aka The Demon

• Written, produced, and directed by Larry Cohen
• Starring
  • Tony Lo Bianco
  • Deborah Raffin
  • Sandy Dennis
  • Sylvia Sidney
  • Richard Lynch

This, the third of three videos loaned me by the enigmatic Apostic of B-Notes (the other two being The Apple and Martin), is by far the most thought-provoking of the trio. It’s a good movie, which is actually annoying — because it’s also an almost-great movie that veers away from the real meat ‘n’ potatoes far too soon.

We open with a bang. Literally — a rifle report as a bicyclist in New York traffic drops suddenly from his bike, dead. Pedestrians all over start falling, thanks to a single man perched on a water tower. Mass panic ensues.

Peekaboo.

In the delay before the official crisis-control types can get there, a single policeman, Peter Nicholas (Tony Lo Bianco), climbs the ladder to talk to the sniper. The smiling gunman cheerfully volunteers his name, and then blithely gives his motive — “God told me to” — before swan-diving to his death.

Naturally, this shakes poor Pete up, especially because he’s kind of living a stressful life as it is. He’s living with pretty girlfriend Casey (Deborah Raffin), but he’s still married to his estranged wife Martha (Sandy Dennis), presumably because he’s a good Catholic, and divorce isn’t permitted. (To be honest, I never have been able to comprehend any personal moral code which treats divorce as an absolute evil, but smiles forgivingly on adultery. Maybe that’s just me.) And he’s not just a Catholic by habit; he believes fervently. And that’s why he becomes more than professionally determined about this “God” killing — especially when he finds another perp who had started stabbing people at random in the supermarket. What does this fine fellow say right before he snuffs it in a hospital ward? “God told me to.”

So when a mysterious call comes in that the St. Patrick’s Day Parade will be the target of the next random/religious attack, Peter’s the only one who takes the warning seriously. Not that convincing others would have helped; the attack comes from the most unlikely of places — one of the thousands of marching patrolmen in the parade. (Probably more amazing is that this patrolman is played by Andy Kaufman, but let’s not get into that.)

Hmm. No, I don’t think we have enough cops here.

Since the rest of the department wants to bury the religious angle and keep it from the public, only Peter explores along those lines, and finds that each of these killers had had recent contact with a long-haired blond man in his mid-twenties, one who walked around New York barefoot. A little additional investigation gest him the name of this mysterious man — Bernard Phillips — and a past address, where a crazed woman attacks him with a knife. She kills herself falling down the stairs, but Peter can tell exactly what she’s trying to say as she dies…

And then things take a turn for the bizarre when the woman is autopsied. Her records show her to be Mrs. Phillips, the mother of the mysterious young man — but an examination shows her to be a virgin. (I’m no medical expert, but I’d think that childbirth would erase the subtle physical signs of virginity.)

It turns out, after some digging, that Mrs. Phillips had had some kind of alien encounter, one that was laughed off at the time, but resulted in a pregnancy. And this starts turning more keys in Peter’s mind, some explaining the deep connection he feels to this case, because Peter himself was adopted from a young single mother under doubtful circumstances.

Hey, I don’t remember giving anyone permission to shoot in my home office.

And here, I maintain, is where the movie starts to go off-track, starts to tell a story that’s interesting but not nearly as compelling as the story it started telling. And I’ll tell you why.

I’m a very religious person. I have strong beliefs and convictions about the nature of God, the nature of humans, and the nature of the universe as a whole. This faith informs the paradigm by which I view the world around me, and by which I make all of life’s choices.

And what if I’m wrong?

I don’t give much thought to that, as a rule. Mine’s not a naive faith; it’s been tempered and scarred and come out stronger, so I’m pretty confident in leaving my bet where I’ve placed it, as opposed to reinventing the wheel on a daily basis. But deep down, I will admit to you, that’s probably my greatest fear, or at least the fear whose consequences are the greatest. What if all of it’s wrong? What if nothing I believe is true?

Repaint! Repaint!

I submit to you that I’m not alone in this. For any moderately religious or spiritual person who has ever given any thought to his faith, that niggling doubt has to lurk somewhere in the dark reaches of the soul: What if none of it is true?

That’s why religious iconography shows up so often in horror films, though usually in a cursory manner. The odd bit of blasphemy here, a scripture out of context there, etc. Usually, the filmmakers themselves are uncomfortable pushing too hard on that weak spot (especially in this day and age, where horror films aren’t supposed to actually horrify or anything), so they merely make shadow-stabs at the material, more out of rote than anything. But that fear is there.

So for me, the most chilling scene of all is when Peter interviews a man in a mental hospital who nonchalantly describes gunning down his son, his wife, and his little daughter, all because, you guessed it, God told him to. In terms of rapture and gratitude, he describes how God filled and fulfilled him, to the point where accomplishing the small task He asked was no burden at all. “He’s given us everything,” he says, “and asks for so little.” And when Peter’s eyes fill with rage and disbelief, he simply smiles and says, “You don’t love God the way I do.”

Richard Lynch: Just as spooky-ass then as he is now.

This is the stuff that will stick with me. This is the true terror that every religious person tries to beat back — if even that most sure knowledge, the direct revelation of God, is false, what can possibly be certain?

But having lingered on this a bit, Cohen manages to lose it in his increasingly-bizarre storyline. Peter eventually meets up with a secret council of religious leaders drawn to New York by His power, and eventually introduced to the messianic Bernard: A young Richard Lynch, bathed effectively in a golden nimbus, hiding in the unused sublevels of the city. Peter also causes widespread (but apparently shortlived) panic by getting the religious details of the recent killings out to the public, and along the way he tracks down his birth mother (who is distinctly unpleased to have him show up) and has a not-so-much reconciliation with both his girlfriend and his wife.

The idea of space aliens spawning half-breed world dominators is a good one, but once it becomes the focus of the story, it not only detracts from the effectiveness of the earlier scenes, but it doesn’t stand up on its own legs. Jesus and Moses are naturally mentioned (though a moment’s thought should show that Moses doesn’t belong here), but the point of the entire alien effort is not only never explained, but seems downright silly. Seeding the occasional messianic figure randomly around the world, to do such frivolous things as cause serial killings? It’s more than “unexplainable,” it’s inane — almost a sign of writer’s desperation, throwing in things to keep the story going which don’t really make sense.

I don’t often find a movie that can truly unsettle me (as opposed to disgusting me or startling me). I’ve now found at least half of a movie that can.

A Notable Quotable:

“All my life I felt so close to God — and it wasn’t Him after all.”

- Peter

Some Notable Totables:

• body count: 30
• breasts: 4
• explosions: 1
• ominous thunderstorms: 1
• actors who’ve appeared on Star Trek: 1
  • Richard Lynch (Bernard Phillips) played Baran on the TNG two-parter “Gambit”