[REVIEW-CAST #7] GOD TOLD ME TO (1976)

[NOTE: This is the seventh in a series of reviews that will focus on genres related to the Krimi and Giallo; for more info, read this post. As with all posts on this site, SPOILERS SHOULD BE EXPECTED.]

[GENRES]: Horror / Exploitation [>conspiracy / alien abduction / apocalyptic messiah / crisis of faith]
[VERSION WATCHED]: Blue Underground Blu-ray


The best horror movies—regardless of genre, subgenre, budget, country of origin, whatever—manage to lay bare, to access and tap a vein of the taboo, the forbidden, the inarticulable; a vein that can be mined (indeed has to be, during the running time of the film, if the film warrants being taken at all seriously) by the viewer. This, in the best of them.

(In the worst of them this sense of the inappropriate, of being in poor taste, manages to be nothing but lowest-common-denominator button-pushing that cynical filmmakers have included simply in the hopes of making money or buzz.)
 
You see it—this oneiric sense of the inaccessible being accessed, no matter how horrifying that access ends up being—in Val Lewton’s "B" pictures, in their creeping existential dread and inconsolable loneliness—fates that are assigned to human beings pretty much no matter what. You see it in Hitchcock’s most challenging, taboo-busting works—PSYCHO, VERTIGO, FRENZY, etc., all of which argue, in their own ways, that the driving obsessions of their characters are also, in varying strengths, our own driving obsessions—obsessions that threaten, if given their head, to destroy those they control. (It’s no accident that the French title for De Palma’s Hitchcock-driven masterpiece DRESSED TO KILL is PULSIONS, i.e., urges, drives, obsessions.) You see it in the best slashers, the best supernatural horrors, the best Gialli, the best Gothic nightmares.

Larry Cohen’s GOD TOLD ME TO, as rough around the edges as it tends to be—as persistently low-budget and "B"—exists in this class, managing to invoke and exploit a number of taboo, hard-to-talk-about subjects: 

1. The opening assassination scene, in which a man on a water tower randomly kills strangers on the sidewalk with his rifle, no doubt taps into the political and moral uncertainty of the times, but it also seems prescient about the kinds of mass violence that would continue to plague the US for decades to come (you can’t help but think of the coverage and panic surrounding the DC sniper while you watch.)
    
2. There’s the way that the film forces the viewer to grapple with concepts tied to child-bearing, parenting, the ever-developing sense of sex and gender: Like the physical reality of a virgin birth; the physical, emotional, mental consequences of children born in a state of "intersex"; the idea that a husband might willfully cause multiple miscarriages just to keep his wife from having a child, because of some irrational fear for what would result ...
    
3. And all of it being crushed under the weight of a modern malaise, an existential aimlessness that threatens to smother a person’s day-to-day life, his or her own sense of self; that sagging, dissolving sense of any greater purpose to life

All of these themes are wrapped up in the main character, played by Tony Lo Bianco. His movement through the film acts as a catalyst and central site for the film’s anxieties and fears, its hopes and "hard sayings". Bianco’s character "sneaks off to Mass every morning" while he also secretly fears that the portion of his life invested in religion has been nothing but a waste, a hollowing, emptying belief that has brought him nothing but non-answers, "no" answers—less and less belief that their *can* be an answer.

As each, next assassin uses "God told me to" to explain why they're randomly killing New Yorkers, Bianco's years of blank belief seem even less believable, less and less redemptive. He is also shaken because it seems these "mad" people have more access to the deity than his decades of going to Mass have afforded him. (When one of these killers attacks him, he wonders the streets of New York till he finds a lit-up cross, which he proceeds to kneel before on the sidewalk, palpably desperate in his search for some answer or sign.)

Likewise with the scene between him and his "lost" mother—his rough, impatient interrogation of her about why she abandoned him as a child, and her nightmarish explanation: She was abducted and impregnated by gods or aliens and no one, in the socially buttoned-up times, would take her story seriously.

All of it lends a rawness, an exposed-wound quality, both to Bianco’s performance and the violence carried out in the movie. You get it in the flashback. You get it in the aforementioned scene between Bianco and his mother. You get it in the scene between Bianco’s current lover and his previous wife.

(These sequences always reminds me of the conversation Cooper and the other cops have in TWIN PEAKS, after they learn the identity of Laura’s killer. One cop says something to the effect of, "How can I believe that [the killer] was possessed by a demonic spirit named BOB?" Cooper answers: "Is it any more horrible or unbelievable than a father repeatedly raping and then murdering his own daughter?")

The film also succeeds in a number of unexpected ways—the casting of a young Andy Kaufman being both the best and most creepy. As we get what seems like documentary footage of an empty-faced (sometimes smiling) Kaufman dressed in his police blues for the NYC St. Patrick’s Day Parade—as the suspense builds, the viewer waiting for him to open fire, for no rational reason, on the crowd—you can’t help but simultaneously think of his sometimes off-putting performance art pieces, living out a version of his life that made no sense to those around him (the most unnerving presentation I've seen of this comes in the Kaufman doc I'M FROM HOLLYWOOD).

Additionally, Cohen manages an awful lot of style on his minimal budget—I’m thinking of the hallway knife attack on Bianco that sees him thrown backwards down the stairs, flailing, out of control (think the killing of Arbogast in PSYCHO or Dalia in FOUR FLIES ON GREY VELVET). Or the visual look of Ricard Lynch’s character, on the one hand scampering in and out of frame, on the other emitting so much light other characters can’t look directly into his face. Or the alien abduction flashback and its use of a "vaginal' totem that returns in Lynch’s gut. All-in-all, in the top-tier of "B-movie" experimentation. And a film that never, ever makes me feel reassured once I'm done watching it.
 

Leonard Jacobs

May, 2015