Running and Gunning with Larry Cohen in the 1970s New York of God Told Me To

GOD TOLD ME TO

(Larry Cohen, US, 1976, 91 minutes) 

"I miss the pictures that he made. I miss his spirit. And I miss the spirit of the times, which we can truly say was the renegade spirit."

--Martin Scorsese in King Cohen: The Wild World of Larry Cohen 

Writer, director, and raconteur Larry Cohen, who passed away in 2019 at the age of 82, was known for his run and gun style of filmmaking. He was the kind of director who shot so quickly and efficiently that he could get around the permits necessary for filming in large urban centers, like New York City. 

That's exactly how he shot 1976's God Told Me To, which incorporates real-life footage from the St. Patrick's Day parade in Manhattan and the Feast of San Gennaro in Little Italy (against Cohen's wishes, Roger Corman's New World Pictures released the film as The Demon in some markets). 

In his 2003 commentary track on the new Blu-ray, Cohen tells Blue Underground CEO Bill Lustig any number of colorful stories about the making of the film (King Cohen director Steve Mitchell and horror writer Troy Howarth handle the second track). It doesn't hurt that these two have known each other for decades, since Cohen wrote all three of Lustig's Maniac Cop movies. He also wrote Lustig's last film, 1996's Uncle Sam. 

For Cohen's fifth feature, he tapped handsome, brooding Robert Forster, who had made such a vivid impression in Haskell Wexler's Medium Cool, to play the lead. 

Had Forster stuck around, the film would have had an entirely different vibe, but alas, the actor couldn't stop chewing gum! Even after Cohen told him, repeatedly, to spit it out, Forster would pretend that he had--and then start chewing again. He had been warned, and so Cohen fired him. 

For the record, Forster has claimed that he quit because Cohen wouldn't stop yelling at him. Nonetheless, they would reconnect in the years to come, hit it off, and work together in Cohen's final directorial effort, Original Gangstas, with Forster's Jackie Brown costar, Pam Grier. As Cohen notes, the Forster of 1996 was no longer the arrogant fellow of old. 

To replace him, he found an actor even better suited for the part of a devout Catholic detective investigating a series of faith-based murders: Tony Lo Bianco, a compact fellow with a grave countenance. He had appeared, to memorable effect, in William Friedkin's The French Connection and Leonard Kastle's The Honeymoon Killers (which was partly directed by Scorsese).

Lo Bianco's origins recalled those of his contemporary, Al Pacino, another Italian-American outer-borough actor who divided his time between the stage and the screen, except Lo Bianco wouldn't hit the same heights. Early on, he got typecast as a gangster, and his subsequent career consists primarily of TV movies and low-budget crime pictures. Now 85, he possesses the same kind of stick-to-it-iveness as Pacino, since he's still working. 

God Told Me To starts out like a crime procedural in the vein of early-career Friedkin or Sidney Lumet before segueing into something pulpier (notably, Lo Bianco had appeared briefly in Lumet's Serpico three years earlier). 

Initially, Peter Nicholas sets out to determine why several New Yorkers, including a cop and a family man, have turned into killing machines without apparent motivation. In each instance, they look the detective in the eye and state, "God told me to," before taking their own lives, but just exactly what God are they referring to and why would he make such a request? 

Cohen opens with a sniper (A Chorus Line's Samuel Williams) on a water tower--the same water tower that appears in his 1973 Black Caesar sequel, Hell Up in Harlem. I couldn't say whether he was inspired by Charles Whitman's 1966 shooting rampage at the University of Texas, but it's the first thing that came to mind, not least because I had just watched Peter Bogdanovich's 1968 Whitman-inspired debut, Targets, a few weeks ago. 

The next massacre erupts during the St. Patrick's Day parade when Andy Kaufman's cop goes on a killing spree. It would mark the future Taxi star's film debut, and he makes one hell of an impression. Cohen had caught one of the young comedian's gigs, and decided that he had to work with him.

Ironically, the audience, as Cohen remembers, had booed Kaufman's anti-comedy routine, but he loved it, accurately predicting that stardom was his for the taking. The two would stay in touch until Kaufman's death from lung cancer less than a decade later. He was only 35. 

Nicholas next questions a man (Robert Drivas) who woke up, threw on a robe, and slaughtered his family. The man betrays no emotion whatsoever as he calmly answers Nicholas's questions. The detective is so unnerved that associates have to pull him off the guy lest he throttle him to death. 

