EDITOR’S NOTE: This movie first appeared on the site on March 20, 2018. Thanks to the incredible Blue Underground 4K Ultra HD release — which has two sets of commentary (Larry Cohen; Steve Mitchell and Troy Howarth), interviws with Tony Lo Bianco and Steve Neill; two interviews with Cohen (one at the New Beverly; another at the Lincoln Center); trailers an TV sports —  I’ve updated this article and thought a lot more about this film which obsesses me. You can get it from MVD.

According to Larry Cohen, God is one of the most violent characters in literature. Take that insight, toss in some Chariots of the Gods, a little police procedural and a gradually involving drama that ends up taking over the life of the hero and you have God Told Me To.

New York City in the 1970s. It’s a horrible place to be. And now, with a gunman atop a water tower shooting into a crowd below, it’s a deadly place. 15 pedestrians are already dead before Detective Peter Nicholas (Tony Lo Bianco, The French Connection, TV’s Law & Order) climbs the tower to speak with him. Tony’s skilled at getting crazy people to back down and his technique is to communicate with them. He tells the killer everything — his age, what he’s doing, even the fact that he’s a devout Catholic — in the hopes that he can stop his rampage. Then, the killer looks Tony in the eye and says, “God told me to,” before he leaps to his death.

Attack after attack follows, all seemingly unconnected except for those words: “God told me to.”

There’s a stabbing in a supermarket. A cop (Andy Kaufman!) shooting into the St. Patrick’s Day crowd (there were no permits for this scene, which blows my mind. Also, while Cohen was organizing the crew to set up the shot, Kaufman antagonized the crowd by making faces, leading to people jumping the barricades to fight him, requiring Cohen to get in between the actor/comedian/force of nature and angry New Yorkers). And a man who kills his wife and children because God has always asked people to sacrifice their children since Abraham. This sends Tony over the edge and he attacks the man.

One of the killers says that his orders came from Bernard Phillips. Tony visits the address but is attacked by Phillips’ knife-wielding mother. She falls down the stairs as Tony dodges her attack and before she dies, she tells him that she was a virgin who was taken by aliens and given a pregnancy without taking her virginity, much like the conception of Jesus.

When Tony brings this information to his superiors, they tell him to put a lid on it. There’s no need for more religious panic. He leaks the story to the press anyway with the expected results.

That’s when Tony meets Bernard Phillips’ cult, who he contacts and controls with his psychic powers. He tells them when each murder will happen and now wants Tony to join them. Instead, Tony asks about Phillips’ mother, which causes a follower to drop dead. Another tries to kill him by pushing him in front of a subway train, but Tony defeats him and uses the man to come to Phillips’ underground lair. That follower — upset that he has come so close to his god — decapitates himself.

Upon meeting the glowing, ethereal and hermaphroditic Phillips, Tony realizes that the self-styled god cannot and will not kill him. Therefore, Tony realizes that he is special and has a purpose. Tony’s girlfriend and wife (look, it was the 70’s) come together to try and save him, but numerous revelations come out — Tony’s estranged wife had numerous pregnancies that her husband seemed to will into stillbirth, afraid of what his children would become.

Tony finds his adoption records, finally meeting his birth mother, who gave up her child — another divine birth — after being impregnated by an orb of light at the 1941 Worlds Fair. The footage accompanying this scene is digital manipulated stock footage from Space:1999! This meeting nearly gives both a nervous breakdown and ruins Tony’s sense of self.

Tony decides to meet his brother/sister one more time and learns the truth: they are alien messiahs, children of an entity of light. Tony’s human side is dominant while Phillips is more like the alien that gave them life. Phillips reveals his true sex — a mixture of sex organs on his side and asks his brother to impregnate him so that they can create new life. Tony refuses and attacks his sibling, who retaliates by bringing the building down on both of them.

Only Tony survives and he is arrested for the murder of Phillips. As the police lead him away, a reporter asks him why he committed the crime. He answers simply, “God told me to.”

