God Told Me To

Larry Cohen – 1976 – USA

Maybe he didn’t make a lot of masterpieces, (okay maybe not any at all), but Larry Cohen was the kind of maverick independent genre filmmaker that I’m just happy was around anyway.  (Though quite active as a screenwriter now, he retired from directing in the mid-90s.)  He had a consistently eccentric and satirical vision not unlike George A. Romero’s or John Waters’, yet he never quite achieved their level of respect as auteurs of transgressive cinema.  But how can you ignore such a wide range of thoroughly entertaining and thought-provoking flicks like Hell Up in Harlem (1973), It’s Alive (1974) and The Stuff (1985)?  His 1976 film God Told Me To is one of his most openly philosophical and hard-to- categorize films; an heir of the Twilight Zone as much as an obvious forebear to the polished and respectable blockbusters of M. Night Shayamalan.  Tony Lo Bianco – (a fine actor not seen often enough in memorable movies) – plays a police detective investigating a series of incidents in which seemingly normal citizens commit motiveless murders in a trance-like state, claiming when asked that God told them to do it.  His search dovetails with one of personal discovery about his own history, and also points him towards a mysterious cult leader (Richard Lynch) who may or may not have been spawned by extra terrestrials.  Like Scorsese’s Taxi Driver of the same year, the film is dedicated to the memory of the great composer Bernard Herrmann, who was slated to write the score before passing away immediately after finishing work on the Scorsese film.)