Soul One

If you live in or near Chicago, check out the new play Soul One, premiering Thursday, March 31.  It’s written by and features Travis Hughes, a great Chicago-based writer and it promises to be a cool night out.  Click here for more info.

Am I the Only Sane One Here?

And Sucker Punch bombs.

Counting Sucker Punch, Zack Snyder’s last three movies failed to make back their budgets at the U.S. box office.  While Watchmen and Legend of the Guardians: The Owls of Ga’Hoole did add decent worldwide totals to their U.S. box office takes, when you factor in prints and advertising and the cut of the box office given to theaters, they failed to turn a profit.  I smell the same outcome for Sucker Punch.

I didn’t see Sucker Punch, but I knew from the first trailer that I would hate it.  I’m sick of CGI run amok without a story to back it up and justify spending insane amounts of money.  The estimated cost of Sucker Punch was $82 million.  In reality, the budget was probably well over $100 million.  The fact that it’s well on its way to being a financial bust ought to give Warner Bros. and Christopher Nolan pause as they prepare to hand over the Superman franchise to Snyder.

But they won’t balk.  They have convinced themselves that Snyder is a visionary director who will propel the franchise into The Dark Knight territory, both creatively and financially.  Snyder very well may turn out a profitable Superman film.  Much like Michael Bay, he has a great eye and is capable of putting together slick action sequences.  But also like Michael Bay, he’s shown a disregard for story or characters and a complete inability to get good work out of his actors.

I don’t have anything against Snyder.  I actually enjoyed Legend of the Guardians and gave him grudging respect for how his remake of Dawn of the Dead turned out.  But as a fan of movies and an observer of a studio system that’s gone insane, green-lighting one bloated action flick after another, it frustrates me to see him throwing away money on crap.  The budget of Sucker Punch could have funded several of last year’s best movies (Winter’s Bone, Rabbit Hole, Monsters, Greenberg, 127 Hours, The Social Network) and given the studio more bang for their buck.  Not to mention, the kind of marketing push that those films (aside from The Social Network) could get from being studio projects that they were unable to get from their indie distributors.

Maybe I’m an idealist, but I believe quality films done on a reasonable budget can be a more profitable formula for the studios than taking a loss on one big-budget, excessive CGI flop after another, while searching for that one blockbuster that turns into a home run.  Sure that one home run brings in a lot of money through not only box office returns, but also ancillary (merchandising, DVDs, cable sales) markets, but the losses that are taken on the seven or eight megaflops balance out those gains.  It seems to me that the more conservative business plan is also the more creatively rewarding one.  Why isn’t this more apparent to the studio heads?

The Cohen Case Files: Black Caesar (1973)

Written, Produced, and Directed by Larry Cohen

Larry Cohen’s first excursion into the blaxploitation genre (unlike many people, I don’t consider 1972s Bone to be a blaxploitation film), Black Caesar is a solid morality tale with gangster film trappings.  If not for the profanity, nudity, and graphic violence on display, it could be a Warner Bros. gangster film from the ‘30s in the way it quickly charts the brutal rise and eventual fall of a criminal kingpin.  But Cohen’s gutsy choice to avoid making Tommy Gibbs (Fred Williamson)–the antihero who serves as the titular character–likable helps set it apart from the films that inspired it and gave it more grit than many of the blaxploitation films that rapidly crowded theaters in the early ‘70s.

The film starts in the mid ‘50s as a teenaged Tommy (Omer Jeffrey) first falls into the world of organized crime.  Hustling money by shining shoes, he accepts payment to keep a gangster from making a getaway as a rival mobster kills the gangster.  Brought into the business by the hitman he assisted, young Tommy has his first run in with McKinney (Art Lund), a crooked New York City cop, when the officer accuses him of stealing money from the payoff he was supposed to deliver.  McKinney slings a torrent of racial slurs at young Tommy as he beats him mercilessly, eventually breaking his leg.

The story then jumps ahead ten years.  Tommy (now played by Williamson) has just been released from prison (presumably there on a trumped up charge from his encounter with McKinney, but it’s never made clear) and returned to the city.  Hobbled by his leg which failed to heal properly, he is a man eager to put the criminal education he received in prison to use.  He immediately jumps on an open mob contract and–in an impressively acted scene by Williamson–performs his first murder.  Using this act to get in the good graces of Cardoza (Val Avery), the local Sicilian crime lord, Tommy immediately starts putting together his own criminal empire on the streets of Harlem.

