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Divine sacrilege, tabloid illumination. It opens on a note of terror adduced from the Charles Whitman spree (bullets raining on New Yorkers from a water tower) and builds to a gutty transmutation of D.H. Lawrence's "Holy Family" (Fantasia of the Unconscious). Sniper, berserk flatfoot at St. Patrick's Day parade and slaughtering paterfamilias, each expires in tranquil elation while giving the piously ominous title as his reason. A devout Catholic juggling sex, divorce, masculinity and guilt, the police detective (Tony Lo Bianco) embodies more conflicting tensions than the case he's investigating. Forgetting mysteries is the next best thing to explaining them, a character says, but Larry Cohen is all about blowing lids off, his derangement of the Gospel leaves no stone unturned and no anxiety unprodded. From the Nativity to It's Alive is but a step, Mary here is one of "the last two virgins," the old maid (Sylvia Sidney) in the retirement home with a memory of extraterrestrial rape and insemination. (The 1950s filter on her counterpart, naked before headlights on a rainy night, irresistibly evokes Kiss Me Deadly.) If the cop turns out to be the Messiah, does that make his shimmering, insinuatingly hermaphroditic double (Richard Lynch) the Antichrist, or something even more threatening to him, a forbidden liberator? On the sidelines of the Christian spectacle, the veteran muckraker (Sam Levene) lends a tinge of Jewish acerbity: "Total chaos... that's what I like." The Wall Street disciples, ancient Egyptian curses and "the cost of salvation," Watergate and the quivering labia of order, helter-skelter eyes on Andy Kaufman's doughy visage. A work of genius, in other words, arguably the Cohen film that churns with the most all-pervasive invention and danger. The last look is concurrent with The Omen. With Deborah Raffin, Sandy Dennis, Robert Drivas, Mike Kellin, William Roerick, and Harry Bellaver.
--- Fernando F. Croce |