RETRO REVIEW: 'GOD TOLD ME TO' (1976)
Killing in the name of…Sammy Williams in GOD TOLD ME TO.
Since man pretty much started killing man, there has been murder perpetrated in the name of a higher power. Stanley Mossburg killed three people in Florida, claiming God told him they were needed for a war; David Berkowitz claimed he was acting under the orders of a demon that inhabited his neighbor’s dog; and Harvey Milk assassin Dan White pleaded that the Twinkies made him do it (which had to suck for Hostess, having their will-outlive-any-apocalypse snack cakes forever associated with that homophobic POS).
The point is that anyone can use any bullshit reason to justify killing another human being. In Larry Cohen’s supernatural thriller, GOD TOLD ME TO, we see just how preposterous killing in the name of a higher power can be.
Tony Lo Bianco in GOD TOLD ME TO.
PLOT:
In New York City, a rooftop sniper guns down fourteen pedestrians on the streets of New York City. A mild-mannered dad takes a shotgun and blows away his wife and children. A cop goes on a sudden shooting spree at the St. Patrick’s Day parade. And each of these unlikely killers makes the same dying confession: “God told me to.” Now a repressed Catholic NYPD detective (Tony Lo Bianco) must uncover a netherworld of deranged faith, otherworldly forces, as well as his own unholy connection to a homicidal messiah with a perverse plan for the soul of mankind.
Andy Kaufman (RIGHT) in GOD TOLD ME TO.
KILLS:
The film opens quite literally with a bang, as a sniper starts picking off pedestrians with a rifle from his water tower perch in downtown NYC, creating a mass of chaos in the streets that leave 14 people dead when all is said and done. I still can’t wrap my noodle around the logistics of how he did this, considering the fact that many of the victims looked to be in totally different areas of the city at the time. But hey, if Oswalt can have a magic bullet, I guess I can suspend disbelief for the duration of this 90 minute movie. And man, does this film ask you to suspend a LOT of disbelief.
It’s at this point, we meet Detective Peter Nichols (played by Lo Bianco). As police surround the snipers' water tower, he holds them back, saying he wants to talk to him first. He talks comfortingly to the sniper, named Harold Gormin (Sammy Williams), who himself is quite calm and personable. Peter tells Harold his age and asks how old he is. Harold evenly replies, “I’ll be 22 the 7th of July, but I’ll never see the 7th of July, will I?” Peter asks him why he is doing this, and we get our first (of many) callbacks to the title of the film when Harold says, “God told me to,” before leaping to his death off the tower.
From there, Peter is swept into a series of murders that cut a swath across New York City, all of which seem to be committed by people saying that God instructed them to do it. At one point, he talks to a man who went into a supermarket and suddenly started stabbing people, a man who gunned down his entire family (more on that later), and, perhaps most notably, a mass shooting at the famous NYC St. Patrick’s Day parade.
The parade is a noteworthy scene for a couple of reasons. For one, writer/director Larry Cohen did not have a permit to film the scene, but went the hell ahead and filmed it anyway. Not surprising, when you consider this is the guy who directed IT’S ALIVE and wrote MANIAC COP 1, 2, and 3. The second, is that Andy Kaufman is in it, and plays the parade assassin. Yep, THAT Andy Kaufman, in his first movie role, no less. Before the parade begins, a man calls Peter at the police station saying that the parade will be targeted as “he has willed it to be.” Peter tries to convince his superiors to stop the event, including the Deputy Commissioner (played by Mike Kellin, who most horror fans might know from his sleazy camp owner turn in 1983’s SLEEPAWAY CAMP), who tells Peter, “the Irish have waited all year for this day and you’re not going to ruin it for them.” I’m not Irish, but that line made me laugh more than I probably should. The parade proceeds, and invariably leads to a bloodbath, with the shooter whispering to Peter as he’s dying that God told him to do it. Apparently during the shooting of this scene, Larry Cohen was organizing the crew, only to see Kaufman, dressed in his policeman’s disguise, antagonizing and making faces at the crowd. At that point, some of the parade attendees attempted to jump the barricades and beat Kaufman, and Cohen had to intervene, which seems to be pretty on-brand for Kaufman.
Psychics, religious cults, aliens, oh my! A scene from GOD TOLD ME TO.
