I’d like to think The Black Cobra 2 is the only Fred Williamson movie in which he wears a Members Only jacket and with a preponderance of cowbell on the soundtrack, but since there’s a number in the title, I can’t be too sure.
Fred stars as Malone, a Chicago cop who gets in trouble for exploding a bad guy’s helmet-clad head like a watermelon with a single bullet, just following perhaps the longest opening credits known to man (eight minutes!). So his cantankerous, overweight police chief sends Fred to Manila to hook up with Interpol office Nicholas Hammond (several hills below The Sound of Music and, for that matter, his Spider-Man TV series). To the filmmakers’ credit, it accurately captures enough of the Philippines’ local flavor to make you never ever want to go there.
The Italian-backed actioner almost seems like two movies for the pain of one. In the first part, Fred falls for a buck-toothed, barfy faced girl whose con-man father was found murdered (“I hate to be the barrier of bad news,” Fred says; couldn’t they have dubbed that over?) and then rescues her after she’s kidnapped by slimy terrorists looking for $10,000.
Then she’s out of the picture and part two begins, with said slimy terrorists holding 350 schoolchildren hostage. Since one of them is Hammond’s short-pantsed son, Nick and Fred rub black greasepaint on their faces (well, okay, just Nick) and get all Die Hard-y as only a film like Black Cobra 2 can’t. I’d like to think they don’t show a single one of the 350 kids because of budgetary reasons, but since they didn’t bother to overdub Fred’s gaffe earlier, I can’t be too sure. —Rod Lott