SoTrumpBelieve Must See Movie...

Executscan Expected more

Maidexpl Entertaining from beginning to end, it maintains the spirit of the franchise while establishing it's own seal with a fun cast

Mandeep Tyson The acting in this movie is really good.

bornskeptic ...Hated how it finished. Actually, after the first pretty solid and interesting 20 minutes, it went off the rails for the duration. It jumped ahead with events and situations that should have taken weeks and condensed it into a few hours. I mean, what the F was up with the interrogation of the girlfriend halfway through by the cops who are about to suspend the main detective? Then, rioting. Then he is back on the force. Meets the alien eunuch, starts a building fire, then shows up in the next scene like nothing happened. wtf. It is definitely a mish mash of good and bad..... The acting by the main characters was quite good. Some cool supporting actors but most with nothing to do. The acting was better than this movie deserved. The story was original, but the script and directing, ugh. Poor execution. And the editors who spliced this thing together should never have worked again. It was a mess. It kind of reminded me of a David Cronenberg movie before he started making David Cronenberg movies. Don't believe me...check out the eunuch played by the always creepazoid Richard Lynch in the final reel exposing a vagina on his stomach and telling the main character to f#ck him. That wackiness was probably the highlight of the film.

dogcow I find Larry Cohen movies are difficult to hate, but also difficult to love. This one is a prime example. Cohen has a knack for big and clever ideas, and for somehow convincing some of the best New York character actors to be in his films. Despite this his films never seem to gel quite as well as his premises suggest they should. Maybe it is his uneven directing style, or the one-take ultra low budgets. Whatever it is they always seem to me like I'm watching a first draft screenplay, lots of promise and no polish.This film is a prime example. Certainly what hollywood wheelers and dealers used to call a "high concept" picture. The premise, as I'm sure you are aware, involves a police detective (Lo Bianco) investigating a series of senseless murders in the big apple. The first of which evokes (likely intentional) echoes of Charles Whitman's infamous rampage from the U of Texas clock tower. When the detective asks the killer the inevitable question "why'd you do it", all he can answer is "God told me to". As the body counts mount, (and Lo Bianco becomes more unhinged) the titular refrain is repeated by perpetrators of various atrocities across the city.As we delve deeper into the mystery, the film takes an extremely unexpected though not wholly unpleasant turn into science fiction, as the cop finds an unearthly explanation for the killings-- just not the one the title might suggest.Unfortunately this is where the film completely falls apart. What should be the climax of the movie comes about 1/3 of the way in. The plot quickly degenerates into a quagmire of nonsensical sub-plots from which it never really recovers. Ebert famously opined that he thought for sure the reels were being shown out of order. I felt more like watching someone flip the channels on a tv through several different movies as the various subplots unfolded. First you get a scene of a police procedural, then a science fiction scene, then a scene out of a blaxploitation/gangster film, then back to the police subplot. Genre bending can often be a benefit of b-movies in this case its a determent. It left me consistently saying "who is that again? Whats going on here". The subplots sort-of come together but the story is told so incoherently I could not help zoning out. When the twist ending came (was it a twist? Im not exactly sure), I was too confused to be surprised. I even rewound the last 10 minutes a few times and still could not figure out exactly what the hell i had just seen.Many seem to consider this Cohen's best film, I would say its actually one of his worst. The shame is the concept is actually very good and the first third is really well done. It is just a shame he seemingly ran out of ideas before he ran out of film. I'd certainly rank this as much inferior film to "Q" , "The Stuff", or even his Blaxploitation pictures. Overall I recommend this to Larry Cohen fans or b-movie completists. I doubt many others will bother sitting through the entire thing.

fedor8 So Moses and Christ were aliens, and they lead the Jews because...? Granted that the story is all over the place, that there are dozens of loose ends in the script, and that the acting by some of the people playing side-characters is semi-amateurish. And granted that the ending is a predictable let-down, a yucky finish which includes perhaps the most bizarre offer of gay sex in a movie.However, what cannot be denied - and it's no small thing - is that GTMT is interesting from start to finish. Many saw the rapid succession of scenes as clumsily put together, but I'd rather have fast-but-imperfect editing in a fun movie than "proper" editing in a dull film (such as an overrated Bergman turd, for example).The ending not only shocks (and amuses) the viewers by offering us Richard Lynch - of all people! - as a HERMAPHRODITIC half-alien, but when Lynch offers his abdomenal vagina (you read that right) for Biancop to insert his penis into, that's when a vomit bag might come into play. We were told that Philips was neither male nor female, so wouldn't it have made bloody sense to cast someone like Justin Timberlake or Leonardo Di Caprio for the role? OK, fine, these two didn't exist back then, being only very effeminate toddlers or not even born yet, but surely casting one of the ugliest actors in America could not possibly have been the answer. I'm surprised they didn't get Sly Stallone for the role of the effeminate Christ-like she-male! It wouldn't have been any sillier though, trust me.Had GTMT been made today, there would have been a plethora of girly actors for the role of the effeminate alien-Christ, but the 70s were still an age dominated by the likes of Bronson and Eastwood. Unlike today. Now it's Tom Cruise and Zac Ephron. Don't forget to shave your legs, girls! Lynch plays a half-alien who is neither male nor female (but carries a sloppy-looking vagina above his belly). So embarrassed was Cohen perhaps by the crappy casting that he never let us see his face properly. After all, this is the same actor who, only 3 years earlier, tried to rape Pacino in "Scarecrow". And now this. Many years later he had to play in the worst werewolf movie of all time, aptly called "Werewolf". What a career.The suggestion that Moses and Jesus are half-aliens presents a lot of logic problems, aside from the intrinsic cheesiness of the idea itself. Why would the aliens only inseminate random women here and there? Why not just take over properly? What did the Catholic Church know about Biancop and Lynch? What did they think about all this? Why does Biancop waste his new-found power, time and energy with a fairly irrelevant pimp, when he's got bigger fish to fry? Why would Lynch initiate a series of asinine random killings? To attract attention to himself? But he's hiding, isn't he? Did the aliens who fathered him expect this kind of nonsense from him, or was he simply bloodthirsty and bored out of his own free will? You can ask a hundred more questions but only end up getting even more bogged down in the zany world of GTMT's undisciplined script. Cohen tried to cover too much ground, not just the obvious point about religious fanaticism, but what ultimately matters was whether the movie is fun or not, and it is.

lastliberal If you like horror, you know Larry Cohen (It's Alive, It Lives Again, Maniac Cop (I, II, & III) It's Alive III). But he is a prolific writer, director and producer who also did Black Caesar, Return of the Seven, and one of my favs from early TV, "Branded." Now, here he is with Tony Lo Bianco & Sandy Dennis, and the film debut of Andy Kaufman.The film is shot in a documentary style to make us believe that it is real. Lo Bianco is a police Lieutenant trying to solve apparently random killings. They do all have one thing in common. The killers all say, "God told me to." It's not and easy film. It seems to jump around, and I could never figure what Sandy Dennis was doing.It's a cult film about a cult, and it gets pretty weird at times. Thankfully, there's a naked chick running around to keep your attention.