God Told Me To did not do well upon original release, but time has proven to be quite kind. Watching it forty plus years later, I was amazed by how prescient it is, with killers opening fire for no reason, with the schism between sexes being seen as divine and by a public and leaders who are ill-equipped to deal with a true crisis of faith in their midst. It’s a brutal little film and a real triumph in the way that it starts as a simple police story and unravels not just the plot but the way the main character perceives himself. Even his multiple times a day shows of Catholic worship cannot protect him from the knowledge that he very well could be the Messiah — but not in the way that anyone expected.

Look, I’ve said it before and God knows I’ll say it again, but if you leave home, never come back. If your mother dies telling you there’s a curse; if your father paints pictures of a dark stranger and a bloody moon and leaves you messages saying to never come back; if you need to fix a will; no matter what, never go home again.

Director and writer Mickey Keating has made Psychopaths, Pod, Carnage Park, Darling, Ritual and Ultra Violence over the past years and now, he’s back with Offseason, which has Marie Aldrich (Jocelin Donahue, always and forever House of the Devil) going back to the coastal town of her birth, a place where her mother Ava Aldrich (Melora Walters) has just passed away in and begged to not be buried within. Now that the tourist island has called her back — her mother’s grave was desecrated — she must get in and get out before the small village shuts down and refuses outsiders until the season returns.

Look, when Richard Brake controls the entrance and exit to your hometown, get out. Get out and never come back. Then again, seeing the relationship that Marie has with George (Joe Swanberg), she doesn’t have much on the outside either. But this is a place where the locals stop talking the moment you walk in, where everyone is an outsider if they’ve left the place behind and where menace hangs in the air. It’s a wonder people aren’t devoured at the grocery store.

You may ask, if you’re as obsessed by Messiah of Evil as I am — check out our commentary track — is this Point Dume? The streets look the same, the fog feels the same, but this all had to have had a catering budget equal to that classic’s entire overall cost, right? Regardless, this has some potent visuals and looming Lovecraftian menace, even if it doesn’t really get anywhere by the end. You’ll see the close coming and be fine with it — this is technically a gorgeous film — but wonder how this could have surprised you more.

You can watch this on Shudder.

Betriek and her family live at the end of a peat bog — a near-swamp — in the north Netherlands, a quiet place broken up by an attack by a random stranger one dark night. Why? The answer to this will obsess her and take her to places darker than she may ever want to go.

After all, an ancient body has already been found in the bog and the non-stop digging of an archeological team is pushing Betriek’s sanity to the edge. But now the bog itself has begun to whisper, those sounds making the diggers lose their minds and attack people. 

Nico van den Brink’s short Sweet Tooth is currently being developed into a full-length feature by James Wan and Sam Raimi; this is his first full-length movie. This folk horror film starts with the murder of Betriek’s grandfather — his blood drips through the floorboards all over her — and somehow gets even darker as time passes. The bog is filled with dead bodies; her mother is dying from some unknown illness and her father waits, drunk, in the basement for the return of the man who killed his father. 

It takes its time to get where it needs to go, but once it gets there, the horror is palpable. The director and writer wants to open the Netherlands to more horror movies; here’s hoping he gets his way.

Moloch is now streaming on Shudder.

Emma (Susanna East, Permissive, Captain Kronos: Vampire Hunter) has been in an accident in London — we’re already two for two on the list of José Ramón Larraz’s favorite things in put in movies — and must be confined to the home of her Sylvia (Perla Cristal). As she recovers, her brain has changed, leaving her prone to moments of extreme rage, propelled by the thought that everyone is against her, like the maid who keeps putting frogs under her pillow.

Made shortly before Symptoms, this feels like a trial run for that movie.

Emma (Susanna East) had been living in the psychiatric hospital in the care of Dr. Donovan (George Rigaud), but Sylvia’s guilt — she’s the one who hit her — is why she moves in, which worries Steve (Ángel Menéndez), as he isn’t too excited about having a mentally deranged young girl who already survived getting hit by his wife’s car. So he plans a trip to Bermuda to get away, but Emma kills him first and Sylvia does everything but outright thank her, even getting rid of the body.

