Larry Cohen: The B-Movie King of New York
Check out any list of top New York directors and all the usual names come up: Martin Scorsese, Woody Allen and Spike Lee, among many others. One name that isn’t often included – and this is why he is so underrated – is Larry Cohen.
Born in Manhattan and raised in the Bronx, Cohen may have built a reputation as a maverick schlockmeister, but one thing you see in his movies is that he shot the Big Apple like nobody else. After 9/11, it’s unlikely that anyone ever will again.
While Cohen’s ideas were often fantastical and his methods opportunistic, he was also a shrewd guy. He knew full well that his hometown was the greatest living movie set on the planet and his run-and-gun methods took full advantage, adding extra production value to his low-budget pictures. Indeed, his New York sequences often added street-level veracity to his outlandish concepts.
Perhaps the most famous example is the parade scene in God Told Me To (1976). Cohen was an indie filmmaker and he was always trying to keep costs down, so he regularly shot his movies on location without a permit. In this case, he decided to capture footage of the St Patrick’s Day parade. Not only that, he inserted his actor (Andy Kaufman in his first screen appearance) dressed as a police officer among the hundreds of real cops marching through Manhattan.
In another instance, Cohen caused panic in the streets while filming an action scene at the top of the Chrysler Building for Q - The Winged Serpent (1982). Although he was using blank rounds, the sound of gunfire and spent shells falling to the pavement below sent pedestrians running. He was forced to release a public apology in a newspaper – no doubt relishing the extra free publicity it would generate.
Otherwise, Cohen’s films tend to be a little flat visually and the editing can be slapdash, perhaps belying the fact that he was a writer first and foremost who learned his trade through an extensive career on television serials. He was more interested in conveying his ideas in an efficient and cost-effective manner than making things look pretty.
Cohen’s penny-pinching, somewhat paradoxically, also enabled him to stack his cast and crew with real quality. He would often cast older actors who were out of favour and would work for a reduced rate, such as when he secured three Oscar winners (Broderick Crawford, Jose Ferrer and Celeste Holm) for The Private Files of J. Edgar Hoover. He also managed to convince Bernard Hermann to compose the music for It’s Alive, one of the maestro’s last scores (along with Taxi Driver) before he passed away. It didn’t always work out – he cast a visibly frail and ailing Bette Davis in Wicked Stepmother, but she pulled out after seeing what she looked like on camera.
Let’s get into Cohen’s movies. Here are some of my favourites, plus one you should maybe leave until later.
The Ambulance (1990)
On paper, the concept for The Ambulance sounds pretty grim. Imagine this directed by someone like James Wan: A fake ambulance prowling New York is kidnapping diabetics for ghastly illegal medical experiments. On screen, however, it is perhaps Larry Cohen’s most deliriously fast-paced and enjoyable movie.
Josh Baker (Eric Roberts) is a heavily-mulleted comic artist who falls for Cheryl Turner (Janine Turner) and chats her up on the street. She collapses and paramedics are quickly on the scene, but it turns out she was never admitted when Josh tries to visit her at the hospital. The similar abduction of Cheryl’s roommate – who also happens to be diabetic – leads him to believe something sinister is going on. Predictably, the cops don’t take the matter seriously, least of all Lieutenant Frank Spencer, a gum-chewing detective played by James Earl Jones chewing on the scenery.
This all sounds like standard conspiracy thriller stuff, but what makes The Ambulance such a delight is Cohen’s devotion to colourful characters, offbeat digressions, quirky bits of business, and Stan Lee in his first film role.
Cohen often liked to centre his stories around oddballs and Roberts capably channels Michael Moriarty, the director’s regular collaborator in that capacity. Roberts gives one of his most endearing performances with an unpredictable turn that goes up another notch when he is paired with Red Buttons. The veteran comic and actor plays an old-school reporter helping Josh investigate the case, and the movie turns into a buddy murder mystery when they’re together.
Add some terrific stunt work, an exuberant pace, and the coolest vintage ambulance since Ecto-1 and you’ve got yourself a rollicking good time. As with many other Cohen movies, there is an element of social commentary going on here too, which gives the otherwise wacky movie a little more bite than you might expect.
The Stuff (1985)
What do you do if you spot some strange substance bubbling out of the ground? Dip your finger in and taste it, of course! The substance in question turns out to be delicious and incredibly addictive, rushed into the mass market by unscrupulous executives as a dessert called The Stuff. It becomes a craze that sweeps the nation, but a young boy named Jason (Scott Bloom) discovers that the tasty goo is alive and has taken over his parents. Meanwhile, industrial spy David “Mo” Rutherford (Michael Moriarty) teams up with a disgruntled junk food producer called Chocolate Chip Charlie (Garrett Morris) to investigate the secret behind the latest sensation.
The Stuff is a sly comedy-horror that draws heavily on classic ‘50s sci-fi in the set-up. The tasting scene at the beginning is very much in the old “something just fell from the sky… let’s poke it with a stick” category, and the unnerving change in Jason’s parents recalls Invaders from Mars. Then the movie goes full-on Blob as the malevolent Stuff eats unwitting victims from the inside out before bursting out in a grisly way.
As usual with Cohen, nothing is quite as straightforward as it may otherwise unfold in the hands of a more conventional director. The satire on mass-produced junk food is bluntly on-the-nose, tying in with his larger concerns about mindless consumerism in American society. In the middle is Moriarty’s wild card performance as Rutherford, an offbeat movie hero if ever there was one. The physical effects are also really well done, making The Stuff a rare example of a mainstream(ish) Melt Movie. It would work as a super double-bill with Chuck Russell’s excellent remake of The Blob (1988).
