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(1976. Dir. Larry Cohen. Tony LoBianco, Sandy Dennis, Sylvia Sidney, Sam Levine, Deborah Raffin. 92 min.) Larry Cohen is America’s greatest indie/exploitation filmmaker, the most visually interesting and he doesn’t get the credit he deserves. His rival in these sweepstakes is the much better known Roger Corman. Whereas Corman in the hundreds of movies he’s either produced and/or directed gives us middle of the road shocks with a California hipster’s humor stashed right around the corner, Cohen is New York City before Times Square was tourist friendly. He goes right for the jugular.
He’s also a master of wingding storytelling. God Told Me To, quintessential Cohen with a mélange of film styles, is a tale of space alien abduction and impregnation that beats the X-File to the punch by seventeen years. Nowadays mass shootings are part of America’s modern collective memory, but there’s nothing new about them and God Told Me To’s terrifying opening has a sniper on a water tower dropping over a dozen NYC pedestrians. When confronted on the tower by Detective Peter Nicholas (Lo Bianco) and asked why he shot all those people, the sniper simply says, “God told me to,” and does a header. It’s enough to give practicing Catholic Nicholas nightmares and you too - it’s only the beginning of a series of murders where the killer mutters, “God told me to” before expiring, a refrain that sweeps Nichols and the viewer along in a tidal wave of religious paranoia. Well written, acted, and directed, surprisingly gripping, at times darkly funny and oh so New Yawk, this is one sci-fi horror flick that delivers the goods – it builds and builds and builds and just when you think it can’t get any crazier, it does. Why do I feel compelled to sing the praises of Larry Cohen? God told me to.
