God Told Me To (1976, Larry Cohen) (Patreon)

49/100

Are you there God? It's me, Michael. I keep trying to enjoy these beloved cult movies that all of my friends adore, but they just don't seem that great to me. The beloved cult movies, I mean. My friends are okay. Except for the ones who can't stop tweeting about basketball. Anyway, the other night I watched a movie that was supposedly about various random people committing murders with no apparent motive, on orders from you! You told them to, supposedly. Which at first I was sure that couldn't be right but then I remembered that you said to Abraham "Kill me a son" and even specified which highway Abe should do this killing out on. I didn't know they had highways back then. For the horses I guess. Please help me God, I don't believe in you but I'm already 130 words deep into this cutesy shtick and I'm not sure how to get out. People expect me to write something halfway intelligent or incisive about that movie I mentioned and the problem is that basically I just thought it was kind of dumb. Which would be fine if it demonstrated any self-awareness about being kind of dumb, as The Stuff does. That's another movie by the same director. But of course you know that. My point is that this movie takes itself very seriously, but I can't take it very seriously, because it's about [SPOILERS FOR THE NON-OMNISCIENT] a deeply religious cop who discovers that the killings he's been investigating were engineered by a human-alien hybrid being that wants to rule the world (I think) and then further discovers that he, the deeply religious cop, is also a human-alien hybrid with mind-control powers of which he had been previously unaware. Doesn't that sound like a movie that should be fun? This movie is not fun. It's pitched at roughly the same tone as, like, Chinatown, had Polanski directed an Ed Wood script merely polished by Robert Towne, on a tenth of the budget. And if the lead actor were regularly outshone by the supporting cast. I admire this movie's bugfuck boldness in theory, God, but it's just not very well executed. You know who else thinks that, though, among people I hang out with? Nobody, that's who. So now I'm gonna look like a clueless killjoy. If you could arrange for everyone to not make fun of me about this mixed review, I'd be grateful. Thanks. 

Okay, I don't think I can pull off a second pseudo-Blume paragraph. (That was born of genuine desperation regarding how to tackle this thing.) What's truly fascinating—though also, from my perspective, ultimately self-destructive, given Cohen's final destination—is the conventional dramatic potency of every single scene involving Nicholas with his girlfriend and/or his ex-wife. Deborah Raffin and Sandy Dennis give performances that would fit snugly in an Ashby or Mazursky picture from that era, betraying no awareness that their characters' domestic strife is situated within a batshit-insane context. As I describe that, it sounds immensely appealing, so there’s no big mystery re: why God Told Me To has so many fans. If all you require is ambitious + unique, this film delivers. Coherence matters to me, however, so the rampant silliness that ensues once Nicholas digs into his own past (starting with Sylvia Sidney's appearance—she, unlike Raffin and Dennis, does seem to have been briefed on where the movie's headed) just renders irrelevant much of the sober, gritty work that precedes it. Undermines that work, at the very least. Having watched only three of Cohen's films (and remembering precious little about The Private Files of J. Edgar Hoover, which I saw almost 30 years ago), I'm not in a position to speak confidently about what constitutes his forte, but The Stuff's garish satire, and Michael Moriarty's equally broad turn in that film, suggests a sensibility that perhaps should have leaned further into outrageousness throughout God (which would also have potentially given Andy Kaufman a role that couldn't have been played by anyone with a pulse). Instead, I got "What if Eddie Coyle's friends turned out to be homicidal glowing hippie extraterrestrials?" Which, again, I concede does sound on some level like a movie you'd absolutely want to watch. I'm not at all sorry that I finally caught up with this one. I just feel sheepish and lame about concurring with Ebert's assessment of it (in a brutally short review) as "the most confused feature-length film I've ever seen." Pick a movie, Larry. God.