Deathblog: Larry Cohen (1936-2019)

I’ve been a fan of Larry Cohen’s work for about as long as I can remember.

Ok, perhaps not quite that long, but certainly since I first acquired a DVD player at some point in the early 2000s, and made the then newly reissued ‘Q: The Winged Serpent’ (1982) one of my inaugural impulsive purchases in this exciting new format.

I mean, who wouldn’t? Just look at the damn thing.

Long story short, I fucking loved it. I still do. It’s one of my absolute favourite movies. To this day, I’ve rarely seen a film that dared to be so much better, so much more original, than the constraints of its genre, budgetary status and marketing materials lead the audience to expect. I mean, most filmmakers would probably have been content just to have created a down-on-the-street New York crime story so compelling that it could made for a respectable addition to the ‘Mean Streets’ / ‘Serpico’ canon in its own right; but to then amp it up with decapitated sunbathers, sinister Aztec cultists skinning people alive and David Carradine blasting a tommy gun in the face of stop motion god-monster on top of the Chrysler Building..? Good grief.

Whoever this Larry Cohen guy was (and his “WRITTEN, DIRECTED AND PRODUCED BY..” credit leaves little room for authorial ambiguity), I immediately knew he was on my wave length (or rather, I aspired to be on HIS wave length, I suppose).

Learning more about ‘Q’s production circumstances over the years, my admiration for what Cohen managed to achieve with it has only increased. Like all of his films, it basically just began with a good idea and a throw of the dice. (He always claimed that he launched the production in a fit of pique after being fired from an adaptation of Mickey Spillane’s ‘I, The Jury’, making initial calls to cast, crew and financial backers from his studio-booked hotel room and shooting the first footage for ‘Q’ the very next day.)

Looking back over Cohen’s filmography, it’s fair to say that this impulsive approach to movie-making – zero pre-production planning, total faith in on-set improvisation – was both his greatest strength and his Achilles’ heel. Sometimes he rolled a five, sometimes an eight, but on ‘Q’, he ended up with a double six staring back at him. Everything just comes together beautifully. Though fans of the equally extraordinary ‘God Told Me To’ (1976) could make a strong argument to the contrary, I still think it’s his masterpiece.

Cohen also claimed – in his characteristically entertaining audio commentary - that he met Michael Moriarty randomly, in a restaurant ferchristsake, immediately offered him a part in the film and began rewriting the script around him, resulting in what is almost certainly the best performance in either man’s career.

He also very nearly ended up in jail (surely only the intervention of friends in high places can possibly have kept him out of the cells) after causing a major security incident in New York City when – asking no one’s permission, as per usual – he had his people climb to the top of the Chrysler Building, hi-jack the hanging baskets used by steeplejacks carrying out renovation work, and start blasting away at an invisible monster with prop machine guns… whilst simultaneously stealing footage of the people on the streets below fleeing in panic!

Though Cohen perhaps never pulled off anything else quite so audacious / insane [delete as applicable], his best films of the ‘70s are full of similarly electrifying moments, in which the violent drama of the fictional narrative crashes headfirst into the real world, capturing the reactions of unsuspecting bystanders (see Andy Kaufman going crazy in the midst of the St Patrick’s Day parade in ‘God Told Me To’, or Fred Williamson staggering across Times Square with a bullet wound in ‘Black Caesar’(1973)). Although he seems to have largely curtailed these shenanigans from the mid ‘80s onward (perhaps considerations of safety and sanity began to win out), these outbursts of chaos are emblematic off the off kilter, anything-could-happen-next energy that defines the entirety of Cohen’s career.

Though he was still a young man when the ‘60s hit, Cohen never really seems to have embraced that decade’s counter-culture. In spite of the gonzo antics outlined above, he was never exactly what you’d call a rock n’ roll kinda guy. In fact, his aspirations early in life involved becoming a borsch-belt comedian or nightclub crooner, before unsolicited script submissions led him toward a career in network TV and, subsequently, independent filmmaking.

(All this is outlined, by the way, in Steve Mitchell’s 2017 documentary ‘King Cohen’, which I watched this week in preparation for writing this post; an excellent doc, and solid gold for anyone who enjoys listening to movie people talking – recommended.)

