Out of all the horror movie villains i've talked about it's surprising that I never got to talk about Matt Cordell until now, and well...here we go, everyone knows the story of the Maniac Cop, basically in the words of the song from the second movie it tells the story of Officer Matt Cordell who is played by the late Robert Z"Dar, who is the only man I know of who has a jawline that makes Jay Leno and Bruce Campbell's seem insignficant by comparison, speaking of Bruce..he's in the movie as well, as the good police officer who is suspected of being the killer, our titlular killer is a former police officer who got screwed over by the justice system and cruelly beaten in prison to the point of being nearly brain-dead, he is mistaken to be dead at first but he comes back from the dead as an undead law-enforcer who is out for vengeance, and much like Michael Myers and Jason Voorhees and to a lesser extent Leatherface, Matt doesn't talk...much, and very much like Christopher Walken's performance as the Hessian in Sleepy Hollow, Z'Dar's performance as Cordell is flawless and eerie and he does it all with body language instead of speaking, in fact he only has a few lines but is capable of understanding human speech.
I also genuinely feel bad for this guy because of what happened to him that resulted in him becoming who he was and it's the kind of story that eerie rivals how brutal the police can be these days, only of course Matt is more of a misunderstood monster.
I also genuinely feel bad for this guy because of what happened to him that resulted in him becoming who he was and it's the kind of story that eerie rivals how brutal the police can be these days, only of course Matt is more of a misunderstood monster.