Hollywood stuntman Jingo Johnson (Jesse Vint, Pigs) has come back home to see his mother before she dies. The family farm has been taken over by a mining company, his old girl Lucy (Karen Carlson, The Student Nurses) is dating one of the mining crew (Robert F. Lyons) and Sheriff Otis Grimes (Albert Salmi) has it in for him.
He learns from Nurse Beulah Barnes (Mary Charlotte Wilcox, Beast of the Yellow Night and, strangely, two seasons of SCTV) that the mining company also owns the hospital that his mother is in, amongst other farmers, and has been keeping them asleep with a concoction of narcotics. Even worse, the pills they gave her caused the disease that soon takes her life.
It turns out that the law is behind all of this — the title makes sense! — and they want Jingo to take the fall for several murders. Oh man, the 70s, a time when redneck — I say this in the kindest of ways as taught by Joe Bob — movies played with conspiracy film!
EDITOR’S NOTE: This was first on the site on July 17, 2018.
I’ve stayed away from talking about David Cronenberg movies on here because, well, better and smarter people have already done so. After all, there’s an entire zine devoted to discussing his works, House of Skin. And friend of the site Bill Van Ryn has already written an incredibly well-written appreciation of this one. But hey — I made it through the whole Joe Bob Briggs marathon and am trying to share my thoughts with you. So please indulge me. Thank you.
The film starts with Rose and her boyfriend Hart getting into an accident in the remote countryside. With no other option, they are sent to the Keloid Clinic for Plastic Surgery, with Hart suffering only a broken hand, a separated shoulder and a concussion. Rose, however, is barely alive, needing several operations and skin grafts from being burned. Dr. Dan Keloid decides to try something new: he uses “morphogenetically neutral grafts” to heal her damaged tissue, hoping that it will heal on its own. A month later, Hart is ready to go home, but she remains in a coma.
Sometime later — time isn’t really of the essence in this nightmare world — Rose awakens screaming. When Lloyd, another patient in the clinic, comes to help her, she somehow cuts him. He doesn’t remember how it happened, but his blood no longer clots and he can no longer feel pain. And Rose? Well, now she has a wound in her armpit that looks sexual — male and female at the same time. Shades of God Told Me To?
Now, Rose can only subsist on human blood, which she discovers after cow’s blood causes her to puke. A farmer watches and tries to rape her, but she is the predator now, soon devouring him and turning him into a zombie-like monster.
All hell soon breaks loose — Lloyd attacks a taxi driver after escaping from the clinic, killing them both. Dr. Keloid attacks everyone within his own clinic. Rose tries to get Hart to save her, but escapes on her own, infecting people all along the way.
Soon, Quebec is a nightmare city, with maniacs using jackhammers to tear people from cars, Santa Claus getting shot and a shoot to kill martial law policy being enacted on anyone showing signs of the virus.
Hart tries to reason with Rose — she is the cause of all of this and needs to be stopped. Of course, things can’t work out well. The world of Soylent Green has become near truth — there are so many dead people, garbage trucks are the only solution.
Cronenberg wanted to cast Sissy Spacek in the lead, but her accent didn’t work for the film’s producers. He heard from Ivan Reitman, the executive producer, that adult film star Marilyn Chambers was looking for a mainstream role. Her being in the film would help sell it and she put in plenty of work, so Cronenberg was happy with the results. In fact, he had never seen the movie that made her famous, Behind the Green Door.
Chambers was quite literally a pure Ivory Soap girl — appearing on a box of that cleaning product as a young mother with the tag “99 & 44/100% pure.” Her appearance in the Mitchell Brothers’ film — released at the height of post-Deep Throat porn chic, when adult films entered mainsteam consciousness — was a sensation. It didn’t hurt that she was also the first white woman in a major adult film to have a scene with a black man, Johnnie Keyes.
Chambers was in the midst of trying a singing career — her song “Benihana” can be heard in this film — and she was married to Chuck Traynor, ex-husband of Linda Lovelace. You could write a novel about the mania of that dude.
That said — for being a sex queen, Chambers comes off as cold in this film. That’s probably Cronenberg’s goal, to subvert notions. Even his heroes are no heroes. No one can stop what is set in motion and everyone is ineffectual. Such is the Cronenberg universe.
One thing I’ve always wondered — why did they spoil the ending of this film in the original poster?