Q – The Winged Serpent (1982)
Larry Cohen obsessively consumed films when he was a kid, sometimes spending all day in cinemas watching multiple movies until he got kicked out. Q – The Winged Serpent is his homage to the classic city-trashing creatures of old, paying a particular nod to the greatest monster mash of them all, King Kong.
After things kick off with a terrific head-chomping scene, the NYPD are investigating a spate of gory killings on the city’s rooftops. Heading up the case are two hard-nosed detectives, played by David Carradine and Richard Roundtree, who suspect an Aztec cult might be responsible. The true culprit is even worse than they feared: the giant winged God Quetzalcoatl has nested in the Chrysler Building and is preying on unsuspecting New Yorkers.
Cohen has a great time sending up the conventions of vintage monster movies, throwing in lashings of gore, a delightfully corny-looking stop-motion beast, and his usual wry satire. Michael Moriarity is also tossed into the mix, improvising like crazy as a small-time crook who stumbles on the creature’s lair and sees plenty of angles for himself. Q is wildly uneven, but it sure is a lot of fun.
Black Caesar (1973)
After making his directorial debut with the subversive home invasion thriller Bone, Cohen delved further into the booming Blaxploitation market with Black Caesar. The film had a strange genesis, originally commissioned by Sammy Davis Jr. as a vehicle for himself. The Rat Pack star reasoned that since he was a little guy like James Cagney and Edward G. Robinson, he could do a black version of the street-tough hoodlums they played in classic gangster movies like The Public Enemy and Little Caesar.
Davis’s project fell through, however, when he ran into a spot of bother with the IRS and couldn’t pay Cohen’s fee. Cohen sold the spec script to Sam Arkoff at American Independent Pictures (AIP) instead before casting another actor with a very different stature. He turned to Fred “The Hammer” Williamson, a handsome former NFL star who had made his screen debut with a small role in M*A*S*H and was ready for leading man status.
Black Caesar is an assured piece of film-making from Cohen, a rise-and-fall Harlem mob saga as tough and action-packed as its ruthless protagonist. Williamson proved just as charismatic as Richard Roundtree and, as Cohen later noted, looked great in the slick threads the wardrobe department provided for him. The film also benefits greatly from James Brown’s funky score – it has been sampled by numerous artists and even if you don’t know the movie, you’ll almost certainly know some of the tunes. The movie was such a success that Cohen dashed out a sequel, Hell Up in Harlem, later the same year.
God Told Me To (1976)
God Told Me To is Larry Cohen’s quintessential New York movie, shot in his typical seat-of-the-pants style with the camera weaving between real and often bemused-looking city-dwellers. The approach gives this strange sci-fi horror a level of authentic street-level grit that many more expensive movies could only hope to achieve.
The film has a gutsy premise that risked offending religious groups with that provocative title alone. It grabs you by the throat from the get-go as a gunman opens fire on the crowds below from the top of a Manhattan water tower. NYPD Peter Nicholas (Tony Lo Bianco) goes to talk the killer down, but the shooter calmly tells him he received orders from the Almighty before leaping to his death.
Nicholas, a devout Catholic, investigates a spate of similar but unrelated mass murders breaking out across the city. All the perpetrators have the same reason: God told them to do it. As Nicholas probes deeper, however, he discovers that the mysterious entity provoking the killers may indeed come from up above, but not from Heaven.
God Told Me To was not well received when it first hit theatres – Roger Ebert dismissed it with a curt one-star review. Perhaps it was a little ahead of its time, pre-dating the ‘90s obsession with UFOs and alien abduction. It’s full of ideas and Cohen handles the potentially scandalous subject matter with restraint and intelligence, although the movie runs out of puff as the otherworldly solution involving virgin births and psychic aliens unfolds. It is one of those cases when an imaginative filmmaker comes up with a brilliant premise that they can’t quite successfully resolve. Even so, it is a fascinating watch and provides plenty of food for thought.
Where not to start: It’s Alive (1974)
Cohen’s transition from blaxploitation to horror eventually became a surprise hit. Although It’s Alive performed poorly on its original limited 1974 release, a re-issue with a revamped ad campaign in 1977 saw it turn a substantial profit and paved the way for an unlikely trilogy of killer baby movies, followed by It Lives Again (1978) and It’s Alive III: Island of the Alive (1987). The sequels – also written and produced by Cohen – deliver on the schlocky kills that the premise suggests, but the original is surprisingly low-key given its subject matter.
The film opens with PR man Frank Davis (John P. Ryan) taking his wife Lenore (Sharon Farrell) to hospital to have their second child. When the baby is delivered, however, it turns out to be a horribly deformed homicidal maniac, killing everyone in the operating theatre before going on the run. The creature hides out in L.A’s storm drains as the police organise a city-wide baby hunt to kill the thing before it can cause any more carnage.
The reason for the mutation isn’t fully explained, but it is suggested that pharmaceuticals and/or man-made pollution may be behind it – again, hinting at the more serious concerns that often lurk in the background of Cohen’s genre flicks. Sadly, It’s Alive simply isn’t as much fun as his later movies, spending way too much time with Frank and Lenore as they agonise over the repercussions of giving birth to a bloodthirsty sprog. Not only that, the film misses New York badly as Cohen simply doesn’t have the flair for sunny California as he does his home city.
Thankfully, the fleeting moments when we actually see the baby rampage are terrific, helped enormously by Rick Baker’s ghoulish creature design and a genuinely suspenseful score from the legendary Bernard Hermann. It’s worth seeing for Cohen completists but definitely not the best entry point into his filmography.
So there you have it, our rundown of Larry Cohen’s greatest exploitation classics. Are you a fan of his movies? If so, which are your favourites? Let us know!
