Apocryphally Weird

58*. GOD TOLD ME TO (1976)

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AKA Demon; God Told Me To Kill

“Trust in the Lord with all your heart and lean not on your own understanding; in all your ways submit to him, and he will make your paths straight.” – Proverbs 3:5-6

DIRECTED BY: Larry Cohen

FEATURING: Tony Lo Bianco, Deborah Raffin, Sandy Dennis, Sylvia Sidney, Sam Levene, Mike Kellin, Richard Lynch

PLOT: NYPD detective Peter Nicholas investigates a series of spree killings in which the perpetrators all seem to act with no provocation or explanation, each justifying their actions by saying “God told me to.” Nicholas, a devout Catholic, is infuriated by this claim, but equally plagued by their certainty and his shame over his own sins and infidelities. His investigation leads him to an unearthly suspect, an individual with stories of alien abduction, virgin birth, and Nicholas’ own family history.

Still from God Told Me To (1976)

BACKGROUND:

  • Cohen was a genre chameleon whose c.v. includes the blaxploitation gangster flick Black Caesar, the giant-beast-in-New-York movie Q: The Winged Serpent, and the consumerism horror-satire The Stuff, and his previous film It’s Alive, the tale of a monstrous baby that our own Alfred Eaker called “one of the best horror films of the decade.”
  • Cohen planned to engage Bernard Herrmann, who provided the music for It’s Alive, to compose the score for the new film. According to Cohen, Herrmann watched a rough cut and afterwards discussed his plans with the director over dinner. Unfortunately, Herrmann passed away in his sleep that night. (The film is dedicated to the composer.) Cohen’s next choice, Miklós Rózsa, turned down the job, saying, “God told me not to.” Frank Cordell eventually scored the film.
  • Cohen first cast Robert Forster in the role of the detective. Forster worked on the film for several days before tiring of the director’s methods and leaving the production.
  • The policeman who goes on a shooting rampage at the St. Patrick’s Day parade is portrayed by Andy Kaufman, in his film debut. Cohen crashed the actual parade to film without a permit, and said later that he had to intervene with onlookers to protect Kaufman when the comedian taunted them.

INDELIBLE IMAGE: In their final showdown, the glowing, androgynous Bernard tempts Nicholas to join forces and spawn a new race of beings on earth. As proof of his bonafides, Philip pulls up his tunic to reveal a pulsing vagina located squarely in the left side of his chest. It’s a startling sight (and a curious location at that), but it clears the bar for shock value, and ensures that Nicholas is definitively unconvinced to join the cause.

TWO WEIRD THINGS: Abstract alien abduction; ribcage vagina

WHAT MAKES IT WEIRD: God Told Me To builds upon the intriguing decision to take the rantings of homicidal lunatics seriously, and to consider the possibility that God really is commanding the insane to do their horrible deeds. Upon this simple subversion, Cohen piles up a child’s treasury of conspiracy theories and paranoid tropes, including shadowy cabals of power, police corruption, ancient astronauts, hermaphroditism, mind control, and angel/devil dichotomies. It’s a mad melange of wild ideas and outlandish plot twists that guarantees you never quite get your footing.

Original trailer for God Told Me To (1976)

COMMENTS: “It’s based on a true story!” Larry Cohen told the Village Voice about God Told Me To in 2018. “No, seriously, it’s a picture about religion, and the violence people do in the name of religion — which feels really relevant today.” Of course, Cohen was far Continue reading 58*. GOD TOLD ME TO (1976) →

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APOCRYPHA CANDIDATE: THE SURFER (2024)

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DIRECTED BY:

FEATURING: , Julian McMahon, Nic Cassim

PLOT: A divorced father (Nicolas Cage) plans to buy the Australian beachside house he grew up in and teach his son to surf the waves like he did as a boy, but local “surf gangsters” torment him, insisting the beach is for “locals only.”

The Surfer (2024)

WHY IT MIGHT JOIN THE APOCRYPHA: The metaphor is obvious, but apt: this is a movie where you just catch Cage’s wave and ride it where it takes you, relishing the lack of control.

COMMENTS: As we open, Nicolas Cage (whose character is never named, merely credited as “The Surfer”) merely wants to take his kid (credited as “The Kid”) surfing on the beach where he grew up. He promises, in a bit of ironic foreshadowing, that catching a particularly gnarly wave is nothing short of a “short sharp shock of violence on the shore.” His dreams are dashed when a self-appointed surf cop in a Santa hat informs him that this public beach is for “locals only.” Outnumbered by the surf-gangsters (“Bay Boys”), Cage retreats to the overlook-cum-rest stop where he will spend most of the rest of the movie, anxiously attempting to contact his associate Mike to raise the additional $100,000 he needs posthaste to purchase his father’s old homestead on a cliff overlooking the beach. The Bay Boys’ bullying continues, however. First, Cage loses his surfboard; then, after his car battery and cell battery die, he finds himself stranded and subjected to increasing harassment. All the while, more details emerge suggesting that he may not be the completely together businessman he presents himself as, while golden-hued flashbacks suggest a youth that might not have been as carefree as he remembers.

