God Told Me to [DVD] [1976] [Region 1] [US Import] [NTSC]

Larry Cohen is quite an eclectic guy. Ok I've only seen 3 of his films: Full Moon High, God Told Me To, and Phone Booth (which he wrote). But you couldn't find 3 more different films if you walked into HMV blindfolded and picked out 3 DVD's.
The storyline revolves around a spate of motiveless murders in New York, beginning with a sniper on top of a water tower taking pot shots at the passers by. The only thing that connects the murderers is their explanation: "God told me to"
Detective Nicholas (Tony Lo Bianco) is baffled and frustrated, and becomes increasingly concerned about his own involvement as he gets closer to the Christ-like figure named Bernard Phillips, who appeared to each of the killers before they struck.
This is quite a strange one. Very low budget, with lots of natural lighting and that oh so fantastic film grain that populated films before the digital revolution. From a film-makers point of view this is an excellent film to dissect. Full of cheap effects and on location shooting, this is a 'how-to' of low-budget filmmaking, but it's the clever and powerful writing that carries it through. Great twist. Definitely a hidden gem.

Vipco's dvd of Larry Cohens superb God Told Me To is an abomination. Taken from an old vhs it is virtually unwatchable.

There is a nice region 1 dvd from Blue Underground which is widescreen and contains a directors commentary.

God Told Me To vies fair to be Larry Cohen's most outrageously adventurous film, with a pitch mixing random murderers, alien abduction and Catholic guilt to create one of the most anarchic B-movies ever. Many of Cohen's scripts work around a big inversion (a health food that eats you, a cop who's a psychopathic killer, a baby so vicious it's the parents that need protecting) but at the heart of this one is a zinger of a question that seems designed to drive Cardinal Spellman and the Moral Majority into apoplexy: if Jesus was an alien, what if He was also a mistake who accidentally turned out good when He was really intended to be bad? Tony Lo Bianco is the cop who suddenly finds himself caught up in a series of random killings that see mild-mannered sons climb water towers and do their best Charles Whitman impersonation with a sniper's rifle, family men kill their wife and small kids and Andy Kaufman's cop start shooting in the middle of the St Patrick's Day parade. The common factor? All are not just calm but in a state of euphoric bliss, all display uncanny accuracy - even with a rifle with misaligned sites - and all say that "God told me to." While the rest of the department take it for mass hysteria, he takes it rather more seriously. Being the kind of Catholic who sneaks away to church when his girlfriend is asleep and blames his failure to get a divorce on his more than willing ex-wife (Sandy Dennis, excellent in her two character-driven scenes) so he can go on happily feeling guilty about his infidelity, he's not going to like where the answers take him, especially when he tracks down a mysterious long-haired figure seen with the killers and guiding their hands but who leaves so little trace that witnesses can't remember his face even while they were staring directly at it. There's more than a hint of Chariots of the Gods along the way, but taken to a far more anarchic level as he uncovers more than one variation on the virgin birth and the notion of the Messianic Secret (that Jesus' true nature was hidden even to Himself until it was revealed to Him) before he can finally confront Richard Lynch's malicious messiah, a creature of light but no mercy or compassion.

As with all of Cohen's films as a director, you can always tell what scenes and shots they had time to think about and what they shot on the fly, often with passers-by roped in as extras and bit-players to save money, but his necessity-is-the-mother-of-invention style pays dividends here, giving the film the kind of gritty street realism of an urban thriller rather than overegging the supernatural/religious elements with style. It helps ground the film's more outrageous notions while making a real virtue of the low budget. It's also surprisingly well written, not just in terms of ideas (there's even a post-Watergate boardroom conspiracy and a crimewave using the religious killings as a smokescreen in there as well) but in terms of characterisation, with the supporting cast making the most of the opportunities in the script and playing it for real with some surprisingly convincing performances: this must be the only film to write a scene where a modern-day Virgin Mary (Sylvia Sidney) gets to tell her abandoned and grownup son how disgusted and traumatised she's been all her life by how she was used and abused, pouring out a lifetime's rage and fear at him.

Its subject matter may have relegated it to a ghetto within the cult films ghetto by keeping it off TV and wider circulation (it was such a hard sell it was three years before it got a release outside the USA, retitled Demon and on the wrong half of a double-bill with 'The Lady in Red), but it's well worth seeking out as a great example of how much you can do with a little money and a lot of ideas.

With no shortage of bad Public Domain releases, it's worth seeking out Blue Underground's Region 1 NTSC release, which has a good widescreen transfer, audio commentary by Cohen, trailer, TV spots and stills gallery.