If you want to see Rabid, you can grab the Shout! Factory reissue. Or turn in to Shudder, who has versions with and without commentary from Joe Bob Briggs.
Back on June 28, 2019, I wrote an article that still gets hits on this site called “Ten movies that were never even released on DVD.” Of those films, only a few haven’t been released, which makes me really happy.
Yet there are other movies — so many of them! — that in a world where it seems like everything is available just aren’t available. My hope is that this article will be seen by some of these labels and just maybe these movies will see the light of day in a format that costs so much that my wife will get mad when she sees the charges on PayPal.
Some rules: Yes, there may be a foreign release or a DVD, but I want a full release of the film packed with extras so that the world — well, the world of dudes obsessed with slip covers and the obscure — can enjoy some of the movies that I love. And if, let’s just say, one of those labels would like me to do a commentary track, I would not say no.
I also realize that most of these can be found streaming. Maybe you haven’t see the movie cave that I live in. I don’t want these digital. I live for physical media.
Let’s get into it:
1. Elves (1989): Yes, I know that there’s a foreign steelbook DVD. Yes, I know that the amazing Terror Vision released the soundtrack. Yes, I also know that this was on the previous list that I mentioned. But it remains one of my missions in life to get more people to love this movie. Every year during Black Friday sales, I wait and hope that this is the year when this Third Reich incest holiday movie is in my stocking. Let’s make it this year.
2. Trick or Treat (1986): How is the magical world of Sammi Curr not on blu ray? One assumes music rights, but this is a movie that has a cult audience within the cult genre audience. Again, I’m an evangelist for this movie, one that I feel does the best job of translating the 80s metal geek experience. Come on, video labels. Make this happen. No false metal.
EDIT: This is being released by Synapse.
3. The Thunder series (1983-1988): I get it. I’m probably the only person who cares about Mark Gregory this much. But in a universe where Severin has released Strike Commando, the idea that these three Fabrizio De Angelis-directed Rambo ripoffs don’t have an expensive box set with Kat Ellinger commentary kind of blows my mind. How can we make this set happen?
4. The Astrologer (1975): No, not Suicide Cult. I’m speaking of the auteur project by director, producer, psychic to the stars and actor Craig Denney and I’m really daring to dream here, because getting this released on blu ray is about as likely as us seeing The Day the Clown Cried in our lifetimes. Do I have to personally write the Moody Blues and ask them to forgive the fact their music was stolen? Do I have to go all Robert Stack and find out if Denney faked his death? I know AGFA has a print of this and man, other than that YouTube link a few years back and some secret showings, I figure that if you don’t know, you’ll never know. IYDKYNK as the kids would say.
5. The Spider Labyrinth(1988): When it seems like the well of Italian horror has run dry, we fill it back up with acqua or, more to the point of this article, more films. Like this one, a Gianfranco Giagni-directed spider-fearing conspiracy movie with hints of Argento and a spider child that must be seen to be believed.
EDIT: This is being released by Severin.
6. Felidae (1994): Speaking of Italy, how weird is it that one of the best post-70s giallo films was a cartoon made in Germany (where it does have a DVD release)? Wait — a cute cat movie that’s a giallo? Yes. With wild dream sequences, mysterious allies, a cult, graphic murders and even a sex scene, Felidae has everything that most giallo does. And unlike some films like Your Vice Is a Locked Room that only have one cat — the black badass known as Satan — nearly every character here has four legs and a tail.
EDIT: This is being released by Deaf Crocodile.
7. Cross of the Seven Jewels (1987): Man, this movie. Imagine if Satan was a werewolf who was challenged by a hero that also turns into lycanthrope when he loses his huge cross with seven jewels and then throw in the mob, a Satanic cult led by Gordon Mitchell, lots of Black Masses, orgies, whipping and a fortune teller named Madame Amnesia. How is this not in everyone’s collection?
8. Profumo (1987):Vinegar Syndrome keeps releasing these Forgotten Gialli sets and man, every time I hope that they have stuff like Obsession: A Taste for Fear, Mystere and this movie on them. I always thought The Devil’s Honey had the most ridiculous sex scenes in a quasi-giallo and then I saw this, a movie that has Russian roulette as foreplay.
9. Camorra (A Story of Streets, Women and Crime)(1985): Harvey Keitel in a Lina Wertmüller-directed giallo-adjacent film in which criminals are getting killed by a syringe to the unmentionables? And it’s a Cannon movie? How do we not have this?