VISUALS/SFX:
The film looks like a typical mid 70’s hard-boiled detective thriller, which is to say, not great. Now wait, before you come at me, I happen to love those kind of films, and I’m not saying the film itself is crappy at all - it just has that low-budget, gritty, unpolished look of many fantastic, late seventies crime thrillers of the day had, like BRING ME THE HEAD OF ALFREDO GARCIA, THE SEVEN-UPS (also starring Tony Lo Bianco), and most famously, TAXI DRIVER (which, incidentally, was shooting New York the same time as GOD TOLD ME TO). Though a thoroughly solid film, GOD TOLD ME TO sadly cannot hold a candle to those other films, as about halfway through it spins out from police crime thriller to supernatural alien tale. Confused yet? Well, it’s about to get worse.
As the movie unfolds with giant plot leaps and bounds, we discover that all this “god” hullabaloo centers around a cult leader who is not only controlling the killers via psychic powers, but is also the product of an alien birth with a human mother who was abducted years ago. Writer/Director Larry Cohen says he took inspiration from the Bible when writing the script, believing that God in the Bible was one of the most violent characters in literature. Hey Larry, I’m not here to yuck your yum, but I’m still not sure how aliens with torso vaginas that ooze Nickelodeon Gak slime like some kind of ectoplasmic creampie fits in with the whole Bible thing. Just saying.
Sylvia Sidney in GOD TOLD ME TO.
PERFORMANCES:
Though the special effects are not going to wow anyone, and the plot goes from Julia Fox delusional to Kanye West fully-off-the-deep-end wild, what makes this often overlooked film as good as it actually is comes down to the performances.
Tony Lo Bianco is clutch as always as a detective determined to unravel why these murders are happening, as he struggles to comprehend the reasons why he is connected to them. One particularly chilling scene sees Peter interviewing a father who has just gunned down his entire family. The man (played by a fantastic Robert Drivas of COOL HAND LUKE fame), calmly tells him what happened, explaining how his daughter ran into the bathroom and how he tried to lure her out by saying it was just a game and that he was going to show her a trick. He tells Peter that when she finally opened the door she was smiling, and that he was smiling too as he shot her. The scene pulses between the two men as we see Peter’s face is a barely contained effigy of disbelief, finally exploding into rage when the man says: “God asked Abraham to kill his son Issac. Sacrifices to your God are nothing new. Why are you looking at me as though I was the first?”
Though only briefly in the film, Sylvia Sydney (of BEETLEJUICE and MARS ATTACKS! notoriety) makes the most of her screen time as Mrs. Mullins, a woman who was also abducted by aliens and shares a personal connection with Peter. I won’t go into the details of the scene as it’s heavy on the spoilers, but it’s a heartbreaking moment as both her character and Peter question their roles in this whole violent and supernatural ordeal.
What if God was one of us? A scene from GOD TOLD ME TO.
OVERALL IMPRESSIONS:
Though GOD TOLD ME TO can be schizophrenic in nature, wildly jumping around so much that you find yourself having to catch up with who Peter is talking to and why, not to mention the entire convoluted aliens/God plot, and the too-long run-time for a film of this nature, it does get more right than it does wrong. Believe me, I’d never thought I’d say that about a film that has honest-to-god Gak vag in it, but here we are. Cohen’s script, though baffling at times, has some solid dialogue and the cast he’s been able to gather is impressive. Comparisons with films such as FALLEN, FRAILTY, DELIVER US FROM EVIL, THE NINTH GATE, hell, even THE HAPPENING are inevitable, though GOD TOLD ME TOO still manages to swing high above that pretentious anal fissure of a film to deliver an experience that is at turns disturbing, compelling, and utterly deranged. Put that in your Twinkie and smoke it.
Deborah Raffin in GOD TOLD ME TO.
THE GORY DETAILS:
Robert Forster was originally cast in the lead role. A few days into filming he and Cohen had a falling out and Forster quit. Forster said Cohen "was one of those guys who yelled a lot on the set, and I said, "Hey, this isn't for me. Let me out of here." We parted friendly and all that." Cohen replaced him with Tony Lo Bianco, who had been in Cohen's play, The Nature of the Crime.
Composer Bernard Herrmann, Larry Cohen's first choice to score the film, died that night after seeing the film without music. The film is dedicated to Hermann in his honor.
Many years after the film's release, a 70-something year old Larry Cohen stated in an interview that a young French filmmaker had asked him if he could remake the film. He couldn't remember who this guy was, but he had left some of his films for Cohen to see, and when he took them out, that young French filmmaker turned out to be no other than Gaspar Noé.
Released in the UK as DEMON, on a double bill with THE LADY IN RED.
Mike Kellin and Tony Lo Bianco in GOD TOLD ME TO.
MY RATING: 6/10
WHERE TO WATCH:
YouTube, Vudu, Amazon Prime, Google Play, and Apple TV.
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