This is the first week that it has been a bit of a challenge to find a movie worth watching for They Called This a Movie that related to a new release.

This week, the only movie worthy of note that happens to be coming out is Mile 22 starring Mark Wahlberg. None of the streaming services have The Happening, so I was stuck looking for bad cop movies.

First, I tried to watch Good Cop, Bad Cop, which is a direct-to-video movie starring Robert Hays, David Keith, and a 26-year-old Pamela Anderson. While it probably would have been fine for this article, nobody in this movie is a fucking cop, so it wasn’t exactly on-brand.

Next, I tried to watch Terror in Beverly Hills, which I couldn’t make it through. Luckily, I didn’t have to go very far to find, Hollywood Cop, another film directed by infamous b-movie director, Amir Shervan. This film has already been showcased on RedLetter Media’s Best of the Worst, so of course it was a perfect fit for They Called This a Movie.

David Goss plays Turkey, the titular Hollywood Cop, I suppose. Turkey is the standard, loose cannon cop that gets results, regardless of how his police captain feels about his methods. We’re clearly in a post-Dirty Harry world, which I’m sure Amir Shervan has seen a number of times. When he’s not storming seedy apartment buildings to stop potential rapes, Turkey is crackin’ wise to Captain Bonano, the eternally-soused Cameron Mitchell, sending him to “a Tums Festival” with his renegade ways.

One day, Turkey and his partner, Jaguar, stumble upon a woman that, more or less, seems to be taking the recent kidnapping of her precocious son completely in stride. Rather than, you know, immediately calling the police and reporting the enormous amount of murders that just took place on her farm, she decides to go to Hollywood and file a kidnapping report. With Turkey and Jaguar’s help, they sniff out the trail of the thugs that took her son and even manage to get some oil wrestling into the mix along the way.

The trail eventually leads them to Rebecca’s ex-husband, who decided to walk out on his wife and kid so he can hang out with a bunch of floozies by the pool all day. The husband is a bit of a scumbag, as he stole $6 million from a gangster, which is the reason the kid is kidnapped to begin with. But he decides to help find his kid and reconcile with his family, even if it means coming face to face with gangster Mr. Feliciano’s goons.

Meanwhile, the son is being held by some of the most incompetent kidnappers of all time, but gets slapped around his fair share. He eventually befriends a guard dog, and manages to escape. But again: not before he gets the taste slapped out of his mouth on multiple occasions. All of this leads to gun fights, exploding cars, and some hand-to-hand combat, which is exactly what you’d expect from an Amir Shervan movie.

For an infamously bad movie, and it is bad, it’s undeniably fun. It’s just plain stupid and the acting is quite terrible, but between the bumbling goons, the precocious kid that talks to dogs and has a goat named Sambo, and the unnecessary detours to oil wrestling bars, strip clubs, and other unsavory places, this movie is exactly what you hope for from cheesy ultra-low budget cop movies. And Cameron Mitchell’s yelling performance is just the icing on the cake.

 

OVERALL

Hollywood Cop has all the trappings of movies from this era and similar budgets. There’s some exploitation, terrible acting, and explosions for the sake of explosions, but it’s terrible in that good kind of way. It’s the kind of movie with a character that uses blood cancer as an excuse to ditch his wife and son to spend the rest of his life with bikini-clad randos and gives a goat a super racist name for literally no reason. You know those types of movies.