Retrospective Film Review

God Told Me To (1976) • 45 Years Later

A detective investigates a series of inexplicable and savage crimes, linked only by the perpetrators claiming that “God told me to…”

God descended to the big screen in 1975 to appear in Monty Python and the Holy Grail (animated by Terry Gilliam and voiced by Graham Chapman), and again in 1977, this time incarnated as a twinkly old man by George Burns for Oh, God! Neither portrayal was conventionally reverent, but they’re downright traditional alongside the God — or putative God — played by Richard Lynch in Larry Cohen’s God Told Me To, an extraordinary, trippy fusion of Big Apple police procedural, post-Exorcist theological horror, and 1970s paranoia.

Cohen’s film is undeniably flawed: the storyline is a non-stop series of revelations rather than a plot in the normal sense, narrative jumps can leave the audience confused, and occasional forays into outright sci-fi SFX (some of them using footage from UK TV series Space: 1999) sit uncomfortably with the handheld realism of the New York scenes. But its strangeness and its…