Any cop would be rattled by these encounters, but Nicholas has other reasons for reacting the way he does, since the investigation leads him to reconstruct his adoption history, culminating in a showdown with his birth mother (a terrific Sylvia Sidney, who had worked with Fritz Lang and Alfred Hitchcock in the 1930s) about the father he never knew. In the process, the film segues from procedural to sci-fi weirdness. Though Nicholas doesn't start out as a killer, he turns out to have something in common with the killers, and the more he learns, the more dangerous he becomes. 

Not all of this plays out as effectively as it could, since Cohen loses some control over his material as the revelations accumulate--fitting, since the revelations cause his protagonist to lose control--but Lo Bianco makes for a consistently strong, compelling lead (you'd never know he was starring in a play and auditioning for parts during the shoot). Another standout: Sandy Dennis (Who's Afraid of Virginia Woolf?) as Nicholas's wife, a more effective foil than the comparatively anodyne Deborah Raffin as his girlfriend. 

Although God Told Me To doesn't examine religious fervor--particularly the Christian variant--as rigorously as I had hoped, it confirms Cohen's frustration with those who insist on inflicting their religious beliefs on others (though he grew up in a Jewish household, I have no idea if he was observant). As Mike Kellin's Deputy Commissioner states, in words as relevant today as they were then, "People who are too goddamned religious make a lot of trouble for everybody."

Prior to God Told Me To, I had only seen one Cohen-directed film, 1982's Q: The Winged Serpent, so I set out to watch his first four features to see how they might have predicted or led to his fifth. I also watched 1985's The Stuff, because why not? Though it wasn't a hit at the time, it's one of his most purely entertaining efforts with its unflappable-kid lead, catchy jingle, and colorful commercials. The low budget shows in the primitive digital effects, but it ranks among the finest horror comedies of the 1980s, highlighted by a go-for-broke performance from the late Paul Sorvino as a militia man who saves the day--a plot development that wouldn't work quite so well in our post-millennial era of Proud Boys and Oath Keepers.  

With Black Caesar and Hell Up in Harlem, both released in 1973, Cohen put his stamp on the blaxploitation genre. If former pro football player Fred "The Hammer" Williamson isn't as skilled of an actor as Lo Bianco or Sorvino, he's a bold and charismatic one who could rock the hell out of a fitted suit. 

Though I wouldn't describe Larry Cohen as a misogynist, he does Bond Girl Gloria Hendry dirty in this duo, the sequel above all. There's no reason Black women should only play likable love interests, but he takes a rather sadistic approach to Helen. 

Though these films were intended for the grind house circuit, it isn't hard to imagine mostly-male audiences booing whenever Helen makes an appearance--and then cheering when Williamson's Tommy sexually assaults her and then snatches her children away. Not to give too much away, but things don't end well. (I had no such qualms with the Dennis and Raffin characters in God Told Me To.) All told, though, the action is good fun and Cohen finagled some top-flight Black musicians: the immortal James Brown for Black Caesar and Edwin Starr and Fonce Mizell for Hell Up in Harlem. 

Similarly, the music throughout Cohen's entire 1970s output transcends its B-movie surroundings, since Miklós Rózsa (Spellbound) scored 1977's The Private Files of J. Edgar Hoover and Bernard Herrmann (Psycho) scored 1974's It's Alive, another high point in Cohen's filmography with a sympathetic turn from John P. Ryan (Runaway Train) as a father trying to square the circle between love for his infant son, unalloyed fear, and concern that the little guy will rip the whole town to shreds if he isn't stopped. 

After It's Alive, Herrmann scored Cohen-admirer Martin Scorsese's 1976 Taxi Driver. His classy, orchestral scores elevate both films considerably. Though Herrmann had agreed to score God Told Me To, he died a mere 15 hours after screening the film. BBC stalwart Frank Cordell would step in with a score that nicely recalls Herrmann's work. 

Of the Cohen films I've seen, I would be hard pressed to declare God Told Me To his best--I'm also partial to Bone and It's Alive--but it's certainly a contender, thanks largely to Lo Bianco's performance and a chilling ending that I should've seen coming, but didn't. If we're meant to take it literally, Cohen concludes that God doesn't exist. Or that God is an alien (he has cited Erich von Däniken's bestseller Chariots of the Gods as an inspiration). 