Despite this however, Cohen’s films and scripts are united by a rebellious spirit, and almost always manage to sneak in an element of pointed social criticism, hidden in plain sight beneath a thin veneer of commercial ballyhoo. Dealing candidly (sometimes furiously) with issues of societal inequality, race / gender / age discrimination and institutional corruption, his writing exhibits a near-obsessive distrust of authority, counselling profound suspicion of the motives of police and government, and frequently pitting unpredictable, potentially dangerous, outsiders against a hierarchy of ineffectual, morally tainted patriarchal figures.

These concerns are perhaps most immediately evident in Cohen’s directorial debut, ‘Bone’ (1970), an extraordinary and uncategorisable social satire which proved impossible to market at the time, and that remains sadly underappreciated to this day. (I reviewed it here as part of a Yaphet Kotto blogathon way back in 2010, though I can’t really vouch for the veracity of my writing or opinions at that time.)

Even more transgressive in their own way though are Cohen’s 1974 hit ‘It’s Alive’ and it’s two sequels – films whose outrageous, envelope-pushing subject matter allowed goofy, bad taste monster attack scenes to exist side by side with harrowing, elemental human drama, whilst also asking their audience to reflect on such startling sights as (in ‘It Lives Again’, 1978) an army of heavily armed riot police surrounding a hospital specifically for the purpose of killing a new born child, whilst a small band of dissidents try to smuggle the expectant mother into a mobile delivery room hidden in the back of a furniture truck. (Although, this being a Larry Cohen film of course, those dissidents prove to be pretty far from heroic themselves.)

Aside from anything else, the first ‘Alive’ film stands as a clear precursor to the work of both David Cronenberg and Frank Henenlotter, and its key scene - in which John Ryan sits in a hospital waiting room nervously anticipating the birth of his first child, only to instead see a nurse staggering through the door to the maternity ward with her throat torn out - remains one of the most jaw-dropping moments in all of ‘70s horror, created with little more than one good actor, one TV soap opera set and a few squirts of fake blood.

In all of the aforementioned films, there is something dangerous; something new and uncomfortable, giving voice to ideas not normally encountered in commercial genre cinema. Cohen’s persistent refusal to tow the usual line when it comes to deciding which characters are ‘good’, which are ‘bad’, and what should be done about whatever the status quo-upsetting threat under consideration happens to be, allows his work to remain provocative and unnerving to this day.

First and foremost I think, Cohen was a great writer. (This seems a good point at which to drop in mention of his voluminous screenwriting work, which included the creation of the ‘Maniac Cop’ franchise and the 2002 high concept thriller ‘Phone Booth’, amongst many others.)

One of the all-time great ‘high concept’ guys, most of Cohen’s scripts seem tailor made for a “give it to us in one sentence” pitch meeting, but he never failed to wring maximum dramatic value from his latest Crazy Idea, foregrounding character and consequence to give added weight to movies that could easily have become goofy timewasters. In an alternate universe – if he’d had lunch with Rod Sterling, or if he’d got to grips with prose - he could easily have slotted into the pantheon next to Richard Matheson, Theodore Sturgeon or Ray Bradbury.

When the films Cohen directed did fall down or emerge as merely average, it was the vagaries of the execution (variable performances, uninspired camera work, botched effects, wonky pacing or simply a lack of time/resources) that let them down. His ideas and his instincts were always on-point, and, given the seat-of-his-pants circumstances under which he worked, it’s remarkable that he rarely, if ever, came up snake eyes.

To date, I’ve never seen a Larry Cohen film that wasn’t worth watching at least once, but, having said that, his extended catalogue is pretty damn vast, considering his preference for outré subject matter and his constant battles with studios and distributers. I’ve been gradually trying to fill in the gaps for myself over the past few years, but, watching the aforementioned documentary served to remind me just how many titles I still have to go.

