Cop Killers

"The completion of the parody Flesh Gordon was dragging on and on, meaning ever more costs with elaborate special effects, difficulties with the law, and other problems, so the team decided to shoot a thriller that would make money more quickly. With $50,000 invested by a Texas cinema owner, producers Howard Ziehm and Bill Osco shot the feature film Cop Killers in a matter of two weeks in Tucson – Ziehm worked behind the camera, as he had on Flesh Gordon, and Osco, who dreamed of creating a new Easy Rider, played the second lead role alongside Flesh Gordon star Jason Williams. The script was written, with some input from Ziehm and Osco, by Ziehm’s busy assistant Walter Cichy who also directed the movie.

Cop Killers, appropriately known as 'Sweet, Mean & Deadly' during the shoot, represents a dark counterpart to the carefree optimism of Flesh Gordon. True to the zeitgeist cinema, characters roaming the country in search of a better life were sure to be in conflict with the authorities, from the bikers in Easy Rider via the bandits in Butch Cassidy and the Sundance Kid to the murdering teenagers in Badlands. Hence it is only reasonable that these two soldiers of fortune are not just harmless crooks; they are two vile criminals for film-makers whose porn productions were not entirely legal, anyway. Their quest is a cynical rampage with no great vision, their story a pessimistic swan song for the American dream. All that is left of that dream here is an empty idea and a meaningless Wild West-style rebellion. It is ironic that the filmmakers’ plan did not work out any better than their characters’ project: the hoped-for windfall failed to materialise. Cop Killers is a film showing a tangible idea of a cinematic future that never materialised – Ziehm did not continue with ‘regular’ films, Osco did not emerge as an acting star, and Cichy died in a tragic car accident just a few years later. As a tribute to him, Howard Ziehm used Walter Cichy‘s porn nickname ‘Linus Gator’as his own pseudonym in Star Virgin.“

Christian Genzel