Psycho Cop is back!

The Psycho Cop is Officer Joe Vickers (Robert R. Schaffer), who upholds the law with the help of Satan and the occult.  When he overhears two office mates talking about a party that they’re going to be throwing for a friend, Officer Vickers decides to stop by and dispense a little Hellish justice.  After killing the security guard, the Psycho Cop spends the rest of the money stalking white-collar workers and strippers.  He’s an efficient killer with a police-related pun for nearly every occasion but he meets his match when he goes after an accountant.  As much as he tries, Psycho Cop cannot catch the accountant.  He can catch security guards.  He can catch strippers.  He can catch low-level executives.  But an accountant?  That’s just a bridge too far.

Psycho Cop seems like he should be a good horror villain and, for the first half of the movie, he seems like he’s unstoppable.  But then he easily gets outwitted by both the nerdiest of the office workers and an accountant and you end up losing respect for him.  The idea of a demonic policeman will always have possibilities but Psycho Cop Returns never reaches the heights of Maniac Cop or even Kevin Bacon’s crazed sheriff in Cop Car.  For everything that you could do with the character of a policeman who is in league with the devil, Psycho Cop Returns just turns him into a one-liner spouting maniac.  Robert R. Schaffer does okay as the title character and he has the right look to play a psycho cop but he’s still no Robert Z’Dar.

As you can tell from the title, this is a sequel.  I haven’t seen the first Psycho Cop so I don’t know if it does a better job at exploiting the whole killer cop angle.  Psycho Cop Returns has potential and a sense of humor but, ultimately, there’s little to distinguish it from the countless other manic-on-the loose films that went straight to video in the 90s.