This review is the fifth and final in a Larry Cohen retrospective commissioned by Nate Biagiotti. It'll feature some fairly necessary spoilers. Many thanks to Nate for supporting Post-Credit Coda through our Patreon. All other film reviews in this retrospective can be found here.
Director: Larry Cohen
Writer: Larry Cohen
Cast: Tony Lo Bianco, Deborah Raffin, Sandy Dennis, Richard Lynch
Runtime: 91 mins.
1976
The New York streets buzz with activity. Crosswalks, business suits, herds of hustling feet. Chaos regulated by rhythms of normalcy. This immense dead-eyed choreography is shattered by a gunshot that flings a biker to the pavement. Like divine retribution raining down from above, victim after victim are shot dead as the intermingling throngs erupt in panic.
An unthinkable number of bodies later, police surround the lone shooter. He is hunkered up on a water tower, clinging to a rifle that had no business killing with such accuracy. Our protagonist Peter J. Nicholas (Tony Lo Bianco) rushes to the scene, informing his colleagues that he intends to talk with this man. After a nauseating climb, he engages the shooter in conversation, shares facts about his life. "We don't kill people we know, right?" The shooter gives off middle management vibes; he speaks with an alarmingly soft, high-pitched voice. What is the meaning of all the mayhem? "God told me to," he placidly informs Peter as a predatory helicopter hovers in the background. Then, in a confluence of sudden sound and jarring edit, he flings himself from the building.
God Told Me To is a police procedural, or perhaps sci-fi horror, or perhaps existential meditation, that follows Peter as he investigates why glassy-eyed mass murderers keep claiming that 'God told them to' enact these atrocities. In many ways this is the most Cohen-y movie of all, featuring a great deal of his recurring tics: reproductive anxiety, Catholic guilt, emotionally inarticulate men, politically obstructive forces, the nature of true belief, impressionistic opening credits (cosmic ejaculate or soapy windshield?), and even a Blaxploitation subplot that harkens back to his earlier directorial work.
The collision of so many ideas is bound to leave a few undernourished, and the last of these suffers the most. Once it becomes public knowledge that killers are claiming God as an alibi, a pimp uses the veil of plausible deniability to murder a cop. This is enough of a pretense for a supposedly sympathetic character to test his strange new abilities by slaughtering the pimp and his companions. This subplot is so tertiary that it's hard to see it as anything but an excuse to obliterate a room of Black men for the sake of popcorn spectacle.
Charitably, this scene is situated in a web of casual violence that darkens every encounter in this fallen portrayal of New York City. What do you expect when God himself is positioned as some sort of serial killer? The nastiness of a crime thriller and the flimsiness of faith in the face of urban ugliness dovetail in the figure of Peter. "You really believe. But where is all the joy it's supposed to put in your heart?" needles Peter's wife, who retains that title only because Peter carries guilty misgivings about divorce. Sandy Dennis as Martha Nicholas delivers the standout performance of the film despite only appearing in a few scenes. She is a broken down woman whose sharp sense of humor drips with an insight that hardly does her any good. Yet there is a detectable softness in how she handles her current former husband, lightly taunting the way he postures for his new girlfriend Casey (Deborah Raffin). "Doesn't she know that you sneak off to mass every morning? Like a thief?"
Cohen's approach to religion is brutal, alarming. He lays bare how perverted it is to be a believer in an age of depravity. This irresolvable double consciousness rattles around Peter's skull as his lonely investigation unearths questions that masquerade as answers. There is no clarity, only rupture so severe that even the genre, the style, and the pace of the film cannot hold. There are two respective revelations of information that transform the film into noir and sci-fi flashback sequences, complete with their own aggressive color filters. These abrupt departures are some of the strangest and best of the film. Can we only encounter the divine through such intense mediation?
The third aggressive color filter is deployed whenever Peter encounters the nominal antagonist, an amber-lit and blurry-faced deity named, uh, Bernard Phillips (Richard Lynch). He is a silly villain, yes, representative of a hermaphrodite God, male and female twinned, patriarch and life-giver, bearing a masculine physique with a torso vagina at the very site that the spear pierced Jesus' flesh on the cross. Silly, disturbing, and exactly the right flavor of melodramatic to exist at the nexus of suspense, noir, sci-fi, horror, and why not throw comedy in there too.
In many ways, I have no idea what to make of a film so packed with scattershot ideas. Is it about trans panic? Civic dissolution? Corporate extremism? The fragility of the collective cultural consciousness? The rape that implicitly underscores the virgin birth? Well, yes, it is about all of these things, but what do they make when tossed into a 90 minute blender? Consider me a believer that continued reflection will unravel more of this movie's blasphemous secrets.
Maybe blasphemy is the only path to true belief.
3.5 / 5 BLOBS
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