One way or the other, it's an enduring human impulse: to use God as an excuse to commit heinous acts. That isn't fiction, it's fact. Larry Cohen just found a fantastical way to depict the phenomenon, and yet he was enough of a realist to conclude with an explanation rather than a solution. 

Much like the mutant baby in It’s Alive, the God in this film isn't indestructible, but nor is he the only one of his kind. And if there can be two Gods eager to bend mankind to their will, well, there could easily be more. 

God Told Me To is available on a two-disc 4K Ultra HD + Blu-ray through Blue Underground. It’s available to stream through several digital play operators including Apple TV, Google Play, Vudu, and YouTube. 

Images: New World Pictures / Horror Geek Life (Tony Lo Bianco), Film Affinity (Demon poster), The Criterion Collection (Lo Bianco and Shirley Stoler in The Honeymoon Killers), DVD Beaver (Sandy Dennis), Harlem World Magazine (Fred Williamson), and Horror Obsessive (Lo Bianco).

Jordan Peele's Nope and the Buck and the Preacher Poster on the Ranch House Wall

NOPE 

(Jordan Peele, US, 2022, 131 minutes) 

Like Jordan Peele's first two films, Nope is filled with signs and signifiers. 

Many viewers will probably miss one in particular, simply because it only makes a brief appearance in the background: a poster for Sidney Poitier's 1972 directorial debut, Buck and the Preacher, a rare Black western made at a time when African-American actors and filmmakers were more frequently associated with blaxploitation films and social problem pictures. 

The poster doesn't just confirm that Nope is a Black western--with sci-fi and horror elements--but that Peele, like the multi-talented Poitier, is his own man. It's understandable when actor-turned-directors engage in fan service. It's a great way to please their base and put food on the table, but Nope is even less of a sop to the punters who made his first film, Get Out, a deserved hit than Us, a harder-to-pigeonhole proposition that pleased critics more than general audiences. I predict a similar fate for Nope. 

If Peele's third feature has the moody lighting, spooky music, and jump scares associated with horror, it isn't a horror movie in the conventional sense. If anything, a lot of the horror moves are fake-outs. Not to give too much away, but some of the scariest moments turn out to be pranks. 

The Buck and the Preacher poster also suggests something more specific: that Otis Haywood (the invaluable, if underused Keith David), a horse wrangler, may have worked on the film. 

Considering that he would've been a teenager in 1972, it's even more likely that his father or grandfather worked on it, because Nope centers on a multi-generational family of Hollywood horse wranglers, the kind of behind-the-scenes players who help bring movies, TV shows, and even commercials to life with little fanfare for their efforts. 

If Netflix's The Harder They Fall recreated the Black western as something cool and sexy--to mixed results--Nope takes a less stylized approach to the work of the Haywood clan. Rather than looters and shooters, they're experts at a legitimate craft. 

 

After Otis meets his maker, due to a freak atmospheric event--which will become freakier and more frequent as the film gathers speed--Otis "O.J." Haywood, Jr. (Get Out's Daniel Kaluuya, who won an Oscar since he last worked with Peele) has taken over the family business. He may know horses, but the unfortunately-named O.J. has less of a head for business. 

This state of affairs sets the scene for the events to come. With bills to pay, and insufficient paychecks to keep up with them, O.J. has been selling off horses for ready cash. He aims to earn enough to buy them back, but he can't do it on his own, since his vape-happy sister, Emerald (Hustlers' Keke Palmer, the firecracker this somewhat slack-paced film needs), prefers to promote her own projects over getting her hands dirty with wrangling. 

 

O.J. finds one revenue stream in actor-turned-theme park impresario Ricky "Jupe" Park (Steven Yuen, last seen as another dedicated patriarch in Minari) who has a need for trained horses. The two share a connection to Hollywood through Jupe's participation in an Indiana Jones-type action-adventure movie and a '90s sitcom about an all-American family and their pet chimp, Buddy. 

Jupe's acting career came to an end when the chimp went nuts on the set, violently attacking the cast (chimp madness aside, Jupe appears to have been inspired by Ke Huy Quan of Everything Everywhere All at Once). 

 

Peele uses sleight-of-hand to depict the bloody devastation. Now Jupe--and his fantastic red Nudie suit--oversees a family business, much like his Haywood neighbors, in which the parents and the kids put on a show revolving around Jupe's encounters with the rumored alien in their midst. 

