning to a sort of factory where they stand around in their civilian clothes, banging axes together above their heads.

We are offered some loose ideas from the cult about ‘killing the weak to make way for the strong’, but with Stallone’s script and Cosmatos’ mind-boggling decisions behind the camera, it ends up feeling like a 13-year-old’s idea of what crime is: hordes of people who get together and celebrate the fact that they all just really, really love murder. That Cosmatos splices B-roll footage of the cult getting up to their activities (chanting, banging tools together again) with Cobra out on the smoggy streets of Los Angeles gives the film a disjointed but not unenjoyable music video vibe.

Cosmatos and cinematographer Ric Waite throw everything in their arsenal at it: fish-eye lenses, orange filters that make the city even more sweltering, handsome chiaroscuro lighting that makes every photographed person look so beautiful. Cobra is often stylish and European feeling (Cosmatos is Greek-Italian). When things get too bogged down in plot, Cosmatos approaches with a laissez-faire continental attitude, and papers over proceedings with more montages.

In one sequence, Cobra hits the tough areas of town to question perpetrators—what he’s asking them is irrelevant, one supposes, as power ballads blare over the soundtrack and we don’t hear a word that Cobra speaks. It’s probably best to assume he’s asking something along the lines of “Hey, are you a member of a murder cult?”

At one point, we’re greeted with an alarming close-up of a small robot. Some moments pass before we realise we are looking at the set of a modernist fashion shoot, which is intercut Cobra’s ‘investigation’. It’s all so utterly confounding, but just part of the music video montage vibe, as if Cobra is about to be chewed out by his square-head bosses for blasting his damned rock and roll music so loud.

The model being photographed next to several small and large robots is Ingrid (played by Brigette Nielsen, her tempestuous marriage to Stallone lasting between 1985-87). She witnesses the cult’s leader, dubbed ‘The Night Slasher’ (Brian Thompson) killing a victim and thus she has to go into hiding. Cobra, naturally, is the man to be given custody of this beautiful, vulnerable woman.

Here, what had seemed unconventional about Cobretti is developed into something downright alien. He doesn’t speak much, Stallone presumably modelling him on an Eastwood type. However, it’s less like Cobretti being a strong and silent type, and more as if he has never met another human being before. His behaviour has to be seen to be believed. In one now-legendary sequence, he sits down with a cold piece of pizza which he proceeds to cut into small portions…with scissors. He throws a newspaper he’s reading into a barbecue, he sits watching Toys R’ Us commercials with a smirk on his face. He has appalling people skills, but it isn’t played for laughs.

After surviving her attack by the vengeful Night Slasher, Ingrid is understandably a bit rattled. She’s still in her hospital bed when Cobretti asks her if he and his partner Sgt Gonzales (Reni Santoni) can have her food. It plays as if Stallone had no idea how to fill out the minutes of the scene. It isn’t supposed to be funny, but Cobretti’s utter tactlessness—not to mention his recurring hyper-fixation on food—is hysterical. As well as being a fascist, Cobretti is also a bit of a dick, and whenever he seems unsure of how to connect to his fellow man (or woman), out come the food references.

In one scene, a riveting back and forth between Cobretti and Gonzales crescendos with Cobretti telling his partner he should try eating more fish and rice. “I got something here that looks like cheese,” is spoken by Cobretti in yet another food-based sequence, but the show=stopping moment that combines his food fixation and all-round ineptness as a human being comes when he smirkingly carries a giant plastic hamburger over to Ingrid. “Your entrée,” he deadpans, almost wincing, totally mirthless, a man afraid to break kayfabe but willing to risk it on the kind of joke you’d make to get a five-year-old to laugh. Ingrid’s response is best described as sympathetic.

Later, she and Gonzales are talking about Cobretti, while the man himself surveys goods at a flea market. They don’t have much to say about him, each other, or anything at all, but Cobretti seems to be having fun. He picks up a bobblehead toy and, in a moment that is like a chimp trying to recreate human behaviour, smiles and bobbles his own head back in response. It’s a clear marker that Stallone’s performance is less in conversation with Rambo or Rocky, and more akin to E.T. the Extra-Terrestrial (1982).

Hiding out in a motel far from the city, Ingrid tries to sleep while Cobretti loudly services his armoury. After cocking one extremely loud gun, he asks, surprised, “Can’t you sleep?”. Instead of apologising for the noise, he spits out “you should try it.” Cobra would almost certainly have more of a romantic thrust and an obligatory final kiss if Cobretti himself wasn’t so thoroughly locked away in CobraLand, his strange mind-palace where neon Pepsi signs are everywhere, where all pizzas are cut with scissors, and all bad guys have bobbleheads (you’d imagine).

Cobretti is a strange combination of innocence and deadly force—it’s as if he’s a make-a-wish kid whose wildest dream is to massacre Dick Tracy bad guys. Or perhaps we’d be better served to view Stallone as the child from the classic Twilight Zone (1959-1963) episode whose God-like powers require everyone around him to go along with his whims and fantasies. Behind the camera, Stallone’s role as screenwriter inflated his ego even further. After Cobra’s release, he approached novelist Paula Gosling, upon whose novel Fair Game the film was based, and requested to have his name replace hers on all future copies of the novel. Would Cobretti himself even engage in acts so self-aggrandising?

