976 was the phone exchange in the 1980s for a ton of pay-to-call lines; my middle school memories indicate it was mostly sex lines (fake example: 976-TITS ... remember, no area codes necessary back then). This movie is the directorial debut of Robert Englund, the actor who played Freddy Krueger and made him into an icon.
And wouldn't you know it, it's not bad. Two cousins, Spike and Hoax (not kidding) are raised by Spike's overly religious mom, played by Sandy Dennis, in the second-to-last movie she ever made. Spike is cool, with a sleek ponytail and a cool leather jacket. He always gets the girl and just oozes that Fonzie "ehhhh, I don't care" cool vibe.
His cousin, Hoax, is the opposite. Super nerd, goofy, happy-go-lucky, but eternally picked on. And, like so many 80s horror films (think Carrie or Slaughter High or April Fool's Day, etc etc etc), the picked-on guy finds a bloody way to even the score. In this movie, inventively, he called 976-EVIL, which turns out to be a hotline straight to hell (!).
Imagine that! You pick up your rad phone, dial a number, and Satan's on the other end! That is the movie's most creative idea, and while as horror ideas go it's fairly lukewarm, it's still original. Poor Hoax becomes best buds with phone Satan, and one by one his enemies start dying. Except Satan slowly gains access to the real world via Hoax's body, until it's up to cousin Spike to set things right.
The movie has a nice gritty, grimy feel to it - the characters are all filthy punks who live on skid row. They all look convincingly like ne'er-do-wells from the late 80s, with multiple earrings and ripped denim jackets and greasy hair. Meanwhile, the movie also has a surprisingly good sex scene between Spike and his perky, punky blonde girlfriend. It's done pretty realistically, not the usual schlocky 80s teen slasher sex.
The special effects, ironically given the Robert Englund connection, are pretty low budget and you'll forget them the minute they leave the screen. Speaking of Englund, he must not have enjoyed directing this, because he went on to direct only one other film, about 20 years later. Sadly, the film earned a 0% on Rotten Tomatoes - which honestly is undeserved.
Cop (1988), on the other hand, sucks more than the ratings would have you believe. Ebert gave it three stars, and it has an unbelievable 81% at Rotten Tomatoes. But I hated it - Woods is a slimy cop, obsessed with catching a killer after he finds a woman sadistically killed at the start of the film.
But honestly, the movie is really about what a terrible, phenomenally terrible cop James Woods is. He sleeps with suspects ... he predatorily sleeps with girlfriends of people just shot and killed. Based on author James Ellroy's famously violent novel Blood on the Moon, Woods is just total human rubbish here. Which, in some settings, is awesome and works perfectly.
But not here. He's bad, but not bad enough to rise to really memorable levels, and in the end apathy wins - I didn't care about him, and I neither cared if he caught the killer or was shot and killed in a surprise twist. It's too bad - James Woods is the king of slime, it's part of the unforgettable magic of Videodrome. He goes 0 to slime in two seconds flat.
And bad cop movies are nothing new - that genre has been well developed for decades now. Usually there is some interesting angle, though - cop has to cross the line to catch the villain (like the recent To Live and Die in L.A.), or cop breaks the rules while the villain observes some moral code, or the whole word is cess pit and the crooked cop is particularly strong evidence of it, etc etc.
So why doesn't it work here? Maybe because the movie just doesn't have anything to say - entertaining or otherwise. You just watch and feel like you're seeing the same character from Videodrome as a cop instead of a cable TV operator, except nothing surreal happens and the dialog sucks. One minute he's spouting police procedural nonsense to his boss, the next he's gross-banging a suspect, then veins are popping out of his head while he gets needlessly furious over some red tape. Maybe it would work with a different actor. Maybe the script is just hopelessly half-baked.
So James Woods as immoral violent cop isn't as fun as you'd think. Maybe it's because the directing is to staid and flat, but they never really loosen the reins - he never gets to be REALLY bad. For that, you have to watch Bad Lieutenant or Magnum Force or, the ne plus ultra of movies about evil cops, Touch of Evil - Sheriff Hank Quinlan makes the corrupt cop in Cop look like a schoolgirl frolicking in a Hello Kitty parade.
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