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  • Accidental Aesop: Due process is for pussies.
  • Awesome Music: Robert Tepper's "Angel of the City" and Jean Beauvoir's "Feel The Heat" are pure '80s deliciousness.
  • Big-Lipped Alligator Moment: Would you believe a movie like this would have a fashion montage, of all things, let alone one involving a robot which may or may not be alive?
  • Cliché Storm: This is up there with Commando in this department. Sly as the Cowboy Cop Anti-Hero, Brigitte Nielsen being Ms. Fanservice, their inevitable hook-up, tons of Car Chases; hell, we even get one of those climactic fights that takes place in a factory that only produces sparks.
  • Complete Monster: The Night Slasher is a psychopathic Serial Killer responsible for terrorizing the streets of Los Angeles at night. He starts the New Order, a nihilistic murder cult of psychopaths so he can indiscriminately kill dozens of victims of whatever background, including children. He prefers to carve up his victims and perform the kills himself to satiate his sadistic nature. He pursues a woman for witnessing one of his murders, and orders his army to lay siege to an upstate town for the sole purpose of killing her. He sees himself as killing off the weak and his movement as heralding the start of a new order where violent killers such as himself rule through terror.
  • Critical Dissonance: Savaged by critics at the time, this movie has a 13% rating on Rotten Tomatoes. It opened up at number one at the box office and ended up grossing an estimated $160 million worldwide against an $25 million budget, and is considered a Cult Classic nowadays.
  • Hilarious in Hindsight: SledgeHammer himself appears in this film before he becomes a TV parody of Cobra.
  • Informed Wrongness: While Monte has a good reason to label Cobra as a Cowboy Cop, at one point he sneers that Cobra has allowed people to die so far... and "so far" every person that died as a direct result of Cobra's actions (and Cobra's actions alone) are members of the Slasher's army he's killed while they were trying to kill him. Either the (now forever lost) full cut of the film had more people dying because Cobretti acted stupidly or Monte is the kind of jackass that won't accept even protecting a major witness and self-defense when they attack Cobra right at his home as a reason to hurt criminals (and with Monte this is not an impossibility, mind).
  • Narm Charm: Even 80s action movies didn't usually go as over-the-top as this one.
  • Squick: Just in case it wasn't clear enough that The Night Slasher was the bad guy, the movie has a reporter mention that one of his victims was a sexually assaulted child, just a few seconds after mentioning that he has claimed his sixteenth victim IN A MONTH.
  • Values Dissonance: The movie is very much a product of its time, having been made during the crime epidemic of The '80s, where there was much more tolerance for the idea of a cop who violated people's civil liberties. Thanks to high profile incidents of Police Brutality and of cops killing unarmed suspects, it'd be pretty hard for a character like Cobra to be portrayed in a positive light nowadays.


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