A love letter to Cobra, the funniest movie ever made

Sylvester Stallone doesn't just uphold American values, he *is* American values.

I had intended to write a serious piece on a downbeat movie from my youth, and then I saw that this week marks 37 years since the release of Cobra, Sylvester Stallone’s tour de force about a cop who single-handedly takes down a murder cult. Now, granted, no one celebrates 37 years of anything. Hallmark doesn’t sell an “It’s Your 37th Birthday” card, nor is there a special gift you’re supposed to give your spouse for your 37th wedding anniversary. Nevertheless, I think Cobra is not just a movie worth celebrating once a year, but every day, for both its hubris, and its perfect illustration of a strange time in American pop culture.

Trying to explain America in the 80s is a real “you had to be there” situation. Baby Boomers were reaching middle-age, and suddenly everyone was a little embarrassed about the hippie era. Where once the “American Dream” had been having a nice little home in the suburbs, now it was something bigger, an ostentatious display of wealth while looking down on those who didn’t have what you have, if not outright denigrating them as leeches and “welfare queens.”

With the election of Ronald Reagan came a return to “family values,” a vague and ephemeral term that mostly seemed to mean maintaining the status quo, and that reflected in our entertainment. Where the second half of the 70s was dominated by disco, which featured predominantly Black, Latino and gay performers, 80s pop music was overwhelmingly white. Even MTV, geared towards a younger, hipper audience, had to be shamed into featuring Black artists. Whereas 70s television made an at least rudimentary attempt at depicting how “the other half” (meaning non-white and/or working class people) lived, 80s sitcoms were almost entirely about white, middle-class families¹. Non-white characters factored so little into popular films of the time that they might as well have not existed, and when they did show up, just as with gay characters they were often treated as a punchline.

Some aspects of pop culture played right into one of the more unsettling aspects of the Reagan Era, the growing belief (encouraged by Reagan himself) that America was constantly in danger of outsiders who hated our values and sought to destroy them. Action movies shifted focus from police corruption and political intrigue to xenophobic “invasion” plots. Sometimes the invaders were from exotic Middle Eastern or Asian countries. Sometimes, particularly in the mid-80s once the new and unimproved Cold War started, they were Russian. And sometimes, the calls were coming from inside the house, as depicted in Cobra.

Even though it’s very much meant to be taken seriously, Cobra is an incredibly funny movie. Though Michael Bay would make an art form out of it in the 90s, it’s among the first action movies to be shot like a music video, with star Sylvester Stallone styled as if he’s about to pose for the cover of American Tough Guy Digest. We know we’re in for some excellent bullshit when the film opens with Stallone, talking through gritted teeth like he can barely restrain his rage, rattling off some completely made-up crime statistics. “In America, there's a burglary every 11 seconds, an armed robbery every 65 seconds, a violent crime every 25 seconds, a murder every 24 minutes and 250 rapes a day,” he says, eerily prescient of people on Twitter who insist that New York City is a bombed out hellscape populated mostly by rats and roving gangs of crackheads and/or Antifa².

An armed psychopath (of which there will be many in this movie) shoots up a supermarket, shouting about a “new world.” You know he hates America and everything it stands for, because he specifically aims at Pepsi cans and Christmas trees. A world-weary police chief assesses the situation and says, in a grim tone of voice, “Call the Cobra.” From the way he says it, you might think “the Cobra” is some sort of special police force or terrorism squad, but no, it’s just one guy, Marion “Cobra” Cobretti, who appears as if by teleportation in his cool 50s-era car, a Jackie Daytona toothpick in his mouth and wearing jeans so tight he can barely walk.

Cobra makes short work of the “Supermarket Killer” (as he’s credited), and soon learns that he was a member of the “New World,” a cult that’s been responsible for a series of gruesome murders in the city³. Led by the Night Slasher (none of these people have actual names, it doesn’t matter, they might as well be known as “Scumbag #1” and “Scumbag #2”), the New World is a cult that has no god or greater purpose than to kill. Like South Park’s underpants gnomes their “killing + ???? = profit” plan is a little unclear, except that it will somehow eventually make the world a better place. They do get together every now and then to shout and clank axes together, which leads to all sorts of questions like do they collect dues? Did they get a bulk discount for their matching axes? Are there snacks served at these meetings, maybe some pizza bagels or Dunkin Donuts?

ANYWAY, while killing David “Sledge Hammer” Rasche⁴, some of the New World members overlook a witness, model Ingrid Knudsen, played by future second Mrs. Sylvester Stallone Brigitte Nielsen, wearing a Harpo Marx wig. It’s fascinating to note that Stallone and Nielsen not only fell in love while making Cobra, but their characters are supposed to be falling in love too, because there is not a drop of chemistry between them. Their meant-to-be-flirty banter is painfully stiff, like a couple of middle schoolers forced to read from Romeo and Juliet. Now, part of this could be attributed to the fact that neither of them are good actors, but it’s really impressive to not even be able to express something you allegedly really felt while making a movie⁵.