In ‘King Cohen’, you will hear Martin Scorsese speak eloquently about the importance of Cohen’s near forgotten 1977 FBI biopic ‘The Private Files of J. Edgar Hoover’. You will learn that his 1987 Stephen King sequel ‘Return to Salem’s Lot’ featured an elderly Sam Fuller teaming up with Michael Moriarty to battle vampires (now THAT I’ve got to see), or that he gave Bette Davis her final movie role in an ill-fated comedy named ‘Wicked Stepmother’ (1989), introducing a ‘body swap’ element into the script in order to allow him to finish the film after health problems and bad feeling led Davis to bail before the completion of shooting.

And, that’s before we even mention his 1980 horror-comedy ‘Full Moon High’ (four years before ‘Teen Wolf’, folks), or ‘Original Gangstas’ (1996), the post-‘Boyz N The Hood’ gang warfare movie he made in collaboration with Fred Williamson, casting genuine gang members in Gary, Indiana.

One suspects that Cohen’s dice hand may finally have failed him on some of these lesser known oddities, but you know, he who dares etc… I look forward to catching up with them at some point.

What a wild rampage of a career. Though Cohen effectively retired from directing in the 21st century (his 2006 ‘Masters of Horror’ episode ‘Pick Me Up’ – a final collaboration with Moriarty - was the only exception), he continued to keep the wolf from the door by writing prolifically for films and TV (in particular, the success of ‘Phone Booth’ seems to have made him the go-to guy for phone-related DTV horror flicks, strangely enough) – but I’m really glad that Mitchell’s aforementioned documentary came through in time to top off his filmography with an appropriately heartfelt tribute to his achievements.

Of course, the summary I’ve banged out above barely begins to scratch the surface of a full life of creative endeavour. How many spec scripts did he sell over the years, only to see them disappear into the ether? And I’m sure that a devotee of ‘60s American TV could probably write an even longer obit post, running down his successes and innovations in that field.

However you approach his career though, Larry Cohen stands as a pioneering figure in the realm of self-sufficient, independent American cinema, a persistent thorn in the side of slick, studio conformity, and a relentless champion of a wilder, weirder, angrier voices within popular entertainment. He will be much missed.

Bone (Larry Cohen, 1970)

This review forms part of this week’s tribute to the work of Yaphet Kotto – many thanks to Seth at Lost Video Archive for putting in the organisational work and for picking such a good subject! See the bottom of this post for a complete list of weblogs taking part.


Beverley Hills used car salesman Bill Lennik (Andrew Duggan) begins "Bone" as a post-counter-culture whipping boy. A personification of square, capitalist values, he is already seething with hatred as undesirable elements seek to ‘invade’ his all-American home, whether in the form of a rat in his swimming pool filter, “that damned Jap gardener”, or a poor Asian cleaning lady gesturing forlornly outside the front gates. Bill is materialistic, intolerant, frustrated by everything – a recognisable ‘type’, ready to be flattened by our hip, young New American filmmakers.


Have we ever stopped to wonder though, how deep this character’s dedication to his allotted role in the forthcoming drama really goes? How would we feel if, say, we left him midway through a nail-biting race against time to save his wife and home from the privations of psychotic criminal… and when we return, he’s knocking back scotch in a dubious-looking singles bar, exchanging surrealistic banter with an alcoholic widow who claims her husband was murdered by a sinister cabal of dentists subjecting him to excessive levels of x-ray radiation?

back at the scene of the crime meanwhile, how do we feel when our vicious face of black, urban crime (Yaphet Kotto as the titular ‘Bone’) drops his façade of implacable menace, accepts a drink from wouldbe victim Bernadette (Joyce Van Patten), and reluctantly admits that he just plain doesn’t have the where-with-all to carry out the threats he made to her husband and go through all the raping and throat-slitting yet again. (“This is a rotten day for both of us” he snaps as he dutifully tears her clothes off.)


To go into a movie with simple, genre-based expectations and see them wholly overturned as our characters rebel against their programming, developing an unexpected third dimension and following weird, aimless story arcs of their own devising, is always great fun. But, released into the world at a very strange moment in American cinema when genre pigeon-holing still ruled supreme, the games “Bone” plays with its audience seem to have alienated rather than attracted potential viewers, while its black-in-the-other-sense humour, wringing laughs from rape, racism and child abuse, sent major studios, potential distributors and certain influential critics running for the hills, resulting in a film that was maligned, misunderstood, ignored and almost lost to the world forever.

