I only bring this up because when I discovered this little known ’80s blaxploitation/karate dude from Indianapolis named Ivan Rogers, and especially when I found his movie BALLBUSTER, I figured I had pretty much just opened Al Capone’s vault and found Jimmy Hoffa and Amelia Eirhart’s skeletons inside holding hands. I mean the title alone is a treasure, but you read the back of the box, one of those way-too-detailed synopsises you find on some real low budget movies, and you gotta get excited: Ivan Rogers plays a P.I. named Roosevelt “Ballbuster” Prophet. I repeat, his name is Roosevelt “Ballbuster” Prophet. Two of the villains he fights are called Hacksaw and Paycheck. Later he fights mercenaries called “The Nasty Boys.” (I’m not sure if they said this in the movie, so I’m glad it’s mentioned on the box.)

But of course, once the initial excitement wears off you realize this is actually a pretty boring movie where you spend alot of time watching Ivan Rogers fire a gun, then another guy fire a gun, then Ivan fire a gun, then the other guy falls over because Ivan must’ve hit him, then Ivan fires a gun again, repeat for 15 minutes.

Ballbuster is slightly warmer than Rogers’s character in CRAZED COP. He talks more. It’s not as dark of a movie, although they do make a big deal about him getting his start by busting up an international kiddie porn ring. And I think maybe his daughter was kidnapped or something, I can’t remember.

This story is about him taking a case from a famous artist woman. At the beginning we see her painting, and her painting is really bad. Later we see her painting again, and she keeps smoking and drinking scotch, so you know she’s troubled. (In CRAZED COP they just used scotch to signify inner turmoil, now they added cigarettes.)
There are a couple unique touches here and there. I was impressed that they state explicitly that Ballbuster Doesn’t Play By The Rules. At the end, when the bad guy has the girl hostage, Ballbuster won’t hand over his weapon because he figures he’ll still kill her. “Either way 2 or 3 of us are gonna die, and it ain’t gonna be me.” The bad guy says “You’re crazy!” and Ballbuster says, “No, I just don’t play by the rules.”

This was important to point out because, personally, I was thinking that he played by his own rules, but actually he doesn’t play by any rules. I’m glad they make that clear.

And you know how at the end of this type of movie the bad guy gets shot, and they turn and start to walk away and you yell at them because you know the guy is gonna come back to life and try to shoot them? In this movie, Ballbuster is very aware of that. He turns his back on the apparently dead bad guy. When the girl starts to say something he holds his hand out to silence her. He is listening for the click of the hammer, then he turns around and shoots the guy dead. Self defense. Well played, Ballbuster.

But my favorite thing in this movie other than the title, this may seem insignificant to most people, I don’t think most people would blink an eye at this particular scene, but hear me out. There’s a part where Ballbuster goes to the girl’s house and she doesn’t answer the door right away, and when he complains that he was knocking forever she says it’s because she was washing her shoes. She’s not lying, and this is not important to the plot. It just happened that she didn’t answer the door right away because she was washing her shoes.

See, that’s the type of thing Hollywood tries to gloss over. They want you to think that everybody wears brand new shoes every day. But not in an Ivan Rogers picture. In an Ivan Rogers picture people gotta wash their shoes. Just like reality. Some people don’t want to face it, but it’s the truth. Wash your shoes.

Of the two Ivan Rogers pictures I’ve seen, BALLBUSTER was the most entertaining, so keep that in mind.

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First a visual of Ivan Rogers: an African-American gentleman of slightly above average build, with a mustache, likes to wear light colored suit and tie with dark shirt. If there was a movie about his life he could be played by Steve Harvey. But he doesn’t make any jokes in this movie, and doesn’t talk unless he has to. He has a dead-eyed stare and frown. His face betrays no emotion so, to show how depressed he is throughout this movie (or how crazed he is, I guess) he drinks lots of scotch and points a gun at his head 3 different times.