Emma soon kills the woman and makes her way to an abandoned hotel in the woods — Larraz trademark! — and when two hippie hitchhikers with bad intentions with the names of Cleo and Woody (Marina Ferri and Andrew Grant) show up, as does Emma’s friend Lupe (Hélène Françoise). Things don’t go well for anyone who gets in the way of our young lady with a razor.

Conceived while Larraz made La muerte incierta and based on a story by Carlo Reali, who was the editor of Larraz’s Deviation, this was made in England as Larraz was still afraid to make his movies in the still Fascist Spain, although parts of this were made in Barcelona.

Director of Photography Antonio Millán and camera crew Juan Prous and Ricardo González — Millán and Prous were vets of working with Jess Franco — make sure that this looks gorgeous, even though it makes no sense and doesn’t need to explain itself. Yet who cares? Larraz wasn’t interested in making anything other than these absolute movies that you need to figure out for yourself.

Also: we have entered the post-Manson era when nearly all hippies in horror are deranged maniacs out to do harm. Act accordingly.

EDITOR’S NOTE: This was originally on the site on January 14, 2022 and has been updated for this post.

José Ramón Larraz went to school for philosophy, became a comic book writer and then made some wild movies, like Whirlpool, which Roger Ebert negatively reviewed — I mean, I love it — by saying that it was ga enuinely sickening film. It has to do with various varieties of sex, yes, but its main appeal seems to be its violence… The violence is not, however, the cathartic sort to be found in The Wild Bunch or the comic strip spaghetti Westerns. It’s a particularly grisly sort of violence, photographed for its own sake and deliberately relishing in its ugliness. It made me awfully uneasy.” He also directed the Spanish Western Watch Out Gringo! Sabata Will Return, The House That Vanished (which had so many titles, including Scream…And Die! and Please! Don’t Go in the Bedroom, as well as a campaign that made it look like Last House on the Left), Symptoms, Stigma, Black Candles (AKA Sex Rites of the Devil) and three American co-productions before the end of his career, the underrated Edge of the Axe, Rest in Pieces and Deadly Manor.

The film starts with its leads, Fran (Marianne Morris) and Miriam (Anulka Dziubinska, billed here as Anulka; a former Page 3 girl who was the Playboy Playmate of the Month for May 1973, she was once married to Soupy Sales’ son Tony, who was in Tin Machine with David Bowie, Reeves Gabriels and his brother Hunt Sales) in bed together, which was probably quite shocking in 1974, but perhaps even more shocking is when they’re machine gunned before the credits.

They’re brought back as vampires that roam the British countryside and take in wayward male motorists, draining them of more than blood before disposing of these conquests. They have a different form of vampirism than you may have seen before, making grisly arm wounds that they continually feed from, closer to cannibals than bloodsuckers.

Morris and Anulka make quite the pair; the film is in love with everything they do. Beyond the gorgeous leads, the scenery is just as inviting, as this was not around Oakley Court, which Hammer used for The Man in Black, The Lady Craved Excitement, The Brides of Dracula, The Reptile and The Plague of the Zombies. William Castle shot The Old Dark House there and you’ll also see it in films like Mumsy, Nanny, Sonny, and Girly; And Now the Screaming Starts! and perhaps most famously, it was the home of Dr. Frank N. Furter in The Rocky Horror Picture Show. While it had no heat or running water when that movie was filmed, it’s now a luxury hotel.

This played double features with The Devil’s Rain! in England, which is my kind of night.

You can watch this on Tubi.

EDITOR’S NOTE: Here’s another take on this film but for this week of José Ramón Larraz, I wanted to  cover each of his movies myself.

