Screenplay by Larry Cohen While watching Invasion of Privacy, I had a striking realization that in retrospect, is so obvious, I feel like an idiot for not noticing it sooner: Despite his running obsessions with religion and corporate/government abuse of power, the main theme that threads through Larry Cohen’s work—both as a writer/director and screenwriter […]
Tag Archives: God Told Me To
Executive Produced (uncredited), Written, and Directed by Larry Cohen While watching Perfect Strangers, Larry Cohen’s train wreck of a romantic thriller, I was reminded of a snippet of Roger Ebert’s review of Death to Smoochy, which I quoted in my Movie Defender piece on that misunderstood film: “Only enormously talented people could have made Death […]
Written by Larry Cohen Joel Schumacher just couldn’t get out of the way. Given a fairly interesting story and mostly tight screenplay, Phone Booth could have been a tense, sweaty little thriller. Instead, with Schumacher at the helm, the film feels at times like an homage to the more ADD-afflicted films of Tony Scott and […]
Written by Larry Cohen As the direct-to-DVD market proliferated in the ‘90s and into this century, it was only a matter of time before a Larry Cohen script was given the slapdash, bare bones treatment and dropped into the nearest bargain bin (of course, I am ignoring films like Uncle Sam that Cohen had a […]
Written, Produced, and Directed by Larry Cohen Q (aka Q: The Winged Serpent) hit theaters in 1982. But for me the film came along circa 1984-85. You see, that’s when the film was in heavy rotation on cable. I was a terribly impressionable ten year old, watching in shock and disgust by peeping through the […]
Written, Produced, and Directed by Larry Cohen Larry Cohen has the ability to take himself seriously at times. For most filmmakers who traffic in genre pictures and satire, this can be a recipe for disaster. In Cohen’s case, this led to arguably his two best films: God Told Me To and It’s Alive. Where God […]
Executive Produced, Written, and Directed by Larry Cohen Sometimes Larry Cohen’s penchant for genre films mixed with social satire leads him into situations where those elements fail to gel. Such is the case with The Stuff. But despite the fact that the film doesn’t fully work as a satisfying whole, it’s still very entertaining and well […]
Written, Produced, and Directed by Larry Cohen I’m going to spend a lot of time on this blog writing about the films of writer/producer/director Larry Cohen. Unfairly brushed aside by mainstream critics and many film historians as merely a cheesy B-movie director, his output has been admittedly uneven, but the highs far outnumber the lows […]
Obsessive Movie Nerd 