With Joe (Philip Roye), a childhood friend who used his intellect to become a lawyer while Tommy was in prison and Rufus (D’Urville Martin), another childhood friend who is now a sham minister, Tommy runs a number of different scams to gain power and money.  But when he snags ledgers that show payments from the various mob families to cops and politicians, he steps on too many toes and finds himself facing a bloody gang war that inevitably brings him up against his old nemesis McKinney.

To say that Black Caesar is a familiar story would be an understatement.  We’ve seen this type of rise and fall of a gangster film many times but Williamson really helps the film to stand out.  Despite the childhood demons of poverty and racism that drive him, Tommy Gibbs is not a misunderstood antihero that just needs the love of a good woman to turn his life of crime into something positive.  As written, he’s a mean bastard, capable of killing friends to increase profits.  Even though he’s a charismatic performer, Williamson never tries to make Tommy likable.  He plays the character the way he was written, using his imposing physical presence to great effect as he threatens, rapes, and kills his way through the film.

While this choice to follow an unpleasant protagonist yields interesting results, it also makes the film surprisingly hard to watch in several places: Tommy is verbally and physically abusive to his wife Helen (Gloria Hendry), and, in a particularly disturbing scene, he rapes her after she expresses disgust with his way of life; In one of the few positive things Tommy tries to do in the film, he buys the condo where his mother is a maid and gives it to her, only to have her refuse it because he’s grown up to be everything she prayed he wouldn’t; Tommy’s unexpected reunion with his long-absent father (Julius Harris) is fraught with tension as Tommy slowly makes it clear that he plans to kill him.  Williamson keeps the film watchable during these scenes (aside from the distressingly intimate rape sequence–I can’t stress how much that scene bothered me), and they do add some character details to Tommy, but that doesn’t make them any less difficult to take in.

The fact that these scenes stick out in my mind makes me feel that Cohen was more interested in crafting a character study and that his heart wasn’t in many of the requisite action scenes.  These sequences are fine, for the most part–an assault on a Mafia compound is particularly impressive–but they pale in comparison to the numerous character moments.  Only in a stunning climactic scene featuring Tommy’s final confrontation with McKinney did the film successfully meld its elements of dark character study with violent action.

With a strong story, Williamson’s great performance, and perfect use of several James Brown songs on the soundtrack, Black Caesar was an instant hit that spawned Hell Up in Harlem, a hastily made sequel that was released later that year.  Unlike many other blaxploitation films that came out at the same time, Black Caesar has stood the test of time.  I think this is due to the fact that Cohen took the story seriously, actually exploring the casual racism and unfair class restrictions that drove Tommy to be such a monster.

Fun Fact: Cohen’s first choice to play Tommy was Sammy Davis Jr.  I have a hunch that I wouldn’t be writing about the film in such glowing terms if that had come to fruition.

James Dixon Sighting: As an assassin working for McKinney.  He was also listed as an associate producer in the credits.  This is the first time I noticed that.

Criminally Ignored: The Last Winter (2007)

It’s a very risky project when a filmmaker tries to make a genre film that wears a political message on its sleeve.  But that’s exactly what co-writer/producer/director Larry Fessenden did with The Last Winter.  Unlike other films that have attempted to merge an ecological message with horror elements (I’m looking at you The Happening), Fessenden did a smart thing and focused on making a good horror movie with interesting characters.  He then sprinkled in timely arguments against drilling in Alaska’s Wildlife Refuge for oil by suggesting that Mother Nature will only be pushed so far before she reacts violently and slaps the shit out of the human race for its shortsighted arrogance.  If you find yourself on the other side of this argument, it’s doubtful that anything Fessenden presents in the film will change your mind.  But, if you’re like me, you believe that it’s only a matter of time before we use up the available fossil fuels and find ourselves sinking into anarchy because we didn’t properly perfect alternate, renewable forms of energy.  If that’s the way you think, The Last Winter is a frightening film.

A stellar cast is headed up by Ron Perlman as Ed Pollack, the head of an exploratory group working for an oil company that has been given rights to drill for oil in the frozen Alaskan Wildlife Refuge.  The group’s job is to determine if an ice road can safely be built into the area without harming the environment.  Pollack couldn’t care less if the environment is harmed.  He strictly views his job through the prism of achieving one goal: get the oil out of the ground as quickly as possible.

