God Told Me To

 A sniper climbs up a water tower high up in the New York skyline and starts shooting people with uncanny precision. Fourteen dead, despite the fact that he's using a "mail order rifle" with an uncalibrated scope. When Lieutenant Nicholas (Tony Lo Bianco) goes to try and talk him down, the shooter seems friendly enough - and when the lieutenant asks him why he's doing it, the amiable psycho replies "God told me to" and jumps off the building.

 More shootings follow, always started by normal people, always claiming they were divinely inspired. This peaks in an absolutely chilling scene - worth the price of admission alone - where a man cheerily describes how he murdered his family in an interview with the lieutenant. It's not a scary movie, but that scene is as horrific as anything I've seen in a while.
 As for the plot, our protagonist finds out that there's some sort of hippy hanging around the periphery of all these events, and chasing that lead takes him to some... pretty unexpected places. Writer/director/all-round-legend Larry Cohen was great at coming up with catchy, crazy premises, but I don't think I'm being unfair when I say he wasn't as good at developing the plots around them. His style, of which this movie is an excellent example, was to follow an insane premise to whichever batshit crazy destination it leads him to, which might not necessarily be the most cinematic or narratively satisfying route.

 It's firmly a genre movie - which genre it finally ends up settling on is actually a spoiler - but the film pays a lot of attention to its dramatic elements, especially where it concerns lt. Nicholas's relationships with his lover (Deborah Raffin)and his estranged wife (Sandy Dennis) and his beliefs.

 While less satirical than a lot of Cohen's output, it's still pretty playful; I mean, when one of the big-in-the-seventies books that inspired the script gets an oblique namecheck, well, you can't but help admire the director's balls.

 And just you wait until you see the film's sole latex special effects creation; I'd love to see the face of the prop sculptor when he got that commission.

 More interesting than good, which is still a good place to be because Cohen's engaging style carries the movie successfully - even when working with a pretty low budget (this is a New World Pictures release, after all). The filmmaking and scripting alternate between very accomplished and endearingly clunky, which is about par for the course with Cohen. I do think a lot of the shots look really good, and it's maybe a little more stylized than the rest of the movies I've seen of his; There's quite a few very atmospheric shots.

 So... yeah, this is a weird one, but firmly in the 'good weird' side of things; An extremely personal film that I can't see anyone else making in even a remotely similar way, willing to go exceedingly nuts when it needs to but tempered with a host of very human moments and a very likeable protagonist.