Here’s an excerpt from a longer interview I did with the main man of all things Cannon, Austin Trunick.
B&S: I want more Cannon stuff to come out on blu ray and be reconsidered.
Austin: I want Vinegar Syndrome to release Camorra (A Story of Streets, Women and Crime). It hasn’t gotten any sort of official US release. It’s available in Europe, but here it’s near impossible to see. When I watched that, the copy I was working from for the book was a VHS rip onto a DVD with Greek subtitles that I ordered from like an English bootleg site. You couldn’t find it, right?
B&S: I watched it on a Russian bootleg site with someone screaming Russian dialogue over the actual movie. (laughs) That’s the only way to watch a movie.
Austin: It’s by Lina Wertmüller, a critically acclaimed director but she also wrote some great Italian genre movies. It has Harvey Keitel playing a drug smuggler. Angela Molina is in it and there’s a mysterious killer. It’s very giallo, but someone is stalking and murdering drug dealers and leaving as their calling card — a heroin syringe jammed in the crotch. And it’s a wild movie and it’s a Golan Globus production and has never been released in the U.S.
Vinegar Syndrome or even Fun City should be all over that movie.
There are so many that are kind of languishing right now and haven’t had any sort of release. I don’t know the rights situation for Godard’s King Learwhich is a movie that I like talking about it more than watching it. And you would think that somebody, if not Criterion, would have at least put out something. Maybe it had an MGM release in the U.S. on DVD but I even feel like that was like a region one bootleg or something in all regions from somewhere else.
Scorpion/Code Red has put out some stuff, though.
Can I pitch you on one of my ultimate releases?
If they’re not already working on it, one of these labels should be working on it. America 3000 is a weird, weird movie but it hasn’t had a release with its original soundtrack. Not even on VHS. Shout! Factory released it on a four-pack but it’s the wrong soundtrack. David Engelbach had actually gone and did an entirely different soundtrack, the voiceover was different, much less pronounced and the music cues were all different.
That’s what was in theaters, so there are theoretically film prints with the correct audio. But every version that’s been on streaming or DVD has the wrong music and dialogue on it.
10. Night Train to Terror (1987): I get it. There’s already been a great early Vinegar Syndrome release of this movie.
But if Austin can make his pitch, here’s mine.
My dream is that Vinegar Syndrome releases a box set of this movie with all of the complete films — Scream Your Head Off/Marilyn Alive Behind Bars, Gretta/Death Wish Club and Cataclysm/The Nightmare Never Endsalong with Phillip Yordan’s movie before this with the same team, Savage Journey, and the movie Yordan made after with much of the same crew, Cry Wilderness — because their first release is out of print.
I want people to be as obsessed with this movie as I am. Let me put this out into the universe.
I have so many other picks but now is when I ask: what do you want to see a big fancy blu ray release of?
This is a vansploitation movie. Yes, that’s really a genre and there are several films in it, of which I can name Blue Summer, The Van (obviously), Best Friends, C.B. Hustlers (which has Uschi Digard in it), Mag Wheels, Van Nuys Blvd. and I guess you could almost count On the Air Live with Captain Midnight. There’s a great article on it by Jason Coffman that goes deep into the genre that I totally recommend.
The beauty of this movie is that it posits a world where solar energy is already happening, van culture is the driving force in society and there is no AIDS to worry about, so all of the vans are a rocking and absolutely no one is knocking. It is surely paradise, if paradise only gets 11 miles to the gallon, fuel crisis be damned.
Our hero Clint Morgan has traveled to The Invitational Freak-Out, a major event for custom van enthusiasts, which means that any time we’re near it, we get to see plenty of b-roll footage of painted vans and all of the accouterments — this is not a word you want to use when selling Winnebagos — that they have inside.
Clint saves Karen (Katie Saylor, Invasion of the Bee Girls) from some bikers from another exploitation genre and they destroy his van The Sea Witch. That’s when he goes to the super genius van designer Bosley and together, they all make Supervan, which uses solar power and lasers. It was really made by George Barris — who designed so many other Hollywood cars — and was based on a stock Dodge Sportsman van. This thing was so big that it had a phone intercom system inside it.
Oh yeah. It turns out that Karen’s dad owns a car company that is out to make a van that uses more gas than ever before — what does it get 3 miles to the gallon? — and they have to take Supervan to the show to prevent him from making it happen, but he puts the cops on their tail.