Doing his best to slow Pollack down and consider all the options is James Hoffman (James LeGros), an environmentalist hired by the oil company to appease the people protesting against their drilling in the Refuge.  Hoffman finds troublingly high temperatures for wintertime in the Arctic.  The temperatures are so high, he sees no way that an ice road can be constructed without doing serious damage to the environment and refuses to sign off on the project, no matter how much Pollack pressures him.

Caught in the middle of the power struggle between these two strong-willed men are: Abby (Connie Britton), Pollack’s right-hand woman, who just happens to be his ex-girlfriend–oh yeah, she’s now sleeping with Hoffman; Maxwell (Zack Gilford), the unstable greenhorn who is the son of Pollack’s best friend; Motor (Kevin Corrigan), the pot-smoking mechanic who just wants to be left alone; Elliot (Jamie Harrold), Hoffman’s less than levelheaded assistant; and Lee (Pato Hoffman) and Dawn (Joanne Shenandoah), two Native-American members of the group serving, respectively, as guide and cook.

When bizarre things (beyond February rainfall north of the Arctic Circle) begin to plague the camp, tensions between Pollack and Hoffman come to a boil.  Are the noises that sound like a herd of cattle stampeding through the darkness of the night sky only in Hoffman’s head or are they real?  The fact that Maxwell hears the same noises points to their reality, but Maxwell isn’t the sanest member of the crew.  So how to explain things?  Is it just the stress of being in one of the remotest places in the world causing shared hallucinations that slowly overtake the members of the crew?  Is sour gas–methane gas released by the thawing permafrost–leading to the erratic behavior?  Or is the planet striking back at the human race for infringing on its last, unspoiled patch of land?  Fessenden refuses to offer up a pat explanation to these questions.  This ambiguity only escalates the tension, making the film an almost unbearable exercise in suspense.

Despite being set in one of the most wide-open parts of the world, The Last Winter is a masterpiece of claustrophobic horror.  Fessenden employs the same brilliant technique that John Carpenter used for The Thing of contrasting the flat, white expanse of the outdoors with the cramped quarters that the crew share.  When your only shelter from a harsh environment is a series of rickety buildings filled with people you can’t stand, the world suddenly seems a very small place.  Fessenden further accentuates this uncomfortable situation by giving every character enough unspoken baggage to keep their motivations from ever being fully revealed.  This leads to plenty of shifting alliances among the supporting characters and keeps Hoffman from being a straight-up good guy and Pollack from devolving into a pure villain.

Of course, the acting helps color in the shades of grey that the script only hints at.  LeGros gives Hoffman a nervous, shifty-eyed energy that offsets his frustration about the fact the people don’t seem to care when he shouts warnings of environmental doom.  While Fessenden certainly sides with Hoffman’s view of the situation, Le Gros doesn’t make him an easy hero to root for just because he comes across as so damn twitchy.  Perlman adds enough forceful authority to the blustering Pollack to make the audience look to him as a possible savior for the crew when things go from bad to worse as bodies start dropping.  But perhaps the best performance in the film comes from Britton as the inscrutable Abby.  It’s never clear if she’s sleeping with Hoffman out of convenience, to spite Pollack, or to steer the environmentalist in the direction of getting in line with the company.  She spends so much of the film playing both of the men that she could have quickly become a villain, but instead emerges as the only levelheaded member of the crew due to Britton’s quiet authority.

More than anything else, The Last Winter is a great horror film.  Using remote locations in Iceland to double for Alaska, Fessenden and cinematographer G. Magni Ágústsson are able to create a threatening environment by just framing the characters as insignificant shapes against the overwhelming landscape.  At the same time, the truly creepy score by Jeff Grace and various audio effects layer over each other to lend an apocalyptic feel to the film that is hard to describe as anything other than unnerving.  Each time I watch the film, by the time the trippy climax and resolution play out, I feel like I just witnessed the beginning of the end of the human race.  That’s a hell of an achievement for a low-budget horror flick to pull off.