The New World gives up all pretenses of getting caught while trying to silence Ingrid, who’s now under police protection. Instead of skulking around in the dark unseen, they’re now attacking hospitals and storming motels in broad daylight, announcing their arrival from miles away by showing up on motorcycles. Ingrid has no need to worry, though, because she has Cobra on her side, a one-man army who dispatches of hundreds of thugs at once without even breaking a sweat (which is fine, because the Night Slasher, played by distinctive-looking character actor Brian Thompson⁶, sweats enough for both of them).

I don’t have to tell you how this all ends. Cobra gets all the bad guys, is applauded for a job well done, and rides off into the sunset with Ingrid, as a song literally called “American Son” plays over the end credits. Cobra is High Noon for idiots, and it’s absolutely hilarious. It’s a Republican’s wet dream, in which the hero can assault his neighbors, constantly put bystanders in danger, and stockpile guns and grenades (which he will later use to kill dozens of people), but it’s okay because he’s working on the side of good. Cobra’s secondary nemesis besides the Night Slasher is a smug, judgmental detective who’s one of those bleeding heart liberals who believes in such nonsense as “laws” and “due process,” and his payback is a big ol’ punch in the kisser at the end⁷.

Cobra sends a baffling message, and yet it was in keeping with the Conservative viewpoint (and one that remains firmly in place today) that America is both the greatest country in the world, and yet also overrun with criminals and degenerates allowed to roam free by a corrupt judicial system working directly against the interests of decent society. What good is arresting someone and putting them on trial if some namby-pamby judge is just going to let them out? The Night Slasher taunts Cobra with this, claiming that even he, who has brutally killed upwards of a dozen people⁸ (including an old lady in a hospital just because), will be set free eventually. “The courts are civilized,” he sneers, to which Cobra, sneering even harder, replies “But I’m not.” You can all but picture a young Ron DeSantis experiencing his first sexual feeling upon hearing that line.

I suppose, viewed through a modern lens, Cobra isn’t all that funny. I don’t know that Stallone, who wrote the screenplay, foresaw that “shoot first and ask no questions later because it doesn’t matter” would become a cornerstone in the current Republican party, let alone applauding the actions of such people as Kyle Rittenhouse and Daniel Perry. The message in Cobra, that it’s always better to take the law into your hands, isn’t funny. It’s how it’s executed, with a hero who’s dressed like an extra in Cruising, that makes it such an entertaining watch. By the time the movie ends, Stallone’s jeans are even tighter than they were at the beginning, and you expect to hear the loud, farty noise of fabric ripping when he throws his leg over a motorcycle seat. It’s a movie so far up its own ass that its original theme song was supposed to be “The Touch,” later used as the theme song for Transformers (and on Dirk Diggler’s aborted attempt at recording an album). It’s Stallone at his most masturbatory, with carefully cultivated Sonny Crockett stubble and a personalized gun that literally sticks out of his pants.

So yeah, despite the bleak world we’re living in, with aliens wearing human skin openly expressing their desire to kill people who don’t look like them, I feel comfortable still laughing at a movie like Cobra, and celebrating its existence. It’s a perfect snapshot of the Conservative mindset, seeing themselves as heroes even when they’re pushing someone around for having the audacity to park in their parking space. They all picture themselves as Cobra, cleaning the scum off the streets, but also fall apart at the sight of a rainbow on a child’s t-shirt. These people should be laughed at, loudly and often.

Wanna hear me talk more about the unheralded masterpiece Cobra? Check out the two-part episode on Kill by Kill.

1. Occasionally said sitcom would eventually add a sassy non-white child to the cast, in a real “I would have voted for Obama a third time” move.

2. Proudly sponsored by George Soros.

3. That city is Los Angeles, though the movie doesn’t go out of its way to specify that, presumably to give audiences the impression that every city has a murder cult haunting its streets at night.

4. Known to you younger, hipper folks as Karl from Succession.

5. Of course, if Stallone and Nielsen hadn’t fallen in love, we would have missed out on one of the greatest celebrity wedding photos of the 80s.

6. Thompson shows up in a small role in Joel Coen’s The Tragedy of Macbeth, and let me tell you I had a real “Leonardo DiCaprio pointing at the television” moment when I saw him.

7. In the original cut of Cobra, this character was revealed to be the actual leader of the New World, working undercover in the police department. Cobra is a lot of things, but one thing it is not is subtle.

8. Though not as many as Cobra himself, who kills at least twice as many people by himself on-screen as the New World does collectively.