What follows for Cage is a complete breakdown, as the script strips the bourgeoisie accoutrements of civilization away from him one by one, leaving him—at least temporarily—destitute. Accumulating a series of small wounds and suffering from short-term malnutrition and dehydration as he bakes in the Christmas sun, Cage drifts into a second-act fever dream where his very identity comes into question. About the only local who isn’t outright hostile to him is a scraggly beach bum (credited only as “The Bum”) who bunks in a discarded car in the same parking lot, and who has been bullied by the Bay Boys for decades now. Cage seems doomed to follow in his footsteps.

Theater patrons are advised to wear sunscreen, as the bright cinematography might give you sunburn, and when the screen starts wavering like high tide has briefly crested over the film, you might wonder if you’re experiencing heat stroke yourself. Francois Tetaz’s ultracool score, full of harp arpeggios and wordless vocals, takes its nostalgic period cues more from exotica than surf music, giving it a grandiose moodiness that constantly threatens to teeter into psychedelia. Finnegan’s visuals cross that line in the third act.

Cage himself is relatively restrained, more in Pig than Mandy mode; but of course, restrained for Cage can involve him force feeding a dead rat to a battered enemy. The fact that we expect, and accept, craziness from Cage makes him the perfect actor for this exercise in masculine delusionalism. Research confirmed my suspicions that this script about an upper middle-class man undergoing a midlife crisis explored via a water sport was explicitly inspired by another famous The S____er (among other sources). The Surfer, naturally, doesn’t quite reach its predecessor’s heights; it’s far more scattered, lacking its forebear’s intense focus on a single character, bringing a manospherish cult and hallucinatory red herrings into the equation. But The Surfer (suggested alternate title: The Sufferer) has a similar empathetic effect that hits home for men of a certain age and marital status.

WHAT THE CRITICS SAY:

“‘The Surfer’ is weird and wily, and while it doesn’t always connect, it maintains a strange presence that’s intriguing.”–Brian Orndorf, Blu-ray.com

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APOCRYPHA CANDIDATE: MUTANT ALIENS (2001)

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DIRECTED BY: Bill Plympton

FEATURING: Voices of Francine Lobis, Dan McComas, George Casden, Matthew Brown, Jay Cavanaugh

PLOT: Josie has kept her eyes on the skies for twenty years hoping to witness her father’s return from space; but on his re-entry, he is not alone.

WHY IT MIGHT JOIN THE APOCRYPHA:

“The president’s being eaten by a nose!”

Check the regulations.

COMMENTS: Early on in Mutant Aliens, we observe a young woman’s inner dialogue about whether or not to bang her beau. As a right-shoulder nun and left-shoulder slut exchange arguments, insults, and blows, her beau stands eagerly nearby, stretching out the front of his underpants’ waistband. Within said pants, Plympton manifests a series of metaphors: a launching missile, a locomotive, a hammer-and-anvil, etc. The scene culminates with voracious lovemaking over the woman’s observation console, the thrustful energy knocking her boob into a control lever. On the display screen, she observes an unidentified object as it comes crashing through Earth’s atmosphere.

In many ways, this vignette encapsulates not merely the building blocks of Space Mutants, but perhaps the animation-auteur’s modus operandi: Plympton suffers an insatiable desire to play with shapes and lines, and has spent his career developing plotlines sturdy enough to support his lively doodling. Mutant Aliens is an absurd narrative—Earth astronaut returns after twenty years with a mad yarn about about love and war with space noses and finger-riding space eyeballs—that features every strange curvy-cue, heaving bio-mass, and ultra-violent encounter his fan base has come to expect. Advertisement goons drool and thrust over the prospect of orbitally projected commercials; a bored secretary devises elaborate fornicatory scenarios between her left and right hands; and mutant aliens reign gross-but-cute terror on the various government suits desperately attempting to contain their menace.

Also, there’s Jesus drag racing—in song. Plympton has several axes to grind: against religion (I’m guessing he had to endure plenty of “Satanic Panic” and TV evangelism during his formative years), against Big Media (see also The Tune), against the military-industrial complex (see also I Married a Strange Person), and so on. And though he’s considerably heavy-handed—a lot of throbbing linework and delightfully icky sound effects go into his screeding—it’s hard to object. The cartoonish excess adds up to cartoonish dismissiveness, and his films feel more like jolly, middle finger Fuck Yous! than like some mopey killjoy whingeing through a megaphone.