I’m at a loss to explain why The Last Winter has not gathered more of a following.  Fessenden is a well-liked independent horror guru (he has also directed the terrific films Habit and Wendigo, in addition to producing and acting in several no-budget experimental horror projects), the cast is uniformly great, and the technical aspects of the film are topnotch.  So why was it dumped in a few theaters at the same time that it was offered on-demand?  Is it the fact that the film takes a strong stand against oil drilling in such an environmentally sensitive area?  I know that general audiences have grown weary of political statements in movies, but Fessenden skillfully weaves his arguments into the dialogue and actions that move the horror plot forward.  Yes, it’s a message movie, but Fessenden never lets the message get in the way of the story.

The Last Winter is a film that any classic horror fan should love.  It may take its time building tension, but once all hell breaks loose, it really becomes one of the more powerful films of the last five years.

Shaking Off The Rust

I started work on my first new screenplay in over a year today.  I was afraid that I’d have trouble getting started, but it turns out it’s just like riding a bike.

If you’re riding that bike into the teeth of a 50 mph wind.

Uphill.

In a driving snowstorm.

Still, it felt good to start getting characters who have been in my head for the last couple of years on to the page and I spent most of the evening grinding it out.

Unfortunately, this means that I largely ignored my promise to have my piece on The Last Winter posted on Friday.  I’ll get it posted at some point this weekend.

If I don’t get distracted by the weird script brewing in my head.

Criminally Ignored

On Friday, I’ll be introducing Criminally Ignored, a new column dedicated to great films that either received no theatrical or barely there theatrical releases.  While this sounds like a wide net I’m casting, the idea is to narrow things down by focusing on movies that no one saw and have failed to become cult favorites on home video.  For example, as much as I enjoy the movie Idiocracy, it’s found an appreciative audience on DVD.  Instead, the first film I’ll cover will be Larry Fessenden’s brilliant eco-horror flick The Last Winter, a film that was ignored in its brief theatrical run and has somehow failed to find an audience despite its topical subject matter and great execution.

The Cohen Case Files: Special Effects (1984)

Written and Directed by Larry Cohen

I first saw Special Effects in the early ‘90s when I was still discovering my affection for Larry Cohen’s films. At the time, I had only seen the “big” Cohen films (It’s Alive, Q). I found the film to be interesting, but something felt off about the tone that made me uncomfortable. There was a sleazy feel to the film that kept it from being truly enjoyable. I was interested to return to the film to see if age and a better familiarity with Cohen’s style would make me feel differently.

The short answer is yes, but in different ways than I expected. Read on for the long answer.

A truly twisted and bizarre satire of the film industry, the film follows naïve Oklahoma country boy Keefe (Brad Rijn, a Cohen regular in the ’80s) as he travels to New York City to retrieve his wayward wife, Mary Jean (Zoë Tamerlis). Much to his moral disgust, he finds her posing nude for pornographers and using the false name of Andrea Wilcox. Determined to convince her to return to Oklahoma, he shows her home movies of their son, but Mary Jean wants nothing to do with any scenario that finds her returning to her old life, no matter how depressing her current life may be. She quickly lies that she’s been contacted by hotshot director Christopher Neville (Eric Bogosian) to take a part in his next film. Keefe doesn’t care and Mary Jean runs away, determined to contact Neville and make her lie a reality.

But Neville is down on his luck–a bad boy known for his love of special effects and soft-core sex scenes, he has gone over budget too many times. His last film bombed and he was just fired from his latest production. Drowning in self-pity, he takes Mary Jean into his bed, letting her think she’ll have a part in his new film. But when she realizes that he’s secretly filming her in bed, she unleashes a string of angry insults about his faltering career that enrage him to such a point that he strangles her to death while his camera catches all the action.

Initially panicked, Neville pulls himself together long enough to clean and abandon the body at Coney Island. When the police find her, they immediately zero in on the spurned and hotheaded Keefe as the prime suspect. With a boatload of circumstantial evidence pointing him toward a guilty verdict, things look bad for poor, dumb Keefe.

But then Neville intervenes, hiring Keefe a high-priced attorney who is immediately able to get him released on bond. Why would Neville do this? Perverse movie psycho that he is, Neville wants to make a movie about Mary Jean’s tragic life and he wants Keefe to play himself. Of course Keefe wants nothing to do with the film, but Neville has him under his thumb, threatening to pull the lawyer and his bond, sending him back to jail.

