An off-the-wall alien abduction saga that skewers mankind’s fundamental behavioral and belief systems, Larry Cohen’s God Told Me To never quite lives up to its bravura opening, in which detective Peter Nicholas (Tony Lo Bianco) investigates a series of random slayings perpetrated by ordinary people (including a young Andy Kaufman as a crazed cop) who all claim, on their death beds, that they were carrying out the will of God. Such assertions hit home for Nicholas, a devout Catholic who attends church every morning and, though involved with a serious girlfriend, maintains a relationship with the estranged wife (Sandy Dennis) his faith won’t allow him to divorce. As Nicholas pries deeper into the mysterious crimes, what he uncovers is a secret cabal of corporate bigwigs working at the behest of a glowing hermaphroditic deity named Bernard (Richard Lynch) who seems to have been the product of an artificially inseminated virgin birth orchestrated by space invaders – an origin shared by none other than Nicholas himself! As usual, Cohen’s grittily shot, continuity-challenged film is beset by roiling social tensions, with the masses so gripped by a disgust for the devout, the elderly, and hippies – as well as for the unborn, in a theme reminiscent of It’s Alive – that they hardly seems to need divine guidance to enact violence. Yet disappointingly, his intriguing but exasperatingly uneven film loses cohesiveness at the moment it should be congealing, proving partly unsure of how to fluidly synthesis its Christian symbolism, jumbled socio-religious critique, and X-Files-ish conspiracy theories about extraterrestrial Almighties.
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