As extensively chronicled in Stephen Thrower’s book Nightmare USA, the early ‘70s was a period that saw a scattered legion of ambitious, independent young filmmakers emerging around the country, fired up by the European New Wave and the possibilities of a post-Easy Rider, post-Cassevettes ‘New American Cinema’, discovering the hard way that if you didn’t have Jack Nicholson’s number, the only up was through the grindhouse. This was an era in which 21 year old director Jeffrey Friedel could see his Bergman-inspired existential thrillers sold to the drive-in circuit by Harry Novak as “Axe” and “Kidnapped Co-Ed”, and where David Durston could follow up his quintessential gore flick “I Drink Your Blood” with a brooding treatise on racial tension and venereal disease. An era in which seemingly any whacked out, regional movie could be left to fend for itself in a marketplace where the art/gore/WTF shocks of “Night of the Living Dead” and “Last House On the Left” were seen as benchmarks of success, where unscrupulous distributors might as well have played frisbee with the negative of some poor guy’s masterpiece at weekends, and where nobody EVER seemed to get paid.


Into this arena steps our hero, Larry Cohen, with his self-financed directorial debut, “Bone”. A vicious and highly original black comedy with a great cast, beautiful photography and a subversive agenda a mile wide, it’s hard to imagine that the many industry bods Cohen screened the film for weren’t on some level impressed with the writer/director/producer’s talent and audacity. Great movie Larry, I can imagine them saying, GREAT movie, but….

Yeah -- BUT. Even circa 1970, it’s difficult to conceive a movie less sellable than “Bone”. Hopper and Nicholson and the Hollywood-hippie crew might have gotten away with freaking out the squares on the big screen, but in the independent sector, things were different.

Clearly not a film that intends to fuck about with disguising its underlying intent, “Bone” opens with a caption card;


Whoa. That’s half your audience gone right there. When the picture proceeds to open with the Godard-via-The Monkees sight of Bill Lennik delivering his TV ad pitch whilst standing in a junkyard, intercut with bloody stills of road accident victims, I’m guessing you could say goodbye to a few more.



And as for whoever was left when the plot-line kicks in – well, I don’t think there’s any reason why a straight-up home invasion thriller about a Beverly Hills couple being menaced by a criminally-minded black man couldn’t have been fairly successful with an American audience in 1970, even with a good dose of liberal social conscience attached. After all, AIP quickies and ‘progressive’ directors had been knocking about with stuff like that for ages, and it was only a year or two later that audiences were thrilling to the black bad-ass stereotypes of the blaxploitation craze. It coulda worked.

As the commie-art-fag shock opening so clearly implies though, “Bone” is very much not that film, however much the people writing plot synopses and DVD back copy might want it to be, even today.


By frustrating genre and plot-based expectations at every turn, by giving us a sociopathic rapist who becomes a sympathetic nice guy and a square, white ‘hero’ who shrugs off his responsibilities halfway through and spends the rest of the movie goofing around, by rejecting three-act scripting conventions and just letting it all hang out, Larry Cohen presented the world with a film guaranteed to wrong-foot pretty much any expectations that press or posters might have created for it – with sadly predictable results.

After failing to secure a distribution deal from the usual suspects, Cohen turned to veteran independent producer Jack H. Harris, and together they tried pushing “Bone” on Cohen’s own terms, as a hip black comedy, placing it in a few theatres in New York and LA. As Cohen tells it, these preview screenings were pretty successful, but the problems began when the film gained its best box office after Harris booked it in an East LA cinema catering to a black audience, double-billed with Fred Williamson’s “The Legend of Nigger Charley”. Subsequently, Harris decided his best bet was to market the film, against Cohen’s wishes, as an action-packed blaxploitation flick (“White Meat, Black Bone”), a tactic that backfired when confused audiences were presented with an action-free, character-driven comedy, and the film tanked.

In an interview included on the DVD, Harris claims he liked Cohen’s film a great deal. But this admiration apparently didn’t stand in the way of his reediting “Bone” to emphasise ‘the romance angle’ and cutting his losses by shopping it around as a cheap second/third feature under the name “Housewife”, with a sexploitation styled poster to match. Over the next few years, it seems like different versions of “Bone” did the rounds in god knows what kind of condition, trading as a sex film, with or without additional porno inserts, and eventually turning up as a supposed horror film under the ludicrous title “Dial Rat For Terror”.



