From the Quartet Records website:
“Quartet Records presents a remastered reissue of the long-out-of-print soundtrack by Ennio Morricone for the 1983 police thriller COPKILLER (aka ORDER OF DEATH).
Coproduced between Italy, France and the U.S., and directed by longtime Morricone collaborator Roberto Faenza, the film stars Johnny Rotten (famous punk-star from the group Sex Pistols), Harvey Keitel and Nicole Garcia. The plot is about a pair of corrupt cops spending their illegal cash on an uptown New York City apartment.
Morricone’s score comes from the composer’s fertile period of poliziotteschi thrillers and his collaborations with Henri Verneuil in Belmondo’s French polars in the early 1980s. The music features the psychedelic, percussion-heavy and often ostinato-based cues that Morricone typically reserved for the steamy chaos of his crime-film scores.
General Music released the score on LP in France and Germany in 1983, and GDM on CD in 2002. This new edition contains the same program, produced by Claudio Fuiano and Dániel Winkler, rebuilt and remastered by Chris Malone from the first-generation stereo master tapes. The package includes a richly illustrated booklet with in-depth liner notes by Daniel Schweiger discussing the film and the score.”
Other editions:
The Film:
From Wikipedia:
“Copkiller (Italian: Copkiller (L’assassino dei poliziotti)),[1][2]also released as Corrupt, Corrupt Lieutenant, and The Order of Death,[3] is a 1983 Italiancrimethriller film directed by Roberto Faenza and starring Harvey Keiteland John Lydon, the lead singer for the bands Sex Pistols and Public Image Ltd. It is based on Hugh Fleetwood‘s 1977 novel The Order of Death, with a screenplay by Fleetwood, Faenza and Ennio De Concini. The music was composed by Ennio Morricone.[4]The plot follows a psychological cat-and-mouse game between a corrupt police officer (Keitel) and a disturbed young man (Lydon) against the backdrop of murders committed by a serial killer who is targeting police officers.
The film was shot on-location in New York City and at Cinecittà Studios in Rome between March and April, 1982. It is Lydon’s only starring role in film to date.[5] Upon release, it received mixed-to-negative reviews from critics, and has since fallen into the public domain.[6] It has since undergone a reevaluation, and has become a cult classic due to the presence of Keitel and Lydon, while being acknowledged as a precursor to Abel Ferrara‘s celebrated and similarly-themed film Bad Lieutenant (1992).[6][7]
The premiere in Italy was on March 15, 1983.[1][8] New Line Cinemaacquired the U.S. rights and released the film under the title Corrupt in New York City in January 1984. and the film slowly worked its way through art theatres for months after.[9]
Thorn EMI Screen Entertainmentreleased the film on home video in America later in 1984 as part of a package they acquired from New Line. New Line also licensed the film for TV syndication to The Entertainment Network (a.k.a. TEN) along with other titles they then had rights to, including The Texas Chain Saw Massacre and The Cars That Ate Paris; the film was retitled Copkiller for television broadcast.
For undetermined reasons, after New Line’s initial rights expired, the film became regarded as public domain[6] in America. Scores of bad-quality copies have been floating around the market, usually either sourced from the Thorn EMI videotape, or a 16mm print of the edited-for-television TEN version.[10] It has not only been offered under its UK titles The Order of Death or Order of Death (mostly in the United Kingdom), its US title Corrupt, or the alternate Cop Killer or Cop Killers titles, but also as Bad Cop Chronicles #2: Corrupt (from the VHS sleeve, part of the video series Bad Cop Chronicles) and Corrupt Lieutenant.[5][11] The latter was devised after 1992 to capitalize on Abel Ferrara‘s Bad Lieutenant, a critically acclaimed film also featuring Harvey Keitel.[10] On July 24, 2017, Code Red DVD released the film on Blu Ray in America, sourced from the original New Line Cinema elements, obtained directly from the Warner Bros. vault.[12]
Copkiller was reviewed on BBC 1‘s Film 83 as Order of Death. Well-known British film critic Barry Norman refers to Lydon’s voice as a “speak-your-weight machine”, and sums up by calling the movie “stupid”.
In the book Harvey Keitel Movie Top Ten edited by Creation Books in 1999 and compiled by film author Jack Hunter, featuring his personal “Top Ten” of Keitel’s best films or performances, there is a chapter dedicated to Copkiller. The chapter is written by film critic David Prothero, who describes the film as “undoubtedly one of Keitel’s finest films”. Prothero makes the link between Keitel’s character in the film and his character in Bad Lieutenant. Another comparison he brings is the parallel relation between Copkiller and Lydon’s role with the relation drawn from the film Performance and Mick Jagger‘s role there; Prothero describes the blurring of Lydon’s stage persona with his onscreen character, stating that defining proofs about this hypothesis are Leo Smith’s tantrums ala Johnny Rotten, his mixture of arrogance and cynicism and the fact that Lydon wears his own clothes throughout the film.”
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