Also known as Scream… and Die!, Please! Don’t Go in the Bedroom and Psycho Sex Fiend, this José Ramón Larraz movie has some amazing taglines like “Are You Planning an Affair? We Can Give You 7 Good Reasons Not to Have Your Next Affair at The House That Vanished And They’re All DEAD!! 1. George 2. Marsha 3. Ted 4. Linda 5. Ronnie 6. Alice 7. Larry” and “Is it too soon to talk about ’72…that time Paul and Valerie fell in love at first sight and began searching for a place to have an affair — and they kept searching until they found…The House That Vanished.” I mean, they did tell us that it was “In the Great HITCHCOCK Tradition!”

Picked up by American-International Pictures in the U.S., trimmed by 15 minutes and given a really similar campaign – actually, it’s the exact same — as The Last House On the Left, this find Larraz playing with his favorite toys: fashionable women in danger, pervy photographers, houses in the London countryside, sexual menace and murder. He kept going back to this well for a bit before throwing Satanism into the stew and, if anything, increasing the sheer levels of filth in his movies. And we were all the better for it.

Valerie Jennings (Andrea Allan) is one of those gorgeous women continually threatened by nearly every frame of this movie, starting when she and her photographer boyfriend Terry (Alex Leppard) travel to a shuttrered hovel of a home deep in the London woods, a place that’s empty save for a room filled with womens’ passports. As they hide in a closet when a new couple arrives, they don’t get to enjoy watching them make love; instead the male dispatches the female with a switchblade. She runs and Terry does too but she never finds him, narrowly escaping to the safety of the big city.

She does find Terry’s car and a modeling portfolio with the images of one girl missing. She asks her friends Mike (Lawrence Keane) and Stella (Annabella Wood) what to do next, but they tell her that she and Terry have committed a crime and need to not tell the police. Meanwhile, Mike introduces her to Paul (Karl Lanchbury, a Larraz villain in numerous entries), a mask maker who invites her to dinner with his aunt Susanna (Maggie Walker). If you’ve seen enough Larraz movies by now, you know that aunt and nephew are soon to engage in the act of darkness.

Life starts falling apart, as Terry’s car keeps disappearing and reappearing; Valerie’s roommate Lorna (Judy Matheson) — who also sleeps nude with her pet monkey — is assaulted and killed, an old man with pigeons moves in downstairs and when she heads out of town to meet with Paul again, she realizes that his house is the same abandoned house she’s been in before thanks to the strange taxidermy inside. Seriously, if you go on a date and someone has a lot of taxidermy, please run.

There, she finds the bodies of those missing and Paul’s aunt appears and demands that he kill Valerie. He responds by stabbing her as our heroine runs outside screaming, directly into the police, while Paul just sits in the void.

Writer Derek Ford also wrote The Legend of Spider Forest, Secret Rites, Corruption (which is not a women’s picture) and Don’t Open Till Christmas as well as directing I Am a Groupie, Blood Tracks, The Urge to Kill and The Girl from Starship Venus.

Larraz comes from Spain to England to make movies that seem like they’re from Italy that have their origins in Germany and England. If that doesn’t make you look movies, then I have no hope for you.

EDITOR’S NOTE: This movie was originally on the site on September 25, 2021 as part of FantasticFest. It’s now playing on Shudder.

17 year old me discovered Gwar and life finally made sense. What other band outright claimed that they were going to murder you when you saw them in concert? Coming from space, destroying the ozone layer, that had game shows on stage that gave the people what they want — “the senseless slaughter of the gutter-slime that litters this nation for cash and prizes” — and could somehow turn lyrics like “you know I snuffed a million planets, but I still find time to cry” into a tender ballad?

Gwar went on Joan Rivers and made fun of everything thrown at them. And in a world that didn’t make much sense, they made sense. It was a badge of honor to see them in concert. Sure, the band has changed — I haven’t kept up honestly since Oderus went on to the next world because it just doesn’t feel the same — but I’m glad they’re still out there.

Director Scott Barber has put together the interviews and stories that form the real story of Gwar and by and large, it’s intriguing stuff, punctuated by stories by celebrity fans like Weird Al, Thomas Lennon, Bam Margera, Alex Winter and Ethan Embry.

