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Cop, adapted by director James B. Harris from James Ellroy’s 1984 novel Blood on the Moon, opens without fanfare. James Woods dials up the tics and twitches as an abrasive, somewhat unstable LAPD detective who embarks on an obsessive manhunt for a serial killer he believes is responsible for the brutal slaying of several young women in the Hollywood area. A casually violent, blandly directed, leisurely-paced police procedural whose familiar genre tropes are only intermittently adrenalized by motor-mouth Woods' trademark gimlet-eyed intensity. Leslie Ann Warren, Charles Durning and Charles Haid co-star. For the record, in the 1950s, director Harris partnered with a then unknown Stanley Kubrick to produce the critically acclaimed classics The Killers, Paths Of Glory and Lolita.
