Recruits(1986)

As part of his plan to get Mayor Bagley (Jason Logan) removed from office, Capt. Magruder (Mike MacDonald) – along with Master Sgt. Stonewall (Tony Travis) – brings a cannon onto the rooftop of a hotel across the street from the podium Bagley and Governor Foster will be standing on for the ceremony to officially announce the construction of the new freeway. They plan to fire a cannonball into a window of the building behind the podium to make it look like an assassination attempt on the governor but without endangering any lives. After Foster arrives, Magruder lights the fuse on the cannon, but as he and Stonewall laugh over the assured success of their plan, he joyfully smacks Stonewall on the back, causing him to stumble and almost fall off of the roof. He grabs hold of the cannon to save himself, but it results in the cannon firing right at the podium and sending everyone into a panic. As his fellow motorcycle cop recruits scramble to protect the governor, Howie (Alan Deveau) spots Magruder and Stonewall on the roof and realizes that they are responsible for this. Just as Magruder foresaw, Bagley is forced to resign due to the evident incompetency of the recruits, and Magruder later kicks the recruits off the force.

As Magruder is celebrating with drinks and making mayoral campaign plans with Stonewall and Sgt. Schicklegruber (Colleen Passard), Schicklegruber suggests that they take pity on the recruits and find jobs for them as a reward for trying. Magruder refuses this, telling her that she and Stonewall need to worry more about who will succeed him as captain. That night, the trio have a beach party with their fellow cops, but they all get poisoned from eating the lobster Stonewall got for them (the lobsters were cooked in a toxic waste drum that Stonewall found at the edge of a local river while he was drunk, which was left there by crooked sanitation workers who were dumping a few drums into it after having earlier paid off Magruder).

As the recruits are leaving the station the next morning, Winston (John Canada Terrell) remarks that, if they could just find the assassin, they could get their jobs back. Howie tries to tell him and the others that Magruder and Stonewall are the culprits, but he gets ignored. Bagley then comes up to them and tells them that the entire police force has been stricken with severe food poisoning, and once word of this hit the streets, various kinds of crime broke out. He asks for their help in restoring order and promises to find some way to get them their jobs back if they succeed. They initially refuse, thinking that they will just get fired again once the chaos was quelled, but Steve (Stephen Osmond) gives everyone a pep talk, saying that this is their chance to prove themselves as real cops. Motivated, the recruits get to work in halting the lawbreaking and violence, and they cap it all off by defeating a motorcycle gang that Steve and Susan (Lolita Davidovich) had a confrontation with days earlier.

Bagley gets restored as mayor, but as he praises the recruits for their fine work at a public ceremony, Magruder and Stonewall appear, and the former accuses Bagley of poisoning the police force for his own political gain and plotting to assassinate Governor Foster with the help of the recruits. Having heard enough, Howie develops some backbone and gets everyone’s attention, and he tells them that Magruder and Stonewall are the would-be assassins, and Schicklegruber steps forth and backs up Howie while also revealing the basic details of Magruder’s scheme to become mayor. Bagley tells the recruits to arrest the traitorous cops, and Magruder and Stonewall make their escape on Magruder’s motorized wheelchair. Howie leads the other recruits on a chase after them, and the bad guys end up taking a spill into the harbor.

After Bagley and the recruits catch up to them, Bagley officially swears the recruits into the police force, and he personally recommends Schicklegruber to be the new captain.