So it goes. We’re lucky enough to live in the DVD era, where we can stick on the reconstructed director’s cut of the film and laugh at such anachronistic craziness. The thing is though, that when I say ‘we’, I essentially mean genre film fans. Horror/sci-fi/exploitation guys. You and I, presumably. I mean, who else is gonna want to spend time tracking down the lost directoral debut of the man who brought us “Q: The Winged Serpent”, “It’s Alive” and “The Stuff”?

The irony is (and obviously I don’t mean this in a snobbish way) - “Bone” is NOT a genre film. As noted, it is a film that laughs in the face of genre convention. Which is extremely curious, given that it is now chiefly notable as the first item on the CV of a director who has spent the rest of his career making unashamed sci-fi and horror movies. But whatever – the fact is, in 1970 Mr. Cohen made a film that finds its true contemporaries not in the drive-in, but among the likes of Hal Ashby’s “Harold & Maude” or Bob Rafelson’s “Five Easy Pieces” – odd, earnest, wilfully unconventional little films about people questioning the paths life has set out for them. Admittedly, “Bone” is a bit more garish than those examples, a bit more brutal with its politics and swinging a bit heavier with the sex and cussing and bad behaviour, but still, at heart it’s a gentle, humane kinda story – more Richard Brautigan than Jim Thompson.


In some ways setting the blueprint for the kind of cerebral alterna-comedies that Spike Jonze and David O. Russell have brought to Hollywood in recent years, Cohen’s script is a riot of non-sequiturs, unexpected left turns and near post-modern diatribes, dealing in race, sex and the general dementia of late capitalist malaise, while “Bone”s improvisational, shot-on-the-run approach to visuals enlivens Andrew Duggan’s odyssey through the streets of Beverley Hills with such intriguing period details as park benches billboards advertising mortuaries, early Scientology pamphlets, gangs of hippies crouching in prayer outside a phonebox and a bus full of old ladies reading porn magazines.


A film created from the screenplay up, Bone is full of the kind of oddball, self-conscious dialogue guaranteed to bum the hell out of any actor not fully committed to the material, and it is amazing to witness how well Cohen’s cast help bring the potentially difficult material to life. It is always difficult to know what to say about acting of this calibre, beyond “it is very good”, so I’ll just observe that all four principals here manage to embody the complicated and unpredictable characters the script has created for them to such an extent that it is impossible to imagine anyone else in their roles, and leave it at that.


Perhaps the key scene in the film comes when Kotto’s character, having pretty much given up on trying to menace the troublesome and assertive Van Patten, sinks into lethargy and delivers an absolutely astounding monologue, riffing on the uncertain future of his career as a ‘violent black criminal’, an occupation Bone treats as seriously as if he were a bank manager or newsreader.

Easing out of his schizo tough guy mannerisms, Kotto begins to open up, discussing the embarrassing failure of his attempted rampage like an athlete talking to his coach after an underwhelming training session (“this is demoralising – I mean what kind of a rapist am I?”, “Well, I don’t know… I’ve never met a rapist before”). Warming to his theme, Bone next starts reminiscing about the days when all he had to do was look at a white woman to inspire terror;

“..now you go to a movie house, and it’s right up there on the screen – how about that, mixed couples all over the place! They went and took all the mystery out of it… they’re treating us like people now - you can see what sort of a position that puts a rapist like me in…”


After building up a rhetorical head of steam, cheerfully expounding on the ‘nigger mystique’ that he’d built his career on pre-Civil Rights, Bone abruptly shifts back into a kind of wounded anger, Kotto’s delivery perhaps reflecting the frustrations of a hugely talented black character actor trying to make a name for himself in a culture where African-American performers were given the choice of goofy bit-parts or one-dimensional caricatures;

“..then they changed it, they changed the whole deal and I found myself slipping; there I was, I was holding onto the past, because change is scary, and then they said ‘EDUCATE YOURSELF’, ‘LEARN NEW TRADES’ – what trades? The Pullman porter, the shoeshine boy and ME. What trades? I only know how to do one thing… at least.. I used to know how…”

