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There was talk some months ago when
PHONE BOOTH was released
to theatres about how much of that film’s success could be credited to the
original screenplay by veteran filmmaker Larry Cohen. As someone who
didn’t find the movie in the slightest bit suspenseful or interesting, and
who has no qualms heaping the blame for that squarely on the shoulders of
director Joel Schumacher and The Committee to Rewrite Larry Cohen, I now
divert your attention to 3 new DVDs from Blue Underground that capture the
brilliance and spontaneity of this underrated maverick writer-director:
BONE, GOD TOLD ME TO, and Q, THE WINGED
SERPENT, three of Cohen’s most effective and best-loved features.
BONE, Cohen’s directorial debut, seems less of an anomaly
when you consider his theater and live TV background before the film was
made rather than the trajectory of his career afterwards. Basically a
3-act play with 4 principal characters, about an angry Black man (Yaphet
Kotto) who forces his way into the ritzy home of a bickering white middle-aged
Beverly Hills couple (Andrew Duggan and Joyce Van Patten), BONE
should’ve gone to all the parties TWO-LANE BLACKTOP and
THE HIRED HAND were invited to -- should’ve had the chance to
hobnob with DUSTY AND SWEETS MCGEE and CISCO PIKE
-- could’ve played inner city double bills with SWEET SWEETBACK’S
BAADASSSSS SONG -- and at least gotten a mention in “Easy Riders,
Raging Bulls.” Only in the early ‘70s could a film like this get made, get
released and re-released under 2 or 3 different titles and erroneously
plugged as everything from sexploitation to blaxploitation, and still get
buried in the end. Well acted, sharply written and directed. Fresh, yet
still clearly a product of its time -- the opening, set in a junkyard
littered with almost as many corpses as cars, seems like a National
Lampoon piece from the early days of Beard, Kenney and O’Donoghue, while
the frantic widow who tells of her husband’s x-ray death at the hands of
every dentist in California could be a Robert Klane outtake, like the
drooling, half-human football player who tears off an opponent’s head and
runs it in for a touchdown (a “Where’s
Poppa?” courtroom testimony that never made it to the
screenplay). Add a dash of “The Occurrence at Owl Creek Bridge”
for a denouement and you’ll think maybe Cohen had the right idea trying to
shoot this in 16mm black-and-white.
Cohen’s most ambitious and compelling work, GOD TOLD ME TO
starts with a bang, literally, and never lets up. Original leading man
Robert Forster was miscast -- I can’t picture him chewing gum in church,
no sirree bob -- and thankfully replaced by the more ethnic Tony Lo Bianco,
who turns in an A+ performance as Detective Lieutenant Peter Nicholas,
NYPD. A churchgoing Catholic married to one woman (Sandy Dennis) but
living in sin with another (Deborah Raffin), Nicholas begins to question
his beliefs and his very existence while investigating a bizarre rash of
killings perpetrated by normal citizens who claim “God told me to” when
questioned about their motives. You can draw a line from GOD TOLD ME
TO directly to one M. Night Shyamalan movie (UNBREAKABLE),
possibly a second (SIGNS), and – stylistically speaking –
everything dramatic that’s on TV right now from NYPD BLUE to
24. And give Cohen extra credit for not only cooking up a
juicy cameo for Richard Lynch’s fire-scarred midsection, but also for
giving a break to an almost bigger risk-taking trickster than himself --
Andy Kaufman, seen here wearing a police uniform and a mile-wide smile
just before the guns start blazing. A friend of mine who caught this
irresistible low-budgeter at the drive-ins of rural Pennsylvania several
times during the ‘70s, both under its original title as well as the
sobriquet DEMON, swears it was met with open hostility from
the audience more than once. “The good, God-fearing country folk didn’t
know what the heck they were seeing,” he told me, “but they knew they
didn’t like it.”
Q is Cohen’s valentine to the “giant monster in the big
city” sub-genre, but it owes as much to Damon Runyon and Ed McBain as it does to
Harryhausen and Danforth. Shifty-eyed con Jimmy Quinn, portrayed by an
Oscar-worthy Michael Moriarty, is small-time when compared to the crooks
he does jewelry store stick-ups with, and positively miniscule next to the
“plumed serpent” he discovers nesting at the top of the Chrysler Building.
Quinn has his own egg to hatch -- a plan to withhold the whereabouts of
the nest in order to blackmail the City of New York for a big payday.
Meanwhile, the screeching winged serpent (an ancient Aztec god brought
back to life by cultists who flay their victims during human sacrifices,
you see) continues to decapitate construction workers, window washers, and
topless sunbathers all over the Big Apple. Kwai Chang Caine and John Shaft
are the detectives trying to piece it all together. Carradine, in fact,
turns in one of the strongest performances of his career, especially when
he’s riffing with Moriarty and unafraid to let the other steal the scenes
-- music, in other words, but not the scat Quinn tortures the barflies
with earlier in the movie. More like a Motown duet, with Carradine
handling the smooth side like Marvin Gaye and laying the groundwork just
before that Tammi Terrell buzzsaw starts up and drowns out everything
else. Now, picture Bruce Willis in the Carradine role, Eddie Murphy in the
Moriarty role, and the year is still 1982. [Pause] Right. Neither can I. |
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