Tony Lo Bianco

  • The Honeymoon Killers (1970)

    ByChristian Sauvé Movie Review

    (On Cable TV, January 2022) The early 1970s aren’t known for fun fluffy movies. In fact, those years were nearly a high watermark of sort for gritty crime drama. In other words—the perfect time for films such as The Honeymoon Killers, a deliberately black-and-white grainy docu-fictive take on a killing couple that preys upon lonely women through lonely-hearts services. Writer-director Leonard Kastle makes the most out of his low-budget by being as stark and realistic as he can be out of necessity. The impact is still effective today, especially considering that the lead actors of the film, Shirley Stoler and Tony Lo Bianco, cheerfully remained outside the Hollywood star system. However, the ransom of this effectiveness is obvious: The Honeymoon Killers is raw and often unpleasant to watch—both low budget and high concept combining to make a film you won’t necessarily watch on a whim to be entertained. But that is also how much of the early 1970s turned out for many cinephiles.

  • God Told Me To (1976)

    God Told Me To (1976)

    ByChristian Sauvé Movie Review

    (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.