Castro Parchesi's T.V. Treasure Trail! Dept. - Comrade Detective

Castro Parchesi, star of aisle-end dump-bin fixture The Tire Fire Five, pops his IoF© cherry with swell review of forgotten T.V. series what you can now pretend you always dug. In joining th' Four Or Five Guys©, Parchesi fulfils childhood dream of working for nothing.

Romania, 1983. The Cold War is raging, and Comrade Detective is the country’s top TV show, a gritty crime serial about communist cops who are in over their heads. When loose cannon Anghel sees his sidekick murdered by a psycho in a Ronald Reagan mask, the police captain assigns him a new partner: Iosif Baciu, a by-the-book rural beat officer, and former professional wrestler. Together, they unpick a conspiracy involving assassins, illegally imported Monopoly boards, Western porn, and a trail of dirt that leads right to the US ambassador.

 

Except Comrade Detective was filmed in 2017, a genre experiment bankrolled by Channing Tatum. Conceived as the imagined Soviet response to gung-ho ‘80s movies like Cobra, Comrade Detective sees collectivism, and not the individual, triumph at every turn. This is thanks to the labour-sharing heroics of cops Anghel and Baciu: a pair of brown-jacketed bad-asses who specialise in sliding over Trabant bonnets, explosions, and glugging vodka for breakfast.

 

Anghel is the textbook flawed cop: quick with his fists, permanently unshaven, possibly crazy. He chastises his partner for being a “goat fucker”, and smears cocaine into the faces of dealers who dare sling it on the workers’ streets. 

 

It’s his job to squint his way through the perfunctory plot, which is a grab-bag of buddy cop clichés, and therefore fantastic. On the hunt of the capitalist killer who took out his partner, Anghel not only has to work with his stiff replacement, but also has to link further killings to the dastardly Jordache Jeans corporation (surely the strangest example of product placement ever). They’re flooding the streets with designer denim, determined to bring down communism through use of corrupt ambassadors and religious extremists, i.e. Christians. 

 See left? This actually happened.

 

In a flip on Rocky IV, where the communist menace was imagined as a chiselled, monosyllabic killing machine, the capitalist bad guys of Comrade Detective are obese fast food addicts in golfing slacks. One dream sequence shows Detective Bachu’s childhood trip to New York, where the streets swarm with prostitutes and bankrupt entrepreneurs. Crack-heads try to rob you of your shoes, while bums sing of how they’re infected with HIV. 

 

Comrade Detective keeps you hooked as much with its serial killer story as it does with jokes about indoctrination. Background detectives binge on borscht, not pizza, and an attempt to evade false imprisonment sees Anghel and Baciu disguise themselves as cowboys. “Considering this is how the men of your country dress,” growls Anghel to a US embassy worker, “I’m surprised you have any population growth," while his partner’s milk-maid wife marvels at Bucharest, “The most modern city in the world with its gas stoves and electricity.” 

 

“I heard about this American,” whispers one character in flashback. “He builds skyscrapers in New York City. And he puts his name in gold letters on every building! Imagine that.”

 

“Sounds like an asshole,” replies his roommate. “It takes many men to erect a building. Not just one.”

 

[Castro Parchesi is a freelance Caged Animal Masturbator retained by top zoos and endangered beast collectors worldwide. His autobiography "Castro Keeps 'Em Coming!" has been sent to many famous agents - Ed.]