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Land of Silence and Darkness (1971): A
His straightforward, austere direction corresponding with his subjects’ difficult interaction with the world, Werner Herzog masterfully conveys the logistical, emotional, and psychological burden suffered by the hearing and sight-impaired in Land of Silence and Darkness. Fini Straubinger, a woman who lost both sight and hearing during a severe staircase fall at the age of nine,…
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Wicked Stepmother (1989): C-
Were I feeling more generous, I might try to make the case that Larry Cohen’s Wicked Stepmother is really an allegory about societal mistreatment of the elderly – how, shirking their familial obligations, many use television as an old fogy babysitter, shuttle off their parents and grandparents to live alone, and generally ignore seniors’ needs…
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The Stuff (1985): B
The Stuff is arguably writer/director Larry Cohen’s most disappointing work, not because it’s terrible but, rather, because its execution never lives up to its scrumptious satiric premise. Corporate saboteur Mo Rutherford (Michael Moriarty, in another entertainingly odd, mumble-mouthed performance) is hired by ice cream industry interests to discover the secret behind desert sensation The Stuff,…
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Special Effects (1984): B
With Vertigo and Peeping Tom as his most obvious (but far from only) touchstones, Larry Cohen dives headfirst into meta territory with Special Effects, a self-reflexive thriller that deliriously dissects the boundaries between reality and fiction. With his career in shambles after having blown a $30 million special effects-laden project, director Christopher Neville (Eric Bogosian,…
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Perfect Strangers (1984): B
Wholly unrelated to the adventures of Balki Bartokomous and Cousin Larry, Larry Cohen’s Perfect Strangers delivers off-kilter thrills via the story of a mob hit man named Johnny (Brad Rijn) who enters into a relationship with single mom Sally (Anne Carlisle) after her two-year-old son Matthew (Matthew Stockley) witnesses one of his contract killings. Johnny…
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God Told Me To (1976): B
An off-the-wall alien abduction saga that skewers mankind’s fundamental behavioral and belief systems, Larry Cohen’s God Told Me To never quite lives up to its bravura opening, in which detective Peter Nicholas (Tony Lo Bianco) investigates a series of random slayings perpetrated by ordinary people (including a young Andy Kaufman as a crazed cop) who…
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When a Stranger Calls (1979): C
Fred Walton’s urban legend-inspired When a Stranger Calls began life as a short film, only to be expanded past the twenty-minute mark once Halloween unearthed a box-office market for serial killer thrillers. The problem with such a profit-driven plan, however, was that Walton’s short – which functions as the feature film’s famous first segment, in…
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The Puppet Masters (1994): C
Robert A. Heinlein may have written The Puppet Masters five years before 1956’s classic Cold War allegory Invasion of the Body Snatchers, but that does little to diminish the been-there, done-that vibe of Stuart Orme’s 1994 adaptation of Heinlein’s novel, about a secret government agency’s efforts to combat slug-like aliens who control humans by latching…
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It’s Alive III: Island of the Alive (1987): B-
It’s Alive III: Island of the Alive finishes the series’ natural allegorical evolution, finally turning the aberrant “It” tykes into a nationwide scourge that – after an opening court room scene presided over by Days of Our Lives paterfamilias Macdonald Carey regarding the “humanity” of small-time actor Stephen Jarvis’ (Michael Moriarty) offspring – is dealt…
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It Lives Again (1978): B+
With It Lives Again, Larry Cohen shifts his horror series’ focus from the realm of the personal to that of the communal, positing a situation in which the childbirth aberration suffered by It’s Alive’s Davis family has mutated into a bourgeoning epidemic. A few years after his own infant ordeal, notorious monster daddy Frank Davis…
