Thoughts on God Told Me To

    On Criterion, I watched Larry Cohen's 1976 crime thriller God Told Me To, produced by Roger Corman's New World Pictures. The film depicts the grittiness and lawlessness of 1970s New York City, as random acts of violence terrorize the city: a sniper perches above a water tower and fires at random pedestrians; a man murders his wife and children (thankfully, the scene isn't depicted and only described after the events), and a police officer (played by a then-unknown Andy Kaufman) fires on other cops during the St. Patrick's Day Parade. What all these shootings have in common is that the last words of the killers before their deaths (either by suicide or by police) is the cryptic, "God told me to."

    Detective Peter Nicholas (Tony Lo Bianco, who just passed away this past June at age 87) is a devout Catholic and Bronx native, and is investigating the shootings, and is taken aback by all the killers having the same motive and saying the same expression, and as he digs deeper into the pattern and finds the supernatural connection that the killers have, it gets to be more along the lines of science fiction, which is an interesting twist from just seeming like a police procedural about serial mass shootings.

    This was a really interesting movie to watch, and it made me think of later 1990s crime thrillers like Se7en and Fallen, both which would follow serial murders between seemingly unconnected people, the former being a serial killer following the seven deadly sins and the latter being about the devil possessing people to commit murder. Lo Bianco was great at playing the old-school Catholic New Yorker who is wrestling with faith when investigating the murders. The great Sylvia Sidney has a fantastic cameo late in the film, with her big movie star eyes of her 1930s ingenue days and rough smoker's voice of her senior years, she was excellent to watch.

    I saw Larry Cohen in person a couple of years before his death in 2019, it was at a screening in 2017 at the Quad Cinema in New York City of his 1984 film Perfect Strangers, where Cohen sat at the back of the theater, and when the film broke twice while screening, and Cohen would crack jokes, going "Intermission time!" in his rough scratchy New Yorker accent of decades past. He was a lot of fun to listen to when he told stories about the making of the film, with his salt of the earth sense of humor. I am happy I got to see him in person and see him speak about it, he was truly a legend of both cult films and the Hollywood 1970s scene.