Officer Downe, directed by Shawn Crahan (Clown AKA 6 from the band Slipknot) and based on the comic by Joe Casey & Chris Burnham, is a crazy, bloody, weird oddball of a movie, and I loved every low budget minute of it. It has an in-your-face sensibility, with a goofy sense of humor and damn fine acting. It’s everything I want in an exploitation movie about a cop repeatedly dying on the job and being brought back to life to go right back on the job.
Kim Coates (Sons of Anarchy) is Officer Downe, a righteous police officer on a personal mission to clean up the streets of Los Angeles any possible way he can, often with the help of his custom .85 Magnum, nicknamed The Answer Man (hilariously introduced with its own title card, a good indication of where this movie’s offbeat heart is). Downe is partnered with Officer Gable (Tyler Ross, The Killing), a youthful rookie who wants to do things by the book in a decidedly non-literate city. Their boss, Chief Berringer (Lauren Vélez, Dexter) has a big secret to keep about Downe: every time he’s brought in battered and dead, he is taken down to the secret basement and resurrected (via some weird combination of electricity and mental power provided by a group of comatose wheelchair-bound devotees).
There are gun-running nuns, underground crime kingpins with animal heads, deadly ninjas wearing flower-print outfits, and more bloody disembowelings and eviscerations and exploding heads than I’ve seen in quite a while. I totally dug the audaciousness of the whole thing. Another example: Zen Master Flash (Sona Eyambe), the leader of the ninjas, speaks in Japanese (I think) with subtitles, then says “F*** these subtitles,” and the rest of his dialogue is badly dubbed into English, but his lips are still mouthing Japanese.
The movie has a ton of little funky smart-ass touches like that. Fortune 500, the afore-mentioned animal-headed kingpins, have human head trophies adorning the wall of their meeting room. The Mother Supreme nun wears a bustier along with her frock and habit. When Downe is in bed with his woman, there’s a running onscreen count of her orgasms that pings like a pinball machine every time he…uh…scores (sorry).
Congrats to Crahan for a fabulously freaky final film. He deserves major kudos for having a strong vision and not being afraid to follow that vision all the way through to its gory conclusion (and beyond). The entire cast is uniformly terrific, taking their jobs and their characters seriously even though crazy stuff is happening all around them. There’s not a false note or wrong turn throughout its ninety-minute running time, and I know this is going to be one of those movies I constantly recommend to my friends looking for a fresh new take on a tired old genre.
Uncle Mike sez: check it out as soon as possible!
Watch the clip below for a deliciously tiny taste of the lunacy.