It's no spoiler to say that fiction will soon become fact. It's through O.J. that Jupe finds out about the UFO. When O.J. first notices it in the airspace above their spread, he tells Emerald, who springs into action with a plan to save the ranch: they'll capture footage of the alien spacecraft--if it is indeed a spacecraft--and sell it to the highest bidder. This leads them to electronics store worker Angel Torres (The OA's Brandon Perea), a bored kid who inserts himself into their scheme, and eccentric cinematographer Antlers Holst (24's Michael Wincott), who provides the camera expertise they lack. 

And that's the gist of the thing, except the Park-Haywood story strands never converge in a satisfying way, and it doesn't help that Jupe proves more dynamic than O.J. Though Kaluuya plays his role exactly as Peele describes it in the production notes, the director appears to have miscalculated to some extent, since O.J. marks Kaluuya’s least engaging performance to date. 

 

I appreciate the contrast between him and his extroverted sister, and O.J.'s ability to control his emotions serves him well once the alien menace closes in, but a summer spectacle, to borrow Peele's term, calls for more colorful characters, like the council dwellers that populate Joe Cornish's Attack the Block, a 2012 sci-fi comedy that cost one-sixth as much as Nope. Though it failed to recoup upon its original release, the film developed a dedicated following on home video, and launched alienslayer John Boyega into the Star Wars stratosphere. 

In addition to Kaluuya’s recessive performance, the new film's pacing feels off. I'm all for slow and steady build-ups in sci-fi scenarios, except the Arrival-type pace feels all wrong for a lighter, more fanciful effort like Nope.

Poitier's Buck and The Preacher, meanwhile, which focused on newly-freed slaves trying to forge new lives for themselves, opens with inter-titles that conclude with the following statement, "This picture is dedicated to those men, women and children who lie in graves as unmarked as their place in history." In focusing on a Black family of Hollywood horse wranglers, Peele has played a part in shedding light on some of the Black and Brown below-the-line talents that have helped to bring his own moviemaking dreams to fruition (just as Mexican-born Buck and the Preacher wrangler José María "Chico" Hernandez helped to bring Poitier’s dreams to fruition). 

 

If Nope doesn't completely work as the summer spectacle Jordan Peele intended, that still seems like a pretty worthy achievement to me.

Nope opens on Friday, July 22. Images from BBC Culture, Maja/Pinterest, Universal/Teen Vogue, and MoviePosters.com.

On the Sonic Catering and Epicurean Toxicity of Peter Strickland’s Flux Gourmet

FLUX GOURMET  

(Peter Strickland, UK/US/Hungary, 2022, 111 minutes)

For his fifth feature, Flux Gourmet, filmmaker Peter Strickland (The Duke of Burgundy) had originally intended to make a "kid's film" as he told Senses of Cinema contributor John Edmond in 2019. 

The idea was to combine an adaptation of the Brothers Grimm's "The Magic Porridge Pot" with an "entertaining, funny, and strange" exploration of "current attitudes towards food allergies and autoimmune responses." 

And that's what he's done, though I'm not certain why Strickland thought kids would want to see such a thing, since it's very much an adult film, from the references to Greek philosophers to the after-performance orgies. 

The story begins and ends with a journalist or "dossierge" with gastric distress who has been documenting the residency of a collective that creates musical performances using kitchen implements. Being surrounded by the sounds and smells of cooking isn't exactly the ideal assignment for the oddly-named Stones (Suntan's Makis Papadimitriou), but he'll do whatever it takes to see the thing through.

Though the film, which was shot in England, is in English, Stones narrates in Papadimitriou's native Greek. When Strickland told Edmond, "It's actually a very personal film," that may be partly what he meant, since he's of Greek descent, though he grew up in England.

Strickland is also a member of the Sonic Catering Band, a name that will prove both significant and prescient (he includes eight of their staticky tracks on the soundtrack, along with that of other groups, including Tim Gane's Cavern of Anti-Matter, who provided the score for In Fabric). 

Fortunately for Stones, the Sonic Catering Institute (that name!), located in a Yorkshire manor house, keeps a physician on staff. In his off-hours, the dossierge meets with Dr. Glock (In Fabric's Richard Bremmer), an acerbic, tweedy gentleman, ever-present wine glass in hand, who finds Stones's acute reflux and excessive flatulence more amusing than perplexing. 

In addition to documenting their performances, Stones conducts interviews with the members of the collective: Lamina Propria (Attenberg's Ariane Labed, who also hails from Greece), Billy Rubin (Sex Education's Asa Butterfield), and Elle di Elle (Fatma Mohamed, a Hungarian-Romanian theater actress who has appeared in all of Strickland's films since 2009's Katalin Varga). 