I thought his background would be a mystery, but luckily he’s still around so there’s ivanrogers.com. Turns out he was a professional kickboxer who was approached to create an instructional karate movie for videodisc. He wrote, produced and starred in it and did another one for the early days of VHS, and I guess after you do a couple instructional videos you wanna be Orson Welles. So after a few years of various kickboxing activities, screenwriting practice and encouragement from Fred “The Hammer” Williamson he decided to follow his dream and make this, the first Ivan Rogers vehicle, originally titled ONE WAY OUT but that was already a Sidney Poitier movie so it became CRAZED COP.

CRAZED COP is almost 100% generic except for the gimmick that it stars and is written by and produced by some dude you never heard of named Ivan Rogers. And instead of taking place in New York or L.A., or even Chicago or Detroit, it is shot in Indianapolis, Indiana. So you get to see what kind of crazy shit goes on in the Indianapolis PD circa 1986.

This came before LETHAL WEAPON, but is also about a dangerous cop who is suicidal because of the death of his wife who gets a new partner of a different race and background (fancy-dressing white female). But this character, Weeks, is not funny-crazy, he’s dead serious crazy. His wife was raped and murdered by hired thugs of a drug kingpin, so he’s going after that guy. And it turns out the chief of police is in on it too.

It’s got all the usual elements. He goes too far, plays by rules that could be considered to be his own, etc. He has to hand over his gun and badge, which he does without comment. He doesn’t give a shit because he’s got a pretty nice gun wrapped in a towel in his trunk, and he never really shows people the badge anyway.

The filmatism is amateurish, sometimes in aggravating ways. The movie tries to be real quiet and moody, with the same repetitive keyboard score looping throughout to create dread. There are lots of long pauses and unneccessary static moments before moving to the next scene. This can work if you know what you’re doing, but the camerawork and alot of the acting is not so hot. There are lots of long handheld shots just showing closeups of a glass of scotch, a photo on a table, etc. In fact, the climactic action scene is mostly closeups. It involves Weeks hanging onto the hood of the bad guy’s car while he drives on the freeway for about 5 or 10 minutes, and it’s one of those scenes made almost entirely of closeups of Ivan Rogers and some car POV shots, and only the magic of editing seems to imply that he is actually on top of a moving car.

The one really funny, goofy scene is when a police van is transporting a prisoner and happens to drive down a quiet residential road where a bunch of kids are breakdancing in the street. He has to stop and they go up to the window and keep dancing (not very well, either). Then one of them shoots the cop, and they continue dancing around the van, open up the back, and shoot the prisoner. Then they run off.

So you see, the breakdancing was just the setup, like how Tommy Lee Jones gets onto the boat in UNDER SIEGE by pretending to be in a band called The Fabulous Bail Jumpers. But what fascinates me is how even after they shot the cop they kept dancing. Like there was some reason for them to keep up the front. The whole thing would’ve fallen apart if they had stopped dancing.

I have to admit, I don’t understand the end of the movie. Even after Weeks has killed the bad guy, he is still brooding and he holds the gun to his head again. But then all the sudden he pulls it to the side and shoots it… and as far as I can tell he shoots a book that’s on the table. Why does he shoot the book? What did the book ever do to him? I know he is not “by the book” but that doesn’t mean you gotta literally shoot an innocent book. I don’t get it.

Also, when the credits are over the spooky loop of keyboard music continues over 2 minutes of black screen, that was kinda weird.

Well, I am not necessarily recommending this movie, and you’d probaly have to buy a copy online anyway because most of you kids seem to do the “net flicks” now where you just have to order a DVD to watch later next week instead of going and getting your grubby hands on a rare treasure like CRAZED COP by Ivan Rogers and going home and watching it immediately. Nobody leaves the house anymore it’s all done through pneumatic tubes. But I did enjoy this movie because of the grouchy presence of Ivan Rogers and the unique landscape of Indianapolis. I always like seeing a movie on locations you haven’t seen a thousand times before. Unless you live in Indianapolis, which I don’t. Ivan Rogers does.

next up in my Ivan Rogers retrospective: Ivan Rogers is BALLBUSTER. stay tuned.

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