Stallone’s name was the brand and that was the point. The film’s poster doesn’t even bother with his Christian name: ‘STALLONE | COBRA’ is more than enough to make star and character synonymous. Several years later, Stallone, along with ex-rival Arnold Schwarzenegger, and Bruce Willis, would even wield his name and cash to launch Planet Hollywood, the chain of movie-themed eateries, in which it was possible to eat gargantuan burgers while gazing at horrifying wax replicas of a nude Stallone from Demolition Man (1993).

There is little he wouldn’t stoop to, and perhaps it’s why Cobra has the faint sense of desperation. By the time Cobra went into preproduction, Schwarzenegger had already established himself as Hollywood’s major new action star; Conan the Barbarian (1984), The Terminator (1984) and Commando (1985) was a streak only just heating up for the Austrian, and Commando in particular shares significant DNA with Stallone’s Cobra. But where Stallone looks embarrassed, Arnie is effortless. Cobra is scattershot, a film seemingly taped together from disparate parts, while Commando, for all its man-on-a-mission clichés, is propulsive and clear. Cobra aims for Commando’s explosiveness, its L.A. chase scenes, its one-liner hamminess.

It fails, but it does so in such a spectacular, fascinating manner that it’s an impossible film to dismiss. Cobra may be confused, but it’s never boring. It’s an exercise in style, and what happens if you forego essentially everything else that a film is supposed to contain. It’s constantly hysterical and strikingly vibrant, a comic strip come to life, albeit one in which the hero doesn’t get that he’s the punchline. It verges beautifully on parody, but there’d have to be somebody at the controls for that to work out. Instead, here is the most beautiful, out-of-control nugget of action cinema – nonsensical, aggressive, and oh-so-close to being in on the joke. All the better for us that it isn’t.

USA • ISRAEL | 1986 | 87 MINUTES | 1.85:1 | COLOUR | ENGLISH • SPANISH

Limited Edition 4K Ultra HD Special Features:

The new 4K restoration by Arrow Films was taken from the 35mm negatives and is presented in 2160p and Dolby Vision. This restoration is a major step up from the previous Blu-ray releases. Cobra is a gorgeous-looking film, and the richness of its colours—particularly the gradated reds and oranges—is on fine display here

The restoration handles darks and lights strongly, with blacks deep and natural, and gunfire, explosions and sparks looking vibrant but not blown out. There is a natural grain to the image that is very filmic and pleasing, and the image is incredibly sharp. It’s a lot of fun to spot all the details with this upgrade—especially seeing the e-fit drawing of the Night Slasher in all its ridiculous glory.

The lossless stereo soundtrack has a thunderous depth and makes the action scenes truly rumble to life. The rest of the soundtrack, from needle-drops to dialogue, has a richness and fullness to it that is truly immersive.

• NEW audio commentary by film critics Kim Newman and Nick de Semlyen.
• NEW audio commentary by film scholars Josh Nelson and Martyn Pedler.
• Archive commentary by director George P. Cosmatos (1998).
• TV version of the film with deleted and alternate scenes, presented for the first time on home video (SD only).
• ‘Slashing the Night Away‘, NEW interview with composer Sylvester Levay. Sadly, the only new interview recorded for this release, this is still a worthwhile interview that gives insight into how the film’s music was put together.
• Dark Glasses, Violence & Robots, NEW visual essay by Abbey Bender on 80s maximalist cinema. An interesting addition to the package, though Bender and Conterio’s essays do contain significant overlap in content and context. Still a worthwhile watch, with plentiful observations that you may have missed.
• ‘White Line Nightmare’, NEW visual essay by Martyn Conterio on Cobra and the “Maverick Cop” genre. A decent visual essay which helps contextualise Cobra, comparing and contrasting it with its contemporaries and highlighting just what a distinctive, unique film Cobra is.
• Archive interviews. There’s a wealth of information in the interviews, which run at about 60 minutes in total. It’s a shame, however, that there weren’t any newly-recorded interviews made for this release, and that Stallone and Cosmatos are absent. What is here is fascinating, with Brian Thompson’s interview being the stand-out. A distinctive and memorable actor, he gives insight into the life of a work character actor, as well as discussing his time on Cobra.
• Stalking & Slashing, archive interview with actor Brian Thompson.
• Meet the Disease, archive interview with actor Marco Rodriguez.
• Feel the Heat, archive interview with actor Andrew Robinson.
• Double Crossed, archive interview with actor Lee Garlington.
• A Work of Art, archive interview with actor Art LaFleur.
• The Making of Cobra, 1986 featurette A brief, but fun EPK put together of behind the scenes footage from the making of the film. Stallone here calls Cobra a modern day gunslinger—but he also describes him as “Bruce Springsteen with a badge”, so perhaps we shouldn’t be giving too much weight to any of Stallone’s claims.
• Teaser trailer.
• Theatrical trailer.
• TV Spots and trailers.
• Image gallery.
• Reversible sleeve featuring original and newly commissioned artwork by Tommy Pocket.
• Illustrated collector’s booklet with NEW writing by Clem Bastow, William Bibbiani, Priscilla Page, and Ariel Schudson
• Double-sided fold-out poster featuring original and newly commissioned artwork by Tommy Pocket.

Cast & Crew

director: George P. Cosmatos.
writer: Sylvester Stallone (based on ‘Fair Game’ by Paula Gosling).
starring: Sylvester Stallone, Brigitte Nielsen, Reni Santoni, Andrew Robinson, Brian Thompson, John Herzfeld & Lee Garlington.