In speaking with them, Stones finds that Elle, who favors Victorian-style gowns, rules the roost. Though she claims to love her bandmates, she considers Lamina and Billy eminently replaceable. Lamina, who resembles Kristen Stewart with her bleached hair and pseudo-goth wardrobe, is none too pleased when she overhears that, though she isn't the vindictive type.  

Stones and the collective sleep in the same guesthouse, where he struggles to hide his gastrointestinal troubles, a performance of a kind from a non-performer. The trio's daily routine, which he observes, involves silent morning walks through the verdant grounds and after-dinner speeches in which they reveal their thoughts about sex, food, and gender roles. 

The dossierge reports to the institute's director, Jan Stevens (Game of Thrones' Gwendoline Christie, another returning In Fabric performer), a statuesque, dramatically dressed woman with equally dramatic makeup, who has been receiving upsetting crank calls from a rejected collective, the Mangrove Snacks, whose terrapin-terrorizing members have been skulking around the grounds after hours. Her black, white, and red outfits will become increasingly baroque as institute tensions grow and accelerate. 

The color red, a Strickland favorite, factors into two of the more disturbing sequences: when Lamina ends up covered in a sticky red substance as the result of a Mangrove Snacks stunt, and when Elle performs, completely naked, while covered in a similar substance as Lamina and Billy crank out industrial noises with blenders and sequencers. In this "abattoir performance," Elle (a vegetarian) plays a pig being prepared for slaughter. 

Jan congratulates the troupe on this Dwarves-like spectacle, but suggests that they drop the flanger. Good idea or bad, Elle has no intention of taking suggestions from an outside party. Jan reminds her that she's funding the residency; at the very least, she deserves to be heard. She's not completely wrong, but nor is Elle. Both will use subterfuge to get their way.  

If you've read any interviews with Strickland, you'll know that he struggles to secure funding for his films, and that he insists on complete artistic control. His side in the debate is clear. That isn't to suggest that he isn't having fun at Elle's expense. She's a control freak and a prima donna, an implication that he shares similar qualities, though I suspect he's more genteel in his interactions with financiers. (In his interview with The Projection Booth, he admits that he had to defend the casting of Marianne Jean-Baptiste, when funders insisted she wasn't sufficiently famous to topline In Fabric).  

As the residency continues, the collective shares insights in their after-dinner speeches about their sexual pasts and proclivities, predicting the encounters to come, one of which appears to draw from Giulio Questi's kinky giallo Death Laid an Egg of which Strickland is an avowed fan (especially of Bruno Maderna's atonal score). Suffice to say: eggs are involved. 

All of these elements, from the tensions between performers to the struggle for artistic expression, converge when Stones' search for a cure becomes part of the performances. In these moments, the film swerves into gross-out comedy. Though Strickland plays with the tropes of horror--blood-like substances, masked figures skulking about the grounds--Flux Gourmet isn't as much of a horror film as Berberian Sound Studio or In Fabric, which may be why some horror aficionados have been left disappointed and confused.   

Though it's strange, even by Strickland's standards, there are precedents, including Věra Chytilová's Daisies, Alejandro Jodorowsky's The Holy Mountain, Peter Greenaway's The Cook, The Thief, His Wife, and Her Lover, and Wakefield Poole's Bible! (another film that Strickland has praised in interviews). 

Nonetheless, I still had to watch Flux Gourmet twice in order to wrap my head around it, something I rarely do, even though I had prepared by reading Strickland, a collection of Senses of Cinema pieces about the filmmaker, and moderated a panel about him at this year's Crypticon. 

As a viewer, I don't feel that it holds together the way that it should, but as an auteurist, I love that it's a Peter Strickland film through and through. The well-judged ending, in which the flatulence-free Stones finally becomes a sort of performance-art star, also plays just as well the second time through.

Flux Gourmet opens at SIFF Cinema on July 8, 2022. Images from Bloody Disgusting (Asa Butterfield, Fatma Mohamed, and Ariane Labed), Artists Partners (Diana Mayo, "The Magic Porridge Pot," aka "Sweet Porridge"), KeeperFacts (Gwendoline Christie and Makis Papadimitriou), Game News 24 (Christie), iHorror (Mohamed), and drfreex (The Devil in Miss Jones star Georgina Spelvin in Wakefield Poole's Bible!).