We’ve seen Clint before on our site, as Mark Schneider is also in the Crown International Pictures movie Burnout, which is one of the few dragsterpolitation movies I can think of, so perhaps he is the perfect star for all things vehicular in nature.
Director Lamar Card is also there, in the nooks and crannies of strange movies that I find myself obsessed with, like producing the scumtastic Nashville Girl and directing the only Fabian-starring, Casey Kasem-coke sniffing disco freakout Disco Fever.
Beyond the near gynecological explorations of all of these vans at the absolute expense of story, this movie has a cameo by Charles Bukowski — the firebrand of a man who wrote “what matters most is how well you walk through the fire” — judging a wet t-shirt contest. I am in no way making that up.
There’s never really been a movie like Supervan. To be fair, I don’t think the world could have handled two. To quote the love ballad from the film, when I think of Supervan, “I’ll always remember you as a milestone in my life.”
Vansploitation got so insane during the ’70s, A&M Records gave away a Styx Van. Yes, Styx had a van you could enter to win!
Hospital researcher Mary (Shive Negar) is going through so much. She has a stressful job that haunts her, a separation from her drunken husband James (Johnathan Sousa) and her daughter Daphne (Bianca Sas) to bring up. She’s not doing well on any of those fronts, as she lost a patient a year ago, she’s debating a restraining order and her kid has to repeat fourth grade.
When new neighbor Eve (Kimberly-Sue Murray) offers to help, it seems like the perfect solution. This being a Tubi exclusive movie, viewers will instantly realize that all Eve wants is to take Daphne and start her own life, probably killing at least one of Mary’s friends.
Before you can say “Lifetime movie,” Eve has convinced Mary that James is throwing rocks through her window, that only she can properly watch her daughter and that best friend Natalie (Amber Goldfarb) isn’t all that great of a pal.
Of course, Eve is manipulating everything, even destroying Mary’s work so that she misses her daughter’s school presentation. Mary reacts by slowing down her life and making time for her daughter, which is a happy ending for everyone except Eve, whose help is no longer needed. She reacts as you imagine, by taking out Natalie and stealing Daphne.
Also, if you didn’t guess that the patient Mary lost was Eve’s daughter and that this is all one long and involved revenge scheme, you have not watched enough basic cable cinema. Please start your homework with any number of Tubi originals or Lifetime movies, then bask in the joy of a much more rich life.
How far reaching is her scheme? She drugged James on the night of his DUI, which broke up the marriage. She just didn’t figure on James and Mary coming back together as they search for their daughter.
Sure, the plot can be figured out in minutes, but movies like this are sheer junk food and I mean that as a compliment. This was directed by Pasha Patriki, who has mainly worked as a producer on movies like Lifechanger. It was written by Mallory Gibson and Courtney McAllister.
Remember: there really isn’t much difference between a cable potboiler and a giallo.
Has a movie ever been more cast for me? I mean, not just Carroll Baker but Susan Tyrell? Can the screen contain that much magic? Directed by Jed Johnson, who also edited Andy Warhol’s Dracula and designed the offices of his magazine Interview, it was written by Pat Hackett and George Abagnalo, and was the last film that Warhol would produce.
Hazel Aiken (Carroll Baker) lives in Brooklyn, where she does electralysis out of her home. But her real job is hiring out women like P.G. (Stefania Casini, who followed this movie with Suspiria and this fact makes me overjoyed) and R.C. (Cyrinda Foxe, who left David Johnansen for Steven Tyler and was the mother of his daughter Mia) to perform dirty deeds for those who need them. Always women, until drifter L.T. (Perry King, coming off Mandingo) comes into her home and throws everything into a mess.
With $1.5 million to spend — the most of any Warhol film — this pretty much ended up being a non-John Waters John Waters movie. The cast is a mix of up and coming actors like King, non-actors from Warhol’s orbit and, in her first U.S. movie in nearly a decade, Baker.
Her part was meant to be played by Vivian Vance — Shelley Winters also turned down the role — but she left the production. Baker was looking to escape the films she made in Europe, saying “I’m looking to get away from that. People don’t realize you’re acting. They just see you’re sexy and they won’t take you seriously.” Oh Carol. I’ve watched every movie you made there — I recommend everything she did with Umberto Lenzi, like So Sweet, So Perverse, The Fourth Victim, Orgasmo, A Quiet Place to Kill, Knife of Ice and The Sweet Body of Deborah.