In a show of almost superhuman efficiency, this labored plot setup is accomplished in less than thirty minutes of running time. Even more impressive than the sheer volume of exposition that Cohen throws at the audience in the first act is the level of characterization he gives to Keefe and Neville in the opening scenes. We know Neville’s creepy right from the start because he enjoys parsing over the details of Lee Harvey Oswald’s face when Jack Ruby shoots him. But he is also sort of pitiable with his easily bruised ego and hint of self-loathing as he stoops to sleeping with the trashy Mary Jean. Even after the murder, he’s still relatable as a human being through his initially freaked out reaction. Interestingly, Keefe is just as off-putting as Neville, if not more disturbing. He comes across like a stalker and a religious zealot in his early scenes before settling into a brooding, potentially violent thug for the rest of the movie. His eventual emergence as the hero of the film is less about any positive qualities he may have and more about the fact that compared to Neville’s arrogant murderer, he’s a saint.

Helped along by a typically sardonic Bogosian performance, the cat-and-mouse game that Neville and Keefe engage in is the most entertaining part of the film. Cohen seems to recognize this and capitalizes on that dynamic until the twist in the second act that finds Keefe discovering a look alike for Mary Jean named Elaine (also Tamerlis). Neville immediately casts Elaine as Mary Jean, forcing Keefe to the breaking point by making him recreate scenes from his decidedly unhappy married life.

Unfortunately, Elaine is a very wishy-washy character. She proceeds to kinda-sorta fall in love with Keefe (even though she thinks he’s guilty), she kinda-sorta flirts with Neville (even though she thinks he’s a jerk), and she fully commits herself to playing the part (even though she doesn’t want to be an actress). I suppose Cohen felt that giving Elaine such contradictions would make her a more fully formed character in less screen time–after all, her character is introduced nearly halfway through the film. Maybe in the hands of a better actress, these character turns would have made more sense, but Tamerlis (famous in certain circles for her amazing performance in Abel Ferrara’s disturbing revenge flick, Ms. 45) just isn’t very good this time around. While she’s more comfortable as brassy New Yorker Elaine, she completely misses the mark as Mary Jean, playing these early scenes like the world’s funniest Cat on a Hot Tin Roof spoof.

But even if Tamerlis’s performance hadn’t been a drag on the film, just the shifting of focus to Elaine’s point of view for the duration of the film kills most of the momentum that had been gained. As the film moves into the third act, Cohen asks us to not only care about Keefe as Neville subtly moves the pieces in place to frame him for Mary Jean’s murder, but also to care about Elaine and her chances for survival as the final fifteen minutes of the film begin to mirror the opening.

While the thriller aspects of the film may falter down the home stretch, Cohen still mines the material for plenty of amusing moments that satirize the lack of empathy or decency in many exploitation films. Not only is Neville cashing in on a murder he committed, people who were only tangentially related to Mary Jean try to turn her murder to their advantage: A young woman angles for the part of Mary Jean by claiming to be her best friend, the police detective (Kevin O’Connor) investigating the murder gloms on to the production as a technical advisor, a technician at the lab where Neville has his film processed tries to blackmail the director when he discovers his guilt. It’s a cynical world that Cohen paints and the film is improved by this dark view.

Surprisingly, considering Cohen’s usually reliable eye for casting, the other major problem (outside of the miscalculated third act) with the film comes as a result of the cast. Bogosian is fine in one of his earliest film roles, playing the same cynical character we’ve seen him do many times in the two and a half decades since. But Tamerlis has her already discussed problems and Rijn is lackluster in what could have been a great antihero role. Keefe is supposed to be as disturbing as Neville, but Rijn’s attempts at playing the slow-burn intensity of a man barely containing his rage fall flat, leaving a huge vacuum in the charisma department when he and Tamerlis are alone on screen.

What is also somewhat surprising is the improved technical aspects of the film over a normal Larry Cohen production. The editing is consistently sharp and the cinematography more fluid than expected. This leads the film to look a little more cinematic than Cohen’s usual vérité approach. Oddly enough, this actually detracts from the power of the film’s central idea of giving the audience a peek behind the egos and bullshit of a feature film production. The film needs that documentary look that Cohen normally uses so well to ground his outlandish ideas in reality. Adding the polished look of a studio film only serves to shield the audience from the ugliest behind-the-scenes aspects of film production, inadvertently forcing Cohen to pull some of his punches.