The whole scene is breathtaking. As with Michael Moriarty’s stunning performance in “Q” a few years later, Larry Cohen seems to get a kick out of working closely with under-valued actors to create characters who achieve an almost fourth wall-breaking intensity, consciously pushing a figure whom lesser films (and complacent audiences) might write off as a ‘low-life’ or ‘villain’ into centre stage and letting him work out his frustrations, daring us to engage with the troubling circumstances that have made him what he is, and to acknowledge that this kind of crippling self-consciousness and neurosis isn’t just the province of comfortable middle-class guys on analyst’s coaches.

A brief look at Yaphet Kotto’s subsequent filmography of bit-parts and straight to video roles, as contrasted with the crazy, Brando-scale charisma he’s throwing around in “Bone”, is all the indictment one needs of the genre codes and social conventions that Cohen was seeking to tear apart here, and of how vital Kotto’s presence was in spearheading the attack.


Whilst he provides the emotional centre of the film though, the character of Bone is also kind of unreal, appearing out of nowhere and then vanishing into thin air at the story’s conclusion like some bizarro world Mary Poppins, leaving the lives of those he has touched transformed. Essentially, both Bill and Bernadette end up using Bone as a prism through which they can realise transgressive desires that they didn’t even know they had until he intervened in their lives.

As Larry Cohen convincingly explains on the Blue Underground DVD’s commentary track, “Bone” essentially operates as a dense network of interlocking fantasies that the characters project onto one another. Bernadette gets to replace her deadbeat husband with a virile black man, whilst Bone gets to enjoy the love of a white woman and the comforts of a rich, white man’s home without having to take them by force. Through Bone, Bill is able to liquidate his responsibility for wife, home and business, and gets to wander around town aimlessly, perhaps for the first time, drinking in the daytime, stealing food from the supermarket and making out with a crazy lady he met in the bank queue. Even Jeannie Berlin’s character gets to project onto Bill her obsession with a childhood memory of being molested in the cinema by a middle-aged man, convincing herself that Bill was the original perpetrator and squaring the circle of her own strange obsessions. For a crazy moment or two it actually looks as if everyone is going to emerge a lot HAPPIER from this unexpected series of events, but, well… y’know, that would just be too easy wouldn’t it? Fantasies never really work out.


Some of “Bone”s damn-the-man Vietnam-era jibes may seem slightly quaint by modern standards, and the free-wheelin’ humour (particularly as embodied by Jeannie Berlin’s nightmare hippy chick character) may cross the line into bloody-minded quirk from time to time. But thanks to the genuinely unusual character dynamics and flick-knife satire of Cohen’s script, and to its flawless realisation by Kotto, Duggan and Van Patten, “Bone” remains a film with big, fuckin’ teeth, one that dares to present a genuinely different approach to American filmmaking, and that succeeds in challenging our boundaries and expectations of such to this day. All high-falutin’ talk aside, it’s a pretty great movie, it’s really funny, and you should do yourself a favour and watch it.

KOTTO WEEK LINE-UP:

Monday Nov. 15th
Unflinching Eye - Alien
Raculfright 13's Blogo Trasho - Truck Turner

Tuesday Nov. 16th
Lost Video Archive - Raid on Entebbe
Manchester Morgue - Friday Foster

Wednesday Nov. 17th
Booksteve's Library - Live and Let Die

Thursday Nov. 18th
Mondo 70 - Drum
B Movies and Beyond - The Monkey Hu$tle
Cinema Gonzo - Report to the Commissioner

Friday Nov. 19th
Illogical Contraption - Eye of the Tiger
Ninja Dixon - Across 110th St.
Lines That Make Things - The A Team (TV episode)
Things That Don't Suck - Blue Collar

Saturday Nov. 20th
Breakfast In the Ruins - Bone (YER READIN' IT!)
Lost Video Archive - The Park Is Mine

Musings: EMPIRE STATE

Watching the finale of Liquid Sky a few weeks back, the image of an androgynous, new wave lady with lethal, alien powers facing a showdown on a Manhattan rooftop with the skyscrapers looming large in the background gave me a strange sense of cinematic déjà vu. I knew I’d seen her before, somewhere.

