This 1976 Sci-Fi Horror Movie On Prime Video Has A Terrifying Premise

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Larry Cohen's 1976 cult film "God Told Me To" is well known to the warriors and trench-dwellers of the psychotronic exploration society. Those who delve into the wilder corners of kooky cult movies can most certainly tell you about the oeuvre of the late Larry Cohen, the writer-director who made dozens of striking and unusual films throughout his multi-decade career. Cohen started his career in 1972 with the comedic Yaphet Kotto vehicle "Bone" and followed it with the blaxploitation classics "Black Caesar" and "Hell Up in Harlem" in 1973. In 1974, he made one of his most famous horror films, "It's Alive," about a mutant infant that goes on a killing spree. At the box office, "It's Alive" recouped more than 14 times its budget, putting Cohen on the map. 

Although he remained prolific, making crime movies like "Perfect Strangers" and monster comedies like "Full Moon High," Cohen is perhaps best known for his outrageous horror films like "Q – The Winged Serpent" (1982) and the killer yogurt movie "The Stuff" (1985). Cohen also wrote the three "Maniac Cop" movies and directed Bette Davis' final movie, "Wicked Stepmother." In the 2000s, he continued to pen high-profile releases, including "Phone Booth," "Cellular," and "Captivity." And all of that only represents about a third of his output. 

The premise of "God Told Me To" is creepy and wild. Tony Lo Bianco played a New York cop and devout Catholic named Peter, who encounters a belltower shooter at the beginning of the film. The shooter kills 15 people before Peter manages to reach him on his perch. When asked why he was committing the murders, the shooter merely said, "God told me to" before jumping off the tower. This will prove to be only the first of many God-related mass murders.

There is a rash of mass killings throughout New York, with each assailant claiming that God told them to commit the murders. The killers never planned out their killings in advance, and they had no connection to one another. None of them seems to have had any history of violence, mental illness, or even a criminal record. The Catholic Peter begins to wonder if God actually is instructing people to murder one another. Peter's investigation starts to go sideways, however, when he investigates the home of one Bernard Phillips (B-movie luminary Richard Lynch). Bernard's mother claims that, before trying to commit a murder, she was abducted by aliens as a young woman. This Bernard character may be a half-alien hybrid, and he may have something to do with the murders. 

It's eventually revealed that Bernard is a psychic alien who is controlling a cult of ultra-wealthy followers. Bernard is psychically controlling the murders, and he appears in the minds of the assailants as God, hence their impulse to explain that God told them to commit the murders. There are some subplots about copycat killers and a grudge between Peter and a local gangster, although those plots don't connect to the main story at large. 

The film climaxes with Peter confronting Bernard and learning unusual things about the world, about Bernard's lineage, and about himself. In a shocking twist, there is a recognizable aperture on Bernard's torso that ... well, I'll leave that detail for you to discover. In a fun casting twist, a murderous New York cop is played by prankster/comedian Andy Kaufman in his first film appearance. The film also stars Deborah Raffin, Sylvia Sidney, and Sandy Dennis.

Needless to say, a bizarre, pseudo-religious horror movie with sci-fi underpinnings didn't fare well at the box office. It also wasn't well-received by critics at the time, although modern horror fanatics have grown to love it; I personally saw it at a repertory screening at the now-defunct Cinefamily in Los Angeles, and there were many marvelous hoots of incredulity from the audience. The sci-fi/alien revelations will make your eyes pop. 

In Michael Doyle's helpful 2015 biography "Larry Cohen: The Stuff of Gods and Monsters," Cohen talks a bit about "God Told Me To," saying that he wrote the film when he surmised that God, as depicted in the Bible, is one of the singularly most violent characters in the history of literature. He also took a lot of the film from Erich von Däniken's book "Chariots of the Gods?," a 1968 tome that cemented many modern theories about the extraterrestrial hand in Earth's ancient religions and architecture. In "God Told Me To," God and aliens were more or less the same thing. Cohen tried to get Bernard Hermamm to compose the music for "God Told Me To," but Hermann was busy working on Martin Scorsese's "Taxi Driver" at the time. There is a dubiously true story about how Cohen also asked  Miklós Rózsa to write the music, but that Rózsa took one look at the movie and turned it down. Rumor has it that Rózsa said that God told him not to.

Weirdly, the surreality and strange sci-fi ideas make "God Told Me To" even scarier. It's definitely unpredictable, and the nightmarish explanations describe a universe gone mad. See it today. It's on Prime Video.