I mentioned that on my first viewing, Special Effects felt sleazy and uncomfortable. I didn’t get that queasy feeling this time around. Maybe it’s the fact that I’m more familiar with Cohen’s satirical intentions, but the idea that he was trying to make a movie cashing in on a movie (Star 80) that had cashed in on the real-life murder of model/actress Dorothy Stratten, adds a certain warped honor to his intentions. Where Stratten’s real life lover not only wrote a book about her murder but also married her younger sister, Cohen sought to skewer a film industry that attracts, exploits, and spits out naïve young women. In that comparison, Cohen’s film definitely holds the moral high ground.

Despite the ambitious attempts to be both a thriller and a film industry satire, Special Effects falls firmly in the middle of the pack when it comes to Cohen’s films. It’s worth a look for Cohen completists and fans of pointed satire, but it may come off as a tad too ridiculous for the general viewer.

More Posts Coming/Manics

Well, it barely took me a week to break my promise of updating several times a week. I’ll have a new Cohen Case File posted tomorrow and I’ll be introducing a new column later in the week. In the meantime, here’s The Manic Street Preachers with Ian McCulloch (Echo!), just for the hell of it. Enjoy.

The Cohen Case Files: Full Moon High (1981)

Written, Produced, and Directed by Larry Cohen

For how much he has dabbled in various genres (horror, science fiction, blaxploitation, mystery, thriller), Cohen has largely steered clear of straight forward comedies.  There is plenty of tongue-in-cheek humor in films like The Stuff, Q, and his script for Maniac Cop, but for the most part, he only used humor in those films to skewer social or political mores.  But if you’re looking for out and out comedies in his filmography, you’re only given two real choices: Full Moon High and Wicked Stepmother.  While I will save my look at the latter for a time when I’ve had a few stiff drinks to sit through it, I thought I’d take a look at the former, just because I was intrigued by the cast and the premise.  I’m glad I did.

Tony (Adam Arkin) is the star quarterback at the titular high school.  He’s kind of a dim bulb, but he’s likable and, with his skills, the school has the chance to finally score a touchdown in the big game against Simpson High, their hated rivals.  He’s lusted after by Jane (Roz Kelly), an oversexed coed who is being pursued by his friend, Flynn (Bill Kirchenbauer).  His father (Ed McMahon!) is a military officer obsessed with the evils of communism (the film starts during the Eisenhower administration) who has built a bomb shelter in the basement of their home.

When Tony’s father is sent by the CIA to Romania on a secret mission, he decides that it’s not so secret that he can’t take Tony.  But once they get to their destination, dear old dad is too busy frolicking with prostitutes to pay any attention to his son.  One night, while trying to make his way to the Museum of Mental Illness, Tony is attacked by a werewolf.  Not surprisingly, Tony finds himself changing into a werewolf at the most inopportune of times.

Frustrated by the rash of nippings (he never kills and eats his victims–”I’m a nosher,” he explains at one point) that begin to plague his hometown upon his return (sample newspaper headline: WEREWOLF ANNOYS COMMUNITY), Tony takes the sudden accidental death of his father as an excuse to move away.  This drives Flynn crazy because without Tony, they have no shot of scoring a touchdown against Simpson.  It drives Jane mad because she’s in complete love/lust with Tony and she goes to such lengths to keep him from leaving as hanging on to his bus as it leaves town.

After twenty years of roaming the world, nipping people at every full moon, he returns to Full Moon High with the intent of scoring a touchdown in the big game, thereby fulfilling his destiny.

Full Moon High is a stupid movie.  But it knows it’s a stupid movie and revels in the fact, pulling out glorious puns, smutty double entendres worthy of a Connery-era James Bond film, cheap sight gags, the willingness to break the fourth wall, and gay panic jokes at a pace that’s so breathless you’d swear it was a Zucker-Abrahams film.

The film came out in the wake of the surprisingly successful Airplane.  Thirty years on, it’s easy to overlook the impact of that silly comedy, but it truly was a game-changer.  Full Moon High was arguably the first film to incorporate Airplane’s anarchic, silly sense of humor into its own spoof of a sub-genre staple.  But instead of sticking to skewering the rote clichés of the werewolf film, Cohen strikes off on any number of tangents that incorporate elements of sex comedies, sports films, and the teenage crime spree sub-genre.  It quickly becomes apparent that if a sequence had the potential to draw some laughs, Cohen left it in, whether it fit the film or not.  How else to explain the bizarre subplot involving Elizabeth Hartman as a meek high school teacher who is deathly afraid (with good reason) of her own students?

