During VHS’s all-too-brief Golden Age (roughly the ‘80s through the ‘90s), you could step into any neighborhood video store, peruse the stacks of new releases, and leave an hour later with any number of low-budget, straight-to-video action titles of varying quality and entertainment value.
To find a hidden gem among thousands of forgettable titles was to experience something truly special. Even better, a positive experience for one VHS renter could turn into a collective one: Sharing a newly unearthed find helped to maintain and sustain friendships among genre enthusiasts.
An exhaustive, time-intensive online search (i.e., Google) for “Blind Cop” won’t uncover a single title sharing that name. A near-identical search, though, will uncover Blind Cop 2, but not its predecessor for a simple reason: Blind Cop doesn’t exist in any form.
A throwback to those ‘80s straight-to-video titles, Blind Cop 2 exists as a sequel to an imaginary cop flick, one that only exists in the moderately deranged minds of co-writer and director Alec Bonk and his screenwriting partners, Augustin Huffman and Isaac McKinnon. The “sequel,” however, does exist.
In the first, tone-setting joke, the title character isn’t identified by a specific name, just “blind cop” (George Fearing) by anyone and everyone, including his perpetually frustrated superiors, casual passers-by, and the nameless thugs he dispatches without breaking a sweat and a ready-made quip on his lips. Wearing glasses over his sightless eyes – his vision lost, of course, during the Vietnam War – Blind Cop makes up for his acute visual deficiencies with near-superhuman, Matt Murdoch-inspired senses (i.e., hearing) and an unquenchable desire to bring maximum justice to the city’s deserving criminals.
Like every name and no-name predecessor from decades past, Blind Cop’s career as a one-man law-enforcement-machine in Reagan-Era America took a turn for the worse when his partner-in-crime-fighting/best friend, Mac (Steven Vogel), perished at the hands of a sniper in the previous, never-made film. (Don’t worry, obligatory flashbacks catch you up on everything you need to know and more than a few you don’t.) The experience has made Blind Cop a typical loose cannon, operating outside the lines, using casual violence and threats thereof to take down and take out the ever-metastasizing criminal element that infests his unnamed city.
After one particularly nasty incident leaves an unwilling informer hospitalized with serious injuries and Blind Cop suspended from the force, he sets out to make wrongs right through extra-judicial violence, tracking down his partner’s killers one or more masked thugs at a time. Bodies hit the floor with resounding, permanent thuds. Video-game style, a not particularly sympathetic, European-accented big (final) boss awaits the title character at the end of his vengeance-fueled journey.
Unfortunately, leaning heavily, sometimes exclusively on parody as the central source of humor results in diminishing returns. The closer the title character and his latest, albeit unofficial partner, Schmidt (Isaac McKinnon), moves to his ultimate destination (i.e., the closing credits), the closer Bonk and Co.’s style of humor risks utter and complete exhaustion. The parody never stretches into satire, seemingly embracing the ultra-reactionary, regressive politics of '80s-era action flicks.
Significant budget limitations also mean Bonk and Co. couldn’t fulfill their vision for action-oriented set pieces on par with the ‘80s cop flicks they’re relentlessly parodying. All too often, set pieces end just as they’re starting or soon thereafter.
Shot selection and editing also betray the noticeable time and budget crunch. Still, there’s enough promise here and occasionally there in Blind Cop 2 to suggest Bonk and Co. could leverage a more polished script and a higher budget into a more watchable result that reflects their obvious love and affection for ‘80s action flicks.
Blind Cop 2 played at the 2024 Chattanooga Film Festival. A theatrical or streaming release will follow at a later time.