As an art collective with a 35-year history, there’s plenty to learn here about how some art school punks went from playing small shows to becoming an industry. Of course, personalities clashed, egos grew and the band may not have lived up to what some members wanted it to be. By the end of the first sixty minutes, the doc starts to grind a bit, as various members feel the urge to tell you exactly how much they contributed even if they weren’t onstage. I understand, as this may be their one opportunity to do so.

A major oversight — in my eyes — is that no mention at all was given to new singer Vulvatron, played by Kim Dylla, who was in the band from 2014 to 2016, leaving under not the best of terms. Perhaps by the end of the film, everyone was tired of the constant drama that was getting dredged up. But for a band with previously only two female members, this felt like a glaring omission.

Even if Gwar’s music isn’t for you, you can hopefully appreciate their sense of humor and the fact that they took their art beyond expectations. They still do.

Loosely inspired by the murder of Travis Alexander by his on-and-off-again lover, Jodi Arias, Love Crime takes place as Jodi is interrogated and remebers her relationship with the dead man through her own point of view. So if you love true crime, well…

This plays fast and loose with reality, as we see what happened and what Jodi thinks happened. You may be put off with the ethics of making a movie within a few years of an actual murder, but if you grew up in the 70s, you know the world of made for TV movies and exploitation films that explore what was in the headlines. We didn’t have true cime TV just yet.

Director Nicole D’Angelo stars as Jodi with producer Shane Ryan-Reid as Travis. It was written by Jamie Grefe, who has also written two modern Emmanuelle movies. I was also excited to see Lisa London (Rocky from the Andy Sidars’ movies Savage Beach and Guns) in the cast.

This Cinema Epoch distributed movie can be watched on Tubi, Vimeo and Amazon.

David Baldwin (Harry Aspinwall, who also co-wrote this movie) may have the blood the world needs to solve the unknown disease that has wiped out most of its population over the last two years. Yet when he begins to fear for his wife Samantha’s (Anita Abdinezhad) safety, he breaks quarantine and attempts to save her.

To do so, he destroys the multiple egg timers that keep his days regimented and begins to explore the area around his quarantine cabin. That’s when he encounters the plague-ridden zombies that have taken over the world as well as a mysterious archer who saves his life.

A plague movie may not be what you’re into these days — or hopefully you are — but Eradication is well made despite its low budget. I’d dare say it’s one of the best Tubi originals that have come out so far.

Director Daniel Byers is the director of the environmental film studio Skyship Films, as well as the horror/fantasy genre production company Dark Tower Films which made this movie.

You can watch this on Tubi.

EDITOR’S NOTE: This originally was on the site on May 10, 2022, but as this is a week of José Ramón Larraz’s movies, it’s back with some minor edits.

José Ramón Larraz may be best known for Symptoms, Vampyres, The House That Vanished, The Coming of Sin, Black Candles, Rest In Pieces, Edge of the Axeand Deadly Manor, but he also made this giallo.

Clive Dawson (Antonio Molino Rojo) returns to India with his new bride Brenda (Mary Maude, who also is in The House That Screamed and Terror) which upsets his old lover Shaheen (Rosalba Neri, Lady Frankenstein, Amuck, The Devil’s Wedding Night, The Girl in Room 2A, 99 Women) to the point that she kills herself, but not before placing a curse on the new marriage. This being the 70s — not the 30s as the flashbacks claim — incest rears its head as Brenda and Clive’s son Rupert soon find themselves realizing that they’re young, Clive is old and that he thinks he’s being chased by his ghost ex in the form of a tiger, so they should just have rough sex.

“I’ve satisfied all your desires. You’ve taken advantage of me,” says Shaheen, but the real mystery of this movie is why would any man leave Rosalba Neri. Outside of perhaps only Edwige Fenech, no one in this genre — maybe this world in 1973 — offers such a smoldering presence that is as much frightening in its intensity as it is arousing.