This loose, anything goes tone is both the film’s greatest asset and its biggest drawback.  While the jokes fly fast and furious, hitting at an impressively high hit-to-miss ratio, the loose feel extended to the technical aspects of the film.  While Cohen’s lower-budget films have always had something of a threadbare feel to them, he’s always made up for that by putting together good casts and drawing on a pool of solid technicians.  Here, the editing is sometimes sloppy, the special effects are charmingly cheap in some scenes and horribly fake in others, the sound design is dodgy, and some of the supporting actors are far too over-the-top.

But while it’s easy to find fault with the way the film was put together, it’s hard to deny just how funny it often is.  Even scenes and characters that shouldn’t work are given life by talented comedic actors.  Arkin shows a nimble way with some of the better one-liners in the script while remaining a sympathetic protagonist worth caring about.  Kenneth Mars, a Mel Brooks favorite, shows up as the gay football coach/high school principal.  His mincing, lisping performance is honestly funny beyond how completely offensive it is.  Likewise, a psychiatrist who “cures” his patients by insulting them could have been obnoxious.  But place that character in the hands of an actor as talented as Alan Arkin, and you’ve got pure comedic gold.

What is odd, considering this is a Cohen film, is the lack of any subversive subtext.  Aside from the occasional dig at the American public school system, the film largely avoids any of the philosophical questions raised in the best Cohen films.

Surprisingly, Full Moon High isn’t available on DVD or Blu-ray in the United States.  Until recently, if you didn’t own an all region DVD player to watch the Australian DVD release, you had to settle for VHS copies that are still floating around or getting lucky enough to catch it on cable.  Fortunately, Netflix has begun streaming it on their site in probably the best home presentation the film will ever get in America.

Full Moon High isn’t a great film and I doubt I’ll ever feel the need to watch it again, but it is an entertaining ninety minutes.  In this age when genre spoofs consist of such dreadful fare as the Scary Movie franchise, it’s a pleasure to look back to the infancy of movie spoofs and soak up just how loopy the films used to be.

NOTE: As a bonus, keep a look out for a young Bob Saget in a small role and Cohen regular, James Dixon as a Barney Fife-esque deputy.

The Cohen Case Files: God Told Me To [aka Demon] (1976)

Written, Produced, and Directed by Larry Cohen

I’m going to spend a lot of time on this blog writing about the films of writer/producer/director Larry Cohen.  Unfairly brushed aside by mainstream critics and many film historians as merely a cheesy B-movie director, his output has been admittedly uneven, but the highs far outnumber the lows and he tackles controversial subject matter in a fearless manner that most filmmakers have to secretly admire.

God Told Me To definitely doesn’t shy away from controversy.

Peter Nicholas (Tony Lo Bianco) is a detective with the New York City Police department.  He’s a devout Catholic, tortured by his failed marriage to the barely sane Martha (Sandy Dennis) and his love affair with a younger woman, Casey (Deborah Raffin).  This religious guilt already weighs on him like a thousand-pound burden hanging around his neck before a string of random murders begin plaguing the city.

First, a young man climbs a rooftop water tower with a rifle and kills random pedestrians.  Next, a man stabs several people in a grocery store.  By the time a cop (Andy Kaufman!) in the St. Patrick’s Day parade kills five people, the city is in a panic.  But what the residents don’t know is what the police are hiding from them: After capture (or just before their deaths), the murderers all say the same thing: ‘God told me to.’

Peter knows this fact and it bothers him on a different level than his fellow police officers because of the depth of his religious faith.  Oddly ashamed of this fact, he sneaks away from Casey every morning to attend Mass and confess his sins.  His rigid belief in the Church is what keeps him from divorcing Martha, despite her insistence that he do so and let her go.  His faith leads him to not only be appalled by the claims of the murderers, but to actively fear them.  Why?  Because deep down, Peter knows there’s something to their claims.  He can’t explain how he knows, but it’s something more than a hunch that leads him to question how a man with an inferior rifle and a bad scope could hit a moving cyclist in the temple.  That’s strange enough, but why do the people stay after their crimes to be captured or killed by the police?  And how do they all know to offer up the same excuse?