The other day it hit me: GOZER.


Now I’m not claiming there’s anything deliberate or underhand going on here. But: ‘Liquid Sky’ was 1982, Ghostbusters was 1984. Isn’t it at least possible that someone on the production team for the latter caught a screening of the former, and thought, hey, that’s kinda neat?

A pretty off the wall reference point for a family-friendly studio blockbuster you might think, but perhaps it was this very spirit of open-mindedness that helped make ‘Ghostbusters’ the atmospheric, clever and imaginative film it undoubtedly is. Stretching this already tenuous musing to breaking point, perhaps it could be suggested that Sigourney Weaver’s demonically possessed sexual predator in ‘Ghostbusters’ also owes a debt to Anne Carlisle’s turn in ‘Liquid Sky’? No? Alright then, fine.

Of course, the respective finales of these films aren’t *actually* set in (or rather, on top of) either the Empire State Building or the more picturesque Chrysler Building, but their presence looms large in both movies – literally so in ‘Liquid Sky’s skyline, whilst ‘Ghostbusters’ haunted, gothic apartment block can clearly be read as a fictional stand-in for one or other of the skyscrapers.

It occurs to me that these buildings – built on a competing basis and completed within a year of each other in 1930/31 - actually have a long history of associations with cinematic monstrosity and alien power. Perhaps this is an obvious result of their brutally imposing art deco/gothic crossover architecture (I’m sure anyone who knows the first thing about architecture will do a doubletake at such clunky and no doubt wrongly applied terminology, but that’s what they’ve always looked like to my dumb eyes - sorry), and the way they dominate the skyline.

Or perhaps it’s more to do with the ongoing legacy of KING KONG.


From here, my brain jumps not to the significance of the big ape, but to the terminal power of decision that ‘King Kong’ invests in poor old Fay Wray, and how uncannily that brings us back to the exaggerated representations of female destructive power seen in the vicinity of these big ol’ phallic monuments to masculine industrial potency in ‘Liquid Sky’ and ‘Ghostbusters’. Do we dare draw a straight line between “beauty” killing “the beast” in the 1930s and Anne Carlisle “killing with her cunt” in the 1980s…?

I’d like to. Oh, c’mon, please, can we? No? Doesn’t float? Well, as Bill Murray puts it in the inevitably rather more normative ending of ‘Ghostbusters’: “that chick is toast!”

Growing up in the ‘80s and early ‘90s, I remember it seemed that a hefty proportion of the action/adventure type movies I watched were set in New York. This could just be my imagination, led astray by the fact that NY seems to inevitably become a strong presence in films which are set in the city, whereas LA or anonymous small town locations often sink into the background unless given special attention. But perhaps there actually WERE a lot of New York-set films in production in this era, moving the action there off the back of the success of movies like ‘Ghostbusters’. I don’t know.

Either way, this weird childhood nostalgia for New York based movies was also something that occurred to me whilst watching Larry Cohen’s stonecold classic independent monster movie Q: The Winged Serpent (1982). Needless to say, I wasn’t afforded the opportunity to watch this one as a kid, which is a shame, as I’m sure my eleven year old self would have loved it then even more than my grown up self loves it now.


So, where in Cohen’s movie do you suppose the resurrected Quetzalcoatl calls home when visiting NY? Right up at the top of the Chrysler Building, that’s where - the semi-derelict spire bit where nobody ever goes. Apparently Cohen and his crew clambered up there and filmed the whole thing on location, 1000 feet in the air, stunts and effects shots and all. What a hero.

Of course, this Quetzalcoatl is also a female – a big, mean firebreathing one, plucking sunbathers off Manhattan rooftops to feed her newly hatched brood. Following the lead of Egon and the boys in a somewhat earthier fashion, David Carradine and his team of police commandos viciously machine gun the poor beastie to pieces, destroy her nest, and normality is restored….. for now.



It’s a pity ‘Attack Of The 50ft Woman’ wasn’t set in New York, or I could have gotten a whole dissertation out of this one.