Review of God Told Me To (1976) by Chris S — 17 Feb 2010

This bizarro mix of police procedural, religious fantasy and alien abduction is really more a film to admire than one that you can actually enjoy. The inital premise of random shootings being carried out by seemingly strait-laced people, who offer up 'God told me to' as their rationale, quickly segues into a rambling plot that covers Catholic guilt, religious conspiracy, corrupt police and a hermaphrodite Christ-like figure. While some individual scenes are very well played (the chaotic shooting at the St Patrick's Day parade, Slyvia Sidney's cameo appearance as the confused alien abductee and indeed the whole sequence around her retirement home with its blaise staff) the film as a whole truggles to maintain any real coherence. Writer/Director Larry Cohen is now almost the forgotten man of 1970's horror cinema (moving from the semi-mainstream after Q -the Winged Serpent in 1982 to eke out a living on the hinterlands of cinema, with only a story credit on Phone Booth and the odd episode of Masters of Horror to prove that he hasn't retired completely), but at the time of this production he was riding high on the success of It's Alive - a horror film as equally high concept as this one. It's therefore fanciful to imagine that this is the film he was allowed to make as a reward for the success of his previous film. Certainly the scenes of Tony LoBianco, Sandy Dennis and Deborah Raffin discussing Catholic guilt would bear this theory out. But the scattershot approach to the plot betrays Cohen's roots in exploitation cinema. All that being said though, Cohen does pull off a very creepy final shot through the technique of having a character simply look right into the camera and repeat the film's title.

Not the greatest film by any stretch of the imagination, but an interesting one nonetheless.