The slightly hysterical view that Cohen takes toward Catholicism (and religion in general) is enough to anger the majority of people in America, so you can only imagine the can of worms he opens when he connects aliens to the story of Jesus Christ in the loopy second act.  By the time we meet Bernard (Richard Lynch), a mysterious young man who may be orchestrating the killings, it makes perfect sense that cinematographer Paul Glickman uses yellow gels and over-lighting to blow out the image, turning him into a walking ball of angelic light.  It’s far from subtle, but it’s a striking moment, especially when contrasted with the vérité style that Cohen employs for the rest of the film.

I wanted to kick off The Cohen Case Files with God Told Me To because it’s the perfect example of a great Larry Cohen film, while not as well known as something like It’s Alive.  It has the hand-held camera work (much of the film was shot on the streets of New York without permits, including placing actors in actual parades and street festivals) that gives it the previously mentioned vérité look that is used in the majority of the films he directed.  Combined with his sometimes frantic cutting, this style could make his films look threadbare and amateurish.  In the hands of a director with a less adept touch with actors, this might be the case.  But in the best of his films, Cohen not only casts well, he draws consistently great performances from his actors.

This brings me to the cast of God Told Me To.  The film has scene after scene of old pro character actors nailing their small performances.  Actors like Lynch, Dennis, Sam Levene, Sylvia Sidney, John Heffernan, Mason Adams (you haven’t lived until you’ve heard the actor known as the Smucker’s voice-over man describe the birth of a hermaphrodite), and Cohen regular James Dixon all lend depth and legitimacy to a story that threatens to fly off the rails at any second.

And of course, there’s Tony Lo Bianco.

As you’ll know, if you’ve seen even a few Larry Cohen films, he writes great, nuanced male leads and then he gets an intense, uncomfortably intimate performance out of a great character actor in that lead role, as opposed to a star.  Lo Bianco falls perfectly into that description.  Sporting a constant grimace that projects a man haunted by a terrible truth that he doesn’t understand, Lo Bianco plays Peter as a man who is slowly unravelling.  His descent from upstanding police officer to a shattered martyr allows him to employ a slow-burn approach to the character that matches Cohen’s handling of the story and the consistent ramping up of tension.  If Lo Bianco wasn’t so gritty and realistic as Peter, the ridiculous plot twists could have been pure cheese.

The fact that he’s so good in the role is actually surprising.  It’s not that Lo Bianco isn’t a good actor.  You need look no further than his work in The Honeymoon Killers to see that the man has boatloads of talent.  What makes his work in God Told Me To so impressive is the fact that he wasn’t the first actor cast in the role.  Robert Forster was Cohen’s original choice and actually shot for a few days before being fired.  Lo Bianco came in without any preparation for the role and carried the film.

The other thing that makes God Told Me To such a perfect example of a Larry Cohen film is the presence of a heavy does of social commentary.  No matter the goofy subject matter, Cohen’s best films have an underlying message to them that is sometimes preachy, sometimes tongue-in-cheek, but always welcome, giving his genre exercises more depth than slicker, studio-produced material.  Here, he takes on the taboo subject of doing terrible things in the name of God–or in this case, in the name of a man who might be an alien who believes he’s God.  This makes the film relevant today, 35 years after its release.  There’s not much difference between the serenely murderous disciples in the film and a terrorist, supremely confident in the belief that killing innocent people is looked upon with favor by God.  For as controversial as the film was when it was initially released, it would probably be even more so today.

The film was distributed by Roger Corman’s New World Pictures, and while the teaming of the two legendary independent filmmakers sounds like a good idea, the film suffered.  Corman tried to cash in on the “satanic panic” craze of ‘70s genre cinema. He retitled the film Demon in some markets and issued posters that were very reminiscent of the posters for The Omen.  The problem with this attempt to piggyback off the success of The Omen is that film was a “good vs. evil” story that reaffirmed traditional Christian values through a literal presentation of an actual Antichrist.  God Told Me To is about questioning blind faith in religion.  While the film never comes down strictly on the side of doing away with religion, it does take harsh aim at blind faith with a tricky central question that asks, “What if there is a higher power in the universe and it’s not so benevolent?”  Between the controversial subject matter and the confusion caused by the film playing different parts of the country under two different titles, it was a commercial disappointment.

But the years have been kind to God Told Me To.  Audiences have found it on home video and it has gained a cult following that extends beyond Cohen’s fan base.  Some of the ideas and themes in the film found their way into The X-Files, twenty years later, so someone was paying attention.  It’s a great piece of storytelling that asks some very compelling questions at the same time that it entertains.  You can’t ask for much more than that from a movie.