Larry Cohen's God Told Me To (1976)

I had barely finished writing about William Sloane's genre-expanding Rim of the Morning (posted Jan. 5) when Turner Classic Movies showed Larry Cohen's God Told Me To.  Cohen has made horror movies, science fiction, and police procedurals (usually in the Blaxploitation style) but this film contains elements of them all.  Tony Lo Bianco is the police detective who investigates a mass killing, the killer saying just before his suicide that he did it because "God told me to."  Cohen is something of a guerilla filmmaker and his film captures all the beauty, seediness and entropy of 70's New York:  bright colors and lots of litter.  Cohen is a master of low-budget filmmaking, using newcomers and low-priced veterans for his cast; God Told Me To is probably the only film to use both Andy Kaufman (who plays a cop who starts shooting people at the St. Patrick's Day parade) and veteran Sylvia Sydney (who plays a woman who was mysteriously impregnated by an alien in 1951)

On a strictly narrative basis this films makes little sense, though I think that reflects one of its major points, i.e., that religion does not make any sense.  Lo Bianco lives with his girlfriend because his Roman Catholic wife won't give him a divorce, though he still goes to mass almost every day.  His search for the "god" that is telling everyone what to do brings him back to himself, his own mother and the nuns who put him up for adoption.  In some ways the mass killings in this film reflect the time of uneasiness when the film was made but they also eerily anticipate the recent madness of killings for religious reasons.

One of Cohen's best films, The Private Files of J. Edgar Hoover, was made right after God Told Me To and is as effective an expose of law enforcement as God Told Me To is of religion.  The fact that both films are considered "schlocky" is as much a matter of an accurate portrayal of their subjects as it is of Cohen's style.  Few things are as schlocky as the religious paintings and statues in Sandy Dennis's Long Island house in God Told Me To.



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