Sure, sure, bits sag here and there (not unlike the occasional swinging breast or phallus), but by the time you notice a lull, Plympton’s wonderfully distracted pen moves on to another blast of ridiculousness. And this is the biggest draw for Plympton fans: in a way, he does the same thing over and over, within each narrative framework as well as from movie to movie. However, this “same thing” is playing around with his medium as hard as he can while poking the prudish, the pompous, and the otherwise powerful.

And that’s just peachy.

WHAT THE CRITICS SAY:

“Juxtaposing the sentimental and the bizarre comes naturally to Plympton, whose films are truly singular — surreal, lovably crude, and sweet-natured but grosser than heck, with blown-up heads and bitten-off fingers galore. Mutant Aliens is no exception… Weird stuff, I tell you, but it’s terribly cute and good-natured somehow.”–Marrit Ingman, The Austin Chronicle (contemporaneous)

Mutant Aliens

Mutant Aliens
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CAPSULE: LES SAIGNANTES (2005)

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AKA The Bloodettes, The Bloodiest

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DIRECTED BY: Jean-Pierre Bekolo

FEATURING: Adéle Ado, , Emile Abossolo

PLOT: When a high-ranking government official dies, Majolie enlists her best friend to segue the disaster into a business opportunity by throwing a trendy W.I.P.: “Wake for an Important Personality.”

COMMENTS: As said, when the going gets weird, the weird turn pro; and that’s exactly what these plucky heroines do. Set in the neon-drenched perpetual night of Yaounde, Cameroon, twenty years in the future, Bekolo’s genre-hopping Afro-futurist tale depicts a city caught up in the competing influences of power, money, sex, and an ancient elemental force called Mevoungou.

Majolie only discovers her client’s identity when searching his wallet after he suddenly expires from a heart attack during an acrobatic aerialist kink session. To her distress, he’s nearly ninety years old and not just a “granddaddy” but the “SGCC”: Secretary General of the Civil Cabinet. She calls her friend Chouchou to help her out of this mess, then promptly gets drunk.

After killing a bottle of whiskey together, the girls acknowledge the ominous presence of the spirit Mevoungou. Risking the danger of channeling this ambiguous power, they steal the SGCC’s AI driven car to dispose of the official’s body. To further complicate matters, Chouchou’s mother, attended by a bevy of mysterious Bene Gesserit-like priestesses, keeps calling her, arousing the suspicions of an idealistic young cop.

Throughout the course of their night the girls dodge a number of questionable characters, including an insolent cab driver and a nosy neighbor who invites herself along for the ride, along with the mundane inconveniences of a society rife with sexual harassment and government corruption. After bribing a cannibal butcher to chop up the body (he weeps when he tastes SGCC flesh), the girls hit upon the idea of holding a wake—except they need a full corpse to make that happen, and they now only have the head.

Bribing a mortician turns out to be a troublesome task. He’s annoyed at being dragged out his bed in order to supply a body and asks for far too much money. Chouchou doesn’t want to pay him, but Majolie insists the fee will be worth it. In an office decorated with a fish tank full of body parts they continue to haggle over the price. Once they reach a deal, the girls look over the unclaimed bodies to find a good match.

After a narrow escape from the Madame Director of the hospital, the girls dress for the funeral. The Wake for an Important Personality at first goes off without a hitch: a crowd shows up, there’s lots of food and drink, and even the SGCC’s family attends. The only minor disturbance occurs when his wife and daughter tearfully insist the body isn’t his. The girls catch the eye of Minister of State and target him as their new patron. Unfortunately, he too knows how to channel Mevoungou, and they find themselves facing a daunting adversary.

Simple and effective camera techniques (dissolves and double-exposures) conjure a world animated by unseen forces. The futuristic 2025 technology, from camera phones to self-driven cars with English-speaking interfaces, appears disconcertingly accurate (as does the tag line “We were already in 2025, and nothing much had changed”).

Action sequences pay homage to The Matrix, but the derivative fight scenes quickly give way to Majolie and Chouchou’s mesmerizing synchronized dances. In the final showdown they confront their enemy, and in order to preserve their autonomy must also fight off the potentially destructive influence of Mevoungou. Much remains unexplained about this enigmatic entity which kills, and laughs, and dances. It flows through the film like a current of weirdness and, much like in real life, whether the weird brings change for good or ill all depends on how you react to it.

WHAT THE CRITICS SAY:

“…as fascinating as it is obscure… Although the production values of this digitally shot film are threadbare, the bizarre visions of writer-director-editor Bekolo are not.”–Marjorie Baumgarten, Austin Chronicle (contemporaneous)

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