Trailer
Plot summary
A gunman takes hostages in a Los Angeles supermarket, and Lieutenant Marion 'Cobra' Cobretti of the LAPD's Zombie Squad kills him before the hostages are executed. Detective Monte reprimands him for ignoring police procedure. The shooting belongs to a series of violent crimes by the New World, a cult that rejects modern society and holds that the weak must be killed. Ingrid Knudsen, a model, witnesses the group and its leader, the Night Slasher, during a killing spree, and comes under the protection of Cobretti and his partner, Sergeant Gonzales. Monte scorns Cobretti's warning that the killings are the work of an organized band of psychopaths.
Cast
Did you know?!Facts and trivia about Cobra (1986)
Can contain spoilers, watch the movie first.
- Sylvester Stallone was signed to play Axel Foley in Beverly Hills Cop and rewrote the script almost completely, removing the comedy and turning it into an action movie, but the studio rejected it and Eddie Murphy came in instead. Stallone later channelled his ideas into an original script.
- Worried that Top Gun, a smash hit that opened the week before Cobra's premiere, would overshadow it, Stallone and Warner Bros. heavily re-edited the film to guarantee at least one extra screening a day, cutting much of the plot and scenes involving characters other than his own.
- The knife used by the Night Slasher was made for the film by knife designer Herman Schneider, after Sylvester Stallone asked him to create a knife that audiences would never forget.
- Brian Thompson auditioned seven times before he was hired; at the fourth audition Stallone thought he was too nice to play the Night Slasher, but after a screen test he immediately got the job.
- During a stunt scene, driver Kerry Rossall and another stuntman were injured after Rossall intentionally crashed a van into a wall, and Nielsen was nearly hit by the same van during an earlier take.
- Cobra was the last film to pair Stallone and Nielsen after Rocky IV (1985) until Creed II (2018), and the only one in which the two appear while married to each other in real life; they divorced a year later.
- Then-U.S. President Ronald Reagan watched this film at Camp David on 6 June 1986, a few weeks after its release.
