The Films of Larry Cohen

_{Originally published on Associated Content, September 11, 2008}

Larry Cohen is not a film director that will ever win the AFI Lifetime Achievement Award, but he is more deserving than such past winners as Sean Connery, George Lucas, Barbra Streisand and Robert Wise.   Larry Cohen will never win an Oscar but he is more deserving of an Academy Award than James Cameron, Peter Jackson, Kevin Costner, Mel Gibson…well, the list goes on and of filmmakers who have won the big prize despite containing about one-hundredth of the ideas that are contained within the best Cohen films.   When you make movies like It’s Alive and Q: The Winged Serpent you are bound to not be taken seriously by people who think movies like Gandhi and Titanic are art.   

Bone: A Bad Day In Beverly Hills

Longtime TV writer Larry Cohen made his name as a film director with this astonishing film that sets the stage for a common theme that runs through Cohen’s best movies, that of the protagonist becoming indivisible from the apparent antagonist.  Yaphet Kotto plays a big burly black man who invades the home of an upper middle class Beverly Hills family and threatens to rape the wife if the husband does not return from the bank with money.  Well, the husband takes his opportunity for escape to go out and enjoy a fling with his mistress.  Naturally, this leaves the invader and the wife to draw closer and they do engage in a consensual sexual relationship before bonding together to seek revenge upon the errant husband.   

Q: The Winged Serpent

There have been exactly three non-human monster movies that are worthy of being discussed with awe.  King Kong, of course, and the recent Korean masterpiece The Host.  And the third great monster movie ever made is Q: The Winged Serpent.   Larry Cohen’s movie about the legendary Aztec monster Quetzalcoatl terrorizing New York City.  This movie is hysterical in the purest sense of the word and if you think an acting performance in a B-movie is not deserving of an Oscar nomination then you’ve never seen Michael Moriarty’s extraordinary performance in this.  Moriarty is the Robert DeNiro to Larry Cohen’s Martin Scorsese.  The big difference being that both Moriarty and Cohen continued doing extraordinary work much longer than DeNiro and Scorsese have.  (Truthfully, is it obvious to anyone else that Scorsese is halfway to hackdom at this point in what passes for the twilight of his career?)  

It’s Alive

It’s Alive at first glance appears to be nothing more than a rather silly little creature feature about, well, a psychopathic newborn.  Drop away your belief that important movies have to be three hours long and contain stone-faced acting and pretend to have lofty ideas for a moment and you will discover that this admittedly raw little flick touches upon some of the ideas that Stanley Kubrick develops to a greater extent in The Shining.  It’s Alive, while ostensibly just a bloody little dark comedy about a baby killer in the sense of the baby being the killer, is actually one of the most incisive and cogent examinations of gender roles and the fear of emasculation at the hand of the burgeoning Womens Lib movement in America during the early 1970s.   

The Stuff

If you have watched The League of Gentlemen you will be familiar with the subplot of Hillary the Butcher who sets aside special stuff for his best customers that eventually wind up killing them.  You never find out what Hillary’s special stuff is, but it doesn’t take a genius to figure out that the Gents were inspired by Larry Cohen’s movie named The Stuff.  Another seeming horror schlockfest that actually makes more serious commentary about the food industry’s influence on American society than Fast Food Nation.  Michael Moriarty returns once again for another terrific performance in this high level satire that takes the idea of Invasion of the Body Snatcher and twists it so that Americans are actively seeking out the pod element by snatching up the creamy dessert that is responsible.  A brilliant movie about how Americans are consuming their very souls by giving into the corporate advertising and the consumption of everything that passes before their eyes.   

God Told Me To

Since I have not yet been able to track down a copy of Cohen’s The Private Files of J. Edgar Hoover, I have to forward God Told Me To as his most fascinating movie.  Not necessarily his best, but fascinating.  The film begins with a sniper on a water tower picking off targets at random.  When the cop hero of the film asks him why is doing such a horrendous thing he answers, “God told me to.”  Over the course of the next thirty minutes several more homicidal maniacs (including Andy Kaufman in an early, brief role as a cop) all give the same mysterious answer to why they conducted themselves in such violent fashion.  Eventually, our hero finds a strange hermaphroditic god who has been involved with alien impregnation of women.  Yeah, it’s pretty freaking bizarre.  And it gets even more interesting when we find out that the cop is also a god, but that his Catholic upbringing has served to repress his memories.   Yeah, Larry Cohen was commenting on repressed Catholic memories long before most people were aware that the Vatican is the single biggest entity covering up child rape in the world.  God Told Me To may suffer from having too many ideas being juggled at once, but considering that the nine hour snoozefest known as the Lord of the Rings spread one boring idea out over nine hours, that’s not exactly a critique.