God Told Me To (1976)

          Quite possibly the strangest movie that Larry Cohen ever made—which is saying a lot, seeing as how Cohen’s filmography includes the 1974 killer-baby epic It’s Alive—this offbeat horror/sci-fi hybrid starts out like a lurid crime story, then evolves into something very different. Set in New York City, the picture begins when a crazed shooter named Harold (Sammy Williams) takes a perch on a water tower and then shoots more than a dozen strangers walking on the streets far below. Among police officers responding to the incident is Detective Peter Nicholas (Tony Lo Bianco), who climbs onto the water tower and tries to reason with the killer. When Peter asks why Harold started shooting, Harold says, “God told me to,” then jumps to his death. Peter is traumatized by the incident, partially because he’s a devout Catholic, and his aguish deepens when several other people go on killing sprees, all claiming that “God told me to.” (One of the murderers is played by future Taxi star Andy Kaufman.)

          Eventually, Peter’s investigation broadens to include inquiries into his own past, because Peter is an orphan who knows nothing about his biological parents. Concurrently, Peter angers higher-ups in the NYPD by going public with the “God told me to” angle; this revelation leads to riots among warring religious forces. Even after Peter gets suspended, he continues his investigation in an unofficial capacity, and he learns that “God,” in this particular case, might be a single messianic individual who compels followers to kill. Yet just when it seems writer-producer-director Cohen is headed down the road of exposing a Manson-type cult leader, God Told Me To takes a left turn into trippy territory. Peter meets “God,” an asexual vagrant who glows so brightly that his features can’t be discerned the first time he’s shown.

          This meeting leads Peter to find Elizabeth Mullin (Silva Sidney), who may or may not be “God’s” mother. Now living in a senior home, she recalls a horrific incident from the past, when she was taken aboard an alien spaceship and artificially inseminated. She gave up the resulting child, who grew up to be “God,” otherwise known as super-powered alien/human hermaphrodite Bernard Phillips (Richard Lynch). Yes, hermaphrodite. To hammer this particular point home, Cohen provides a loving closeup of Bernard’s matched sex organs, which protrude from the side of his torso.

          None of this makes much sense, but it’s a fun ride, after a fashion, because it’s wild to see how far Cohen goes down the rabbit hole of his own imagination. What other film includes an alien abduction, a crazed sniper, an immaculate conception, an obsessed Catholic, a religious controversy, and a sex mutant? Plus, even if the deranged God Told Me To doesn’t “work” in any conventional fashion, the bizarre movie has vibe to spare thanks to a fantastically ominous musical score by Frank Cordell. Legendary film composer Bernard Herrmann scored Cohen’s previous film (the aforementioned It’s Alive), but Hermann died before working on Gold Told Me To. Cohen clearly guided Cordell toward mimicry, and, in fact, Cohen dedicated the picture to Herrmann. Emulating Herrmann’s propulsive musical style was a genius move, because Cordell’s dark and dense score lends Cohen’s phantasmagorical narrative a degree of macabre grandeur.

God Told Me To: FREAKY

Snowbeast (1977)

          Bigfoot was so ubiquitous in mid-’70s pop culture, you can’t blame the guy for wanting to take a vacation. So instead of thumping around the forests of the Pacific Northwest, as he did in countless movies and TV shows during this period, the Artist Sometimes Known as Sasquatch spends Snowbeast chilling at a ski resort. Made for TV and running a brisk 86 minutes, this low-budget thriller boasts a coherent script by Joseph Stefano (who, in better times, wrote Psycho for Alfred Hitchcock), and features a handful of competent actors who keep things lively. Robert Logan, star of the Wilderness Family movies, plays Tony, the manager of a Colorado ski resort owned by his tough grandmother, Carrie (Sylvia Sidney). When a terrified skier reports an attack by a mysterious creature on a ski slope, Carrie (in true Jaws rip-off fashion) demands the incident be kept quiet so panic doesn’t derail the resort’s upcoming winter carnival. Tony starts to investigate the attack, but he’s distracted by the arrival of one-time Olympic skiing champ Gar (Bo Svenson) and Gar’s wife, investigative reporter Ellen (Yvette Mimieux). Cue the psychodrama!

          It turns out Tony once dated Ellen, and Gar has been gun-shy about skiing since his Olympic success. So, in addition to the usual business of a monster attack every 10 minutes or so and semi-suspenseful scenes of Our Heroes snowmobiling around the woods and looking for Bigfoot, Snowbeast features the type of contrived character interplay one usually finds in Irwin Allen disaster movies. The sheer number or events in Stefano’s script sorta makes up for the film’s lack of genuine terror, and even though Snowbeast feels padded—a sequence of Mimieux snooping around the woods goes on far too long—Snowbeast basically delivers the B-movie goods by introducing archetypal characters and then keeping the audience guessing about who will survive. The monster stuff is disappointing, of course, but director Herb Wallerstein wisely limits our glimpses of the titular critter to flashes of claws and feet, plus one or two split-second peeks at the creature’s hairy face. This is cheesy stuff, without question, but by the low standards of ’70s Bigfoot cinema, Snowbeast is fairly entertaining.