King and Baker struggled with their roles and asked Tyrell for advice, who told them their mistake was even reading the script. In a movie where everyone is horrible, the fact that Tyrell is the only somewhat good person is pretty insane.
Don Schain is probably best known for directing his wife Cheri Caffaro in the Ginger trilogy of Ginger, The Abductors and Girls Are For Loving. This is her last film before disappearing from the public eye. As for her one-time husband, he would go on to line produce H.O.T.S. and High School Musical.
Written with Jan-Michael Sherman and Don Buday (KISS Meets the Phantom of the Park), Too Hot to Handle has Caffaro as Samantha Fox, a socialite assassin who has come to the Phillippines on her yacht and proceeds to kill some bad people in wild ways, like suffocating an S&M enthusiast with a plastic bag and shoving a woman into a mudbath complete with electrodes.
She’s being chased by policeman Domingo De La Torres (Aharon Ipalé). and his partner Sanchez (Vic Diaz). Of course, he falls for her and you probably will too. Caffaro isn’t a typical sex symbol, she’s not the best at action scenes but she has some kind of unexplainable charisma that carries this entire movie.
It stars a cast of people that honestly, only someone like me would care about, and it’s made by people just as colorful, a crew of folks that would go on to dominate the film industry after emerging from the Roger Corman film cycle. It’s everything great about Cannonball Run, but both more serious and ridiculous, sometimes within the very same scene.
This is everything I want to watch.
Much like the aforementioned Cannonball Run, as well as Speed Zoneand The Gumball Rally, this movie was inspired by Erwin G. “Cannonball” Baker, who raced across the United States several times and by the race named after him, the Cannonball Baker Sea-To-Shining-Sea Memorial Trophy Dash. This illegal cross-continent road race was started by Car and Driver editor Brock Yates to protest the 55 MPH speed limit.
David Carradine plays Coy “Cannonball” Buckman, who has just been released from serving time for the death of a girl while he was driving drunk. He’s been entered into the illegal Los Angeles to New York City Trans-America Grand Prix in the hopes that he can get his racing career restarted.
That’s because Modern Motors has promised a contract to either him or his arch-rival Cade Redman (Bill McKinney, Deliverance, First Blood). Meanwhile, Coy has to somehow convince his lover/parole officer Linda Maxwell (Veronica Hamel, When Time Ran Out) to allow him to race.
Redman doesn’t have it easy either — his expenses are being paid by Sharma Capri (Judy “The Ozark Nightingale” Canova, who hosted her own national radio show from 1942 to 1955) and client, country singer Perman Waters (Gerrit Graham, amazing as always, just like he is in Terrorvision and Phantom of the Paradise).
Other racers include:
Young lovers Jim Crandell (Robert Carradine, Revenge of the Nerds) and Maryann (Belinda Balaski, every Joe Dante movie), who take her daddy’s Corvette and enter the race
Terry McMillan (Carl Gottlieb, one of the writers of Jaws!), a middle-aged man driving a Chevrolet Blazer
Beutell, who has taken a Lincoln Continental from a kindly old and rich couple and promised to get it to New York City safely
A tricked out van driven by three waitresses — Sandy (Mary Woronov you have my heart), Ginny (stuntwoman Glynn Rubin) and Wendy (Diane Lee Hart, The Giant Spider Invasion)
German driver Wolfe Messer (James Keach, Sunburst) in a De Tomaso Pantera
Zippo (Archie Hahn, who was one of the Juicy Fruits in Phantom of Paradise), who is Coy’s best friend and drives a Pontiac Trans Am just like his buddy.
What Coy doesn’t know is that his brother Bennie (Dick Miller) has bet that he will win and will do anything to ensure that happens, including killing Messer. Meanwhile, McMillan has his car — and mistress Louisa (Louisa Moritz, Myra from Death Race 2000) — flown to the finish line.
Redman kicks Perman — who becomes a big country star when his song about the race takes off — and Sharma out of his car, but in his final battle with Coy, a piece of Perman’s guitar gets stuck in the gas pedal and he dies in a big crash. While all this is going on, Zippo is in the lead, so Bennie sends out a hitman to off him. Coy had put his girl in that car as he felt it was safer — actually it was Zippo who did the drunk driving and Coy covered for his friend — but a major crash ensues and Linda is taken to the hospital by Jim and Maryann.
