God Told Me To (1976)

In a filmography made up of oddities and eccentricities, Larry Cohen’s God Told Me To stands out as the weirdest, a provocative and cerebral chiller full of wild ideas that seemed custom made to rattle a few cages. Its mish-mash of genres (a Cohen speciality) encompasses science fiction, horror, gritty urban drama, blaxploitation and others, skipping around with such abandon that the end result becomes almost impossible to adequately classify. It’s mostly an absorbing police procedural, albeit one with a particularly odd mystery to explore, that becomes progressively more outré as it goes along.

New York cop Peter Nicholas (Tony Lo Bianco), a devout Catholic who is struggling with the complications of his personal life (he’s living with a younger woman, Casey (Deborah Raffin) while separating from his depressed and bitter wife Martha (Sandy Dennis)) is traumatised by an encounter with a gunman who opens fire on passers-by from a water tower. Before the sniper jumps to his death, he tells Nicholas that he committed the killings because “God told me to.” Further inexplicable killings occur, the protagonist repeating the sniper’s justification for their crimes. His investigations lead him to a man named Bernard Phillips (Richard Lynch) who turns out to be a hermaphroditic alien-human hybrid who is psychically compelling his followers, who regard him as a messiah, to kill. Nicholas learns that Phillips was born to a woman who was abducted and impregnated by aliens and that his own mother – he was adopted as a child and never knew his past – was similarly impregnated. Aware now that he too is the product of a “virgin birth” and as otherworldly as Phillips, he heads for a final confrontation with his “brother.”

Partially shot guerrilla-style on the streets of New York, God Told Me To is a cheap (special effects are filched from Gerry Anderson’s Space: 1999 (1975-1978), the alien ship being that show’s Eagle transporter) but hugely ambitious film, its vision of a seemingly normal – violent and cynical – world slowly unfolding to reveal something altogether weirder is brilliantly sustained. Nicholas’ voyage from ordinary working cop to potential messiah teeters on the very edge of absurdity but Cohen holds it all together admirably.

Although there are some beautifully written scenes (Cohen was always a better writer than director) and the whole film is conceptually audacious, Cohen’s writing does stumble from time to time. Quite why Phillips is compelling his followers to murder innocents and to kill themselves (self-defeating, surely?) is never fully revealed. But maybe that’s the point. Phillips is utterly incomprehensible, a literally inhuman psychopath whose motivations are perhaps never knowable.

Among those beautifully written scenes are the one in which Nicholas talks to a chillingly serene man (Robert Drivas) who gunned down his own family, blissfully calm and content in the knowledge that he’s done God’s work; several thoughtful meditations on the nature of faith and belief; and the clever reveal that Nicholas’ investigations are into himself and his family roots rather than Phillips’.

A lot of the film rests on the shoulders of Tony Lo Bianco, a late replacement for the originally cast Robert Forster who left the production after a falling out with Cohen. He gives a first rate performance as the haunted Nicholas, already prone to nightmares even before the killings start, his already messy private life ripped apart as he delves into his previously unexplored past. Lo Bianco is an often overlooked actor and God Told Me To is one of his best performances, an intense and compelling turn vital to helping Cohen’s outrageous plot hang together. Because we belief in his performance, feel his pain and confusion and utterly buy into Nicholas’ complexities and contradictions, the more out there aspects of the plot make perfect sense.

He’s given a good run for his money by the always watchable Richard Lynch in a brief but memorable – and very atypical – appearance as the hermaphroditic Phillips , always seen radiating an eerie glow. Lynch effortlessly conveys Phillips’ sexual ambiguity and otherworldly weirdness, making him one of the most unusual and unforgettable of screen villains. His whimpering cries as Nicholas strikes him, Phillips feeling pain for the first time, is genuinely arresting, this seemingly all-powerful alien hybrid suddenly transformed into a startled and helpless child.

Deborah Raffin and Sandy Dennis get less to do than perhaps we’d like but their “normality” and the complications of their relationships with Nicholas go a long way to rooting the plot in the real world and Sylvia Sidney turns up for an affecting cameo as the mother of the hybrids, a tormented woman waiting for death in an old people’s home, her entire life blighted by that fateful encounter that she’s never been able to comprehend. And famously of course there’s a small role for future comedy legend Andy Kaufman, here making his first screen appearance as a crazed cop who goes berserk during New York’s St Patrick’s Day parade, another victim of Phillips’ mind control.

Lynch’s reveal of a female sexual organ in his side and Phillips’ desire to mate with Nicholas (“I can have your babies”) tentatively ties God Told Me To to Cohen’s killer baby trilogy (It’s Alive (1974), It Lives Again (1978), It’s Alive III: Island of the Alive (1986)) It’s also a shot that was removed from several prints, particularly those that circulated in particularly religious parts of the USA where the very premise and title were likely to cause outrage. Executive producers Edgar Scherick and Daniel Blatt were allegedly so dismayed by the button-pressing film that Cohen delivered that they insisted their names be removed from the credits.

Cohen later claimed that that God Told Me To was inspired in equal parts by Erich von Däniken’s best-selling Chariots of the Gods? (1968), Superman (an alien with extraordinary powers walking among mere humans would almost inevitably be treated as a messiah) and by his belief that “there is no character – fictional or real – in the whole of literature as violent as God” ¹. It’s no surprise that the film was greeted with anger in some quarters – distributors New World Pictures inexplicably chose to open the film in Texas, a more religious state than say California or New York, a decision that baffled Cohen.

As a consequence, God Told Me To performed relatively poorly at the box office (a re-issue misleadingly titled Demon fared little better) but over the years has developed into a cult favourite, recognised as one of Cohen’s finest achievements. You’ll need to take a few leaps of faith (oh, the irony!) to prevent the story falling apart but stick with it, but wholeheartedly into its bold and unique worldview and you have one of the most unusual and thought provoking B-movies of the 1970s, one that will leave you pondering its many implications for a long time afterwards. In 2010, Gaspar Noé expressed an interest in remaking the film but a decade on nothing has ever come of it.

---

1. Larry Cohen: The Stuff of Gods and Monsters by Michael Doyle ↩