Cobra (1986)

COBRA is in the running for the worst film that Sylvester Stallone has ever made. Its as stupid and wrongheaded a film as you can get and somehow it managed to make a great deal of money. The film is in it’s way kind of like a Arnold Swartzenegger’s COMMANDO which reduced a film’s plot to it’s absolute basics and then went with it. The difference is that COMMANDO is stupid fun and COBRA is just bad.

The plot of Cobra has Stallone as a cop protecting Brigite Nielson, his then wife or girlfriend, from a huge gang of satanic killers. What does the gang do beyond kill people- beats the shit out of me, but there are a lot of them and they kill you just for the hell of it. That’s all there is to the plot it’s a couple of good guys versus the state of California in a film full of crashes and killings.

And that’s it. There is no real rhyme or reason it’s just Stallone killing bad guys.

And it’s interesting for a while…and it was kind of interesting back when it came out, I mean I owned a copy of it on VHS because I liked the film, but watching it now it just plays soooooo bad. I mean really bad. Stallone doesn’t act he just mumbles and stands. He’s clearly taking himself way too seriously Brigitte is just there. The bad guys make no sense, especially since they seem to be infinite in number. If a group was this big they could take over the state not merely randomly kill people. And as for the action, its aged badly. It doesn’t help that Brian Thompson as the lead bad guy is terrible. Never the best actor, he got roles because of his look, here he’s given stupid shit to do and he can’t overcome the crap script to make anything other than a cardboard character.

I know what I originally liked about the film was that it was really cool action- but the truth is now looking back after 30 years of hyper cutting and insane over the top action the stuff here isn’t all that hot.

This is a really bad movie- it really is.

Why am I writing the film up? Because it just came packaged in a collection of Cannon Films and I was going through that enjoying myself until I hit that turd ball… and since I’m aiming to do al the films….

Do yourself a favor just avoid this one