Terry and Louisa arrive first at the finish line, but Louisa accidentally tells the judges that they flew most of the way. The girls in the van get lost and crash, while Coy makes it to the finish line. Just before he’s about to win, he learns Linda is in the hospital and races off to see her. This leaves his brother to be killed by gangster Lester Marks (Paul Bartel, who also directed the film) and his men (Sylvester Stallone makes a cameo, as does Martin Scorsese, as mafioso).
Jim and Maryann win the race and the $100,000, while Coy gets his racing contract and the girl, and Beutell delivers the now destroyed Lincoln to its owners.
Other actors who show up for the madness are John Herzfeld (who was in Cobra and wrote and directed the films Escape Plan: The Extractors and 2 Days In the Valley), Patrick Wright (Wicked Wicked, Caged Heat, Graduation Day), future directors and at the time Corman assistants/editors Allan Arkush (Rock ‘n Roll High School) and Joe Dante (more movies than I can name, all of them wonderful), Roger Corman himself as a District Attorney, Jonathan Kaplan (director of White Line Fever, The Accused and The Student Teachers), Aron Kincaid (who was the voice of the Iron Sheik and Bobby Heenan on Hulk Hogan’s Rock ‘n’ Wrestling and Killer Croc on Batman: The Animated Series), Joseph McBride (writer of Rock ‘n Roll High School), Read Morgan (The Car), John Alderman (New Year’s Evil) and even superproducer Don Simpson, who co-write the movie with Bartel. This movie is what happens when everyone working for Corman at the time all gets together so the budget can have extras.
Paul Bartel did not enjoy making this film because he felt he was being typecast as an action director. But after he only made $5,000 after spending a year of his life making Death Race 2000, it was the only kind of movie people wanted from him. “Corman had drummed into me the idea that if Death Race 2000 had been harder and more real it would have been more popular. Like a fool, I believed him.”
Bartel wasn’t a fan of cars and racing, so he loaded the movie with cameos and character gimmicks. His favorite scene was when he plays the piano and sings while two gangsters beat up Dick Miller. And the end is pretty rough for a movie that’s so funny, so star David Carradine tried to talk to Bartel about how disturbing he intended it to be.
When Joe Bob Briggs did his How Rednecks Saved Hollywood show, he mentioned that this movie destroys Cannonball Run. As always, he was right.
Finally, an episode of Night Gallery you can savor, as “Pickman’s Model” is one of the better stories that the show would present. Sure, you have to deal with a middling story in the, well, middle, and the Jack Laird blackout segment is predictable flotsam and jetsam, but when you have an opening this strong, that’s why you stay with this show.
Remarkably, Laird would direct the first segment from a script by Alvin Sapinsley. Based on the H.P. Lovecraft story, this is about Richard Upton Pickman (Bradford Dillman), a painting teacher at a women’s college. Somehow, he keeps his job despite all of his work being so horrific it nearly causes people to pass out. Mavis Goldsmith (Louise Sorel) becomes obsessed with him, despite him trying to remain apart from her. As she tracks him down, she discovers that the creatures in his paintings are horribly real, thanks to special effects by Leonard Engelman and John Chambers, who used the original mold for the Creature from the Black Lagoon to make their monster. Another tie to monster films is that Mavis lives in the same studio backlot house that was once home to the Munsters.
For someone so devoted to humorous vanilla horror, the fact that Laird made more than one Lovecraft story on this show is slightly perplexing. Maybe people really aren’t all good or bad; there are shades of everything.
“The Dear Departed” was directed by Jeff Corey and written by host Rod Serling. Based on a Alice-Mary Schnirring story, it’s about two spiritualist con artists — Mark Bennett (Steve Lawrence) and Joe (Harvey Lembeck) — and the affair Mark is having with his partner’s wife Angela (Maureen Arthur). Once Joe is hit by a bus, their act becomes legitimate, to Mark’s horror.
“An Act of Chivalry” is the absolute nadir of this show, if “Pickman’s” is near the height. Just the dumbest of sight gags and something that denigrates this show to a degree that emotionally bothers me. About the only nice thing you can say is that at least future Electra Woman Deidre Hall is in it.
Ah Night Gallery. Often you are the peak and the valley at the same time.
EDITOR’S NOTE: This movie has been on the site twice before — on March 20, 2018 and July 19, 2022 — but hey, you should watch it again.
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 digitally 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 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.
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