Almost 40 years later, a cult classic action slasher is getting a remake. And from a director who could really use another hit. Making his debut with the critically acclaimed crime thriller Pusher back in 1996 before crafting Tom Hardy’s breakout role in Bronson in 2008, filmmaker Nicolas Winding Refn found by far the biggest success of his career so far with the acclaimed, Academy Award-nominated, and highly unorthodox action thriller Drive in 2011. Starring Ryan Gosling as a near-silent getaway driver, Refn has failed to match the promise of Drive in the years since, but now hopes to reignite things with this long-awaited remake of an 80s slasher.
Starring Tom Atkins alongside Laurene Landon, Shaft’s Richard Roundtree, and cult horror legend Bruce Campbell, who recently revealed that he has sadly been diagnosed with cancer, 1988’s Maniac Cop follows two New York police officers as they “search for a killer in uniform who should be dead.” Boasting the incredible tagline “You have the right to remain silent… forever,” a remake of Maniac Cop has been in the works for years, leaping from the big screen to the small screen and back again, and while Nicolas Winding Refn has been rumored for the job for some time, the filmmaker behind the 80s original, director William Lustig, has now confirmed that the project is finally happening.
“Nic has it as his next project, that will shoot in the fall.”
Speaking to Icons of Fright, Lustig proved to be a fount of information as he not only confirmed that the Maniac Cop remake is happening with Nicolas Winding Refn behind the camera, but that it will start filming this fall. The director, who also helmed the sequels Maniac Cop 2 in 1990 and Maniac Cop III: Badge of Silence in 1993, went on to explain why the remake has taken so long, and why it jumped from being a feature to a HBO series and back again.
“What happened with HBO was, HBO got sold to Discovery, and Discovery — after they’d spent over a million dollars developing the scripts for the series — Discovery says, ‘We’re not in the Maniac Cop business.’ They gave all the scripts back to us, so we didn’t have to pay a turnaround, so that was it with HBO. Now it’s moving ahead. I can’t announce the company, but it will become known.”
“It’s sort of like one of these things that’s bouncing around in your head, and you wanna just get it out. I think Nic is at that point. This thing had so many fits and starts. It’s moving ahead and expected to start shooting the fall.”
Nicolas Winding Refn needs a win, as his two most recent efforts, the action movie Only God Forgives and the arthouse horror The Neon Demon, were met with middling-to-scathing reviews at the time. But, while it may not seem like it at first, Maniac Cop could be the perfect project, with the cult slasher combining Refn’s penchant for stylized horror, action, and violence, as well as enabling the filmmaker to bring another layer to this tale of a ruthless, resurrected cop for this deeply polarized modern world. Refn will first return to the big screen with the upcoming thriller Her Private Hell starring Yellowjackets’ Sophie Thatcher.
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