Snowbeast: FUNKY

Death at Love House (1976)

Although it suffers from the rudimentary execution that doomed most ’70s TV movies to oblivion after their initial broadcasts, Death at Love House has such a kicky story that some enterprising soul could probably put together a worthwhile remake. Plus, the movie stars a pair of comfortingly familiar actors. Kate Jackson and Robert Wagner, respectively of Charlie’s Angels and Hart to Hart fame, play authors who take up occupancy in a gloomy Hollywood mansion while researching a book about long-dead ’30s actress Lorna Love, the mansion’s onetime owner. Joel (Wagner) is the son of Lorna’s lover, so when paranormal events suggest that Lorna’s spirit is roaming the grounds of the mansion, Joel begins to wonder if he’s being courted by a ghost. As happens in this sort of story, Joel starts to reciprocate the attraction by becoming obsessed with a giant portrait of Lorna. He also fantasizes about her in dream sequences featuring beautiful ’60s/’70s starlet Marianna Hill as the glamorous Lorna. This is all enjoyably undemanding stuff, right down to the obligatory subplot involving a creepy old caretaker (Sylvia Sidney) who serves the otherworldly whims of her dearly departed mistress. The idea of blending old-Hollywood glamour with the ’70s supernatural fad was novel, whether the credit goes to writer James Barnett or producer Hal Sitowitz, but a limp screenplay and perfunctory acting prevent the piece from realizing its potential. So, even though Jackson summons a smidgen more gravitas than the ever-wooden Wagner (and even though Hill is so sexy it’s easy to believe she can beguile from beyond the grave), it’s only a matter of time before Death at Love House tumbles into bad-movie chaos during the conclusion. Still, there are worse ways to spend 74 minutes (though not many) and the basic concept is memorable.

Death at Love House: FUNKY

Summer Wishes, Winter Dreams (1973)

          By the time she made Summer Wishes, Winter Dreams, the formidable Joanne Woodward had been playing troubled women onscreen for years, so she was way past the point of trying to engender audience sympathy; quite to the contrary, her performances in ’70s pictures like this one are truly fearless. Put even more bluntly, Woodward had no reservations about playing complete bitches, probably because she trusted her ability to reveal the hurt beneath the anger. And that’s just what she does in Summer Wishes, to the point that her performance has a subtlety the rest of the movie can’t quite match. So, while the film as a whole is good but not great, no such hedging is required when praising Woodward’s work. She’s abrasive, exhausting, rude, vicious, and vulnerable, portraying the whole spectrum of one woman’s complex emotional life.

          Rita Walden (Joanne Woodward) is the wife of a successful optometrist, Harry (Martin Balsam). They live in upper-middle-class luxury in New York City. Rita whiles away her time shopping with her stuck-up mother (Sylvia Sidney), fretting about a past love she can’t forget, and trying to understand why she’s at loggerheads with her adult daughter and completely estranged from her adult son. In the course of the story, a family tragedy and a resulting breakdown force Rita to question her life choices, even as the long-suffering Harry takes her on a romantic getaway to Europe. Profoundly lost, Rita lashes out at anyone and everyone, yet still expects her loved ones to come when she calls; she’s incapable of realizing that her psychological prison is of her own making. And once Rita and her husband reach France, we realize Harry his is own demons, because traumatic memories of his World War II combat experiences come flooding back.

          Directed by journeyman Gilbert Cates as the follow-up to his similarly bleak award-winner I Never Sang for My Father (1970), and written by Stewart Stern (an Oscar nominee for the 1968 Woodward vehicle Rachel, Rachel), this is a posh but understated production from top to bottom. The interior scenes, evocatively lit by cameraman Gerald Hischfeld, are bathed in deep shadows that reflect the emotional states of the characters, and the exterior scenes, particularly those in the former battlefields of the European theater, are suitably overcast.

          Balsam, though primarily focused on mirroring Woodward’s acting, has some sweetly affecting moments as a man struggling to understand his enigma of a wife, and Sidney is fierce in her brief appearance. The picture isn’t perfect by a long shot, and the subplot of Rita being traumatized by her son’s homosexuality is treated clumsily; dream sequences in which Rita’s son is romanced by a male ballet dancer are at best dated and at worst borderline offensive. That said, Summer Wishes, Winter Dreams attacks a worthy theme with focus and purpose, making it easy to overlook a few narrative hiccups. (Available through Columbia Screen Classics via WarnerArchive.com)

Summer Wishes, Winter Dreams: FUNKY