Run with the 'Scissor Cop'

Scissor Cop, a short on New York’s Channel 101, is a high octane thrill ride set in a post-industrial Brooklyn landscape with one odd caveat: the protagonist, a bad-ass cop named Johnny, carries a pair of scissors at all times.  And most of those times, he’s running with ’em.

Like many male leads in action films, Johnny’s ability to form lasting emotional relationships is inhibited by his dedication to being a cop, and his attachment to those scissors.

The show consists of extended action scenes spliced with black and white flashbacks of Johnny’s formative experiences – his mother telling him not to run with scissors, his girlfriend saying the scissors will have mortal consequences, run-ins with evil doers with scissors, etc.

Typical to Channel 101, Scissor Cop makes light of the absurdities of mainstream genre movies by adding more obvious absurdities of its own.  And beyond some killer action sequences, there are great, over-the-top action lines, like Johnny’s “Couldn’t play the piano” as a deadpan response to his partner’s question, “Why did you join the academy?” 

Scissor Cops is up to four episodes, and gets better with age.  The premiere was filled with arbitrary fun, but the plot has gotten more involved and the themes more developed, as we learn about Johnny’s troubled past and come to realize that the pair of sharp shears is the only thing in this crazy world he can count on.

It’s the first attempt at an episodic series from Escape Pod Films, a small Brooklyn-based crew behind some halfway decent shorts that seems to have found its stride with longer-form content.