Tony Lo Bianco

(Criterion Streaming, April 2020) I’m several decades late coming to this conclusion, but in between Q, The Stuff, Maniac Cop, the Phone Booth/Cellular story diptych and now God Told Me To, Larry Cohen was a really interesting story teller. Not the smoothest, not the most accomplished and not really the one who was best served by directors (even when he was himself directing), but they all have something unusual and often interesting to say. God Told Me To does begin with what seems to be an intriguing but familiar premise: several strangers going on mass murder sprees, ultimately claiming as a motive that “God told me to.” As our cop protagonist investigates, things initially seem to point toward the kind of religious horror film that we’ve seen before. But then there’s the last half-hour of the film, which goes in an entirely different direction (albeit one foreshadowed by the prologue) to deliver something a bit scattered, a bit unsatisfying but so wild and crazy that no other movie since then had dared replicate. (Well, except maybe in the X-Files’ salsa blend of tropes.) I’m not going to claim that God Told Me To is good—but it’s certainly intriguing, engaging and then crazy enough to be memorable. I did like Tony Lo Bianco’s performance in the lead role, even though any actor would be driven crazy by the script’s wild turn toward the end. There’s a convincing argument to be made that Gold Told Me To best plays as a series of strong scenes not very gracefully being held by a mad collage of contradictory ideas, but compared to a lot of downbeat SF movies of the 1970s, it still holds up as being more than the usual clichés.