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Talking about horror directors who got their start in the 1970's, Larry
Cohen is by today mostly overshadowed by other filmmakers of his
generation, like George A.Romero (who actually got his start in the late
1960's), Tobe Hooper, Wes Craven or even Joe Dante - which is a downright
shame, because other than above-mentioned directors (with the occasional
exception of Romero) Larry Cohen always infused his films with social
satire and biting political commentary, and other than above directors
(again, with the occasional exception of Romero) he never betrayed his
indie roots and - at least as a director - managed to stay out of the
Hollywood ratrace, as he would rather do what he wants to on a low budget
than selling out for a few million Dollars. And this attitude is exactly
what makes his films - from his directorial debut onwards - so incredibly
fresh in approach, which makes them seem fresh even today while
many a higher budgeted shocker has long gathered an outdated look and feel
to it. But the special aspect of Cohen's films is not so much that they contain
social satire and biting political commentary, it's that he serves these
elements in a wholly entertaining context, giving the audience a genre movie rather
than some sort of pamphlet film - which in my eyes makes Cohen one of the
very few (if not the only) thinking man's B-movie directors. In this respect, it's interesting to
note that Cohen, who was soon regarded as something like a non-conformist guerrila-filmmaker, has
actually found his start within the studio system, above all things as a
TV-scriptwriter - but I'm getting ahead of myself, let's start at the
beginning ...
Early Life, Early Career Larry
Cohen was born in 1941 in Kingston, New York, but eventually, his family
relocated to the Riverdale section of the Bronx, New York, where he
attended highschool. Always
interested in films, he worked as a page at NBC,
New York, at a young age, and he sold his first script to the station -
the episode The Eighty Seventh Precinct of Kraft Television
Theatre which was based on the novel by Evan Hunter - in 1958,
when he was not yet 18 ... and to avoid complications because of him being
underage, he claimed he was born in 1938, a birth date many sources carry
to this day. As a talented writer, Cohen soon found work on many
TV-series, including the Zane Grey Theatre (1960), The
Nurses (1963), The Fugitive (1964 - 1965) starring
David Janssen, and The Defenders (1963 - 1965) starring
E.G.Marshall. One of his episodes of The Defenders, The
Traitor (1963, David Greene), was actually spun off into its own
series, Coronet Blue, in 1967, though the links of the two
series were only vague - The Defenders was actually a
courtroom drama series, while Coronet Blue was an espionage
drama that would anticipate The Bourne Identity's (2002, Doug
Liman) main storyline - an amnesiac spy on the run from his own people -
by quite some decades.
Especially his work on The
Defenders made Cohen a sought after screenwriter, so around the
mid-1960's. he relocated to Los Angeles, where he not only wrote many more
screenplays for TV-series but also created a few series as such,
such as above mentioned Coronet Blue, the Chuck
Connors-Western series Branded (1965 - 1966) and the today
unfortunately largely forgotten sci fi series The Invaders (1967 - 1968),
a series that much more than everything else he has written for television
was a precursor for things to come, because of its theme (alien invasion)
and its many political allusions - though Coronet Blue also carries at
least some subversive messages.
Eventually, Larry Cohen has made a big enough name of himself
as a screenwriter that he was hired to script feature films as well. His
first film though was nothing big, The Return of the Magnificent Seven
(Burt Kennedy), the 1966 sequel to 1960's The Magnificent Seven
(John Sturges), again starring Yul Brynner, but Steve McQueen was replaced
by Robert Fuller - and of course, the sequel did not live up to the first
part (just as The Magnificent Seven did not live up to its inspiration,
Akira
Kurosawa's Shichinin no Samurai from 1954). Still, The Return of
the Magnificent Seven did prove to be a big enough success for two
more sequels about the Magnificent Seven to follow - but
without the involvement of Larry Cohen ... or Yul Brynner, for that
matter.
Larry Cohen's first excursion into the horror genre was a film
called Scream Baby Scream (1969, Joseph Adler), an over-the-top
shocker about a crazed artist carving models' faces up to reassemble them
to new mutant models. In sheer outrageousness, this film of the grindhouse
variety matches any film by Herschell Gordon Lewis - but it does feature a
lot less explicit gore.
Other than the outrageous Scream
Baby Scream, Daddy's Gone A-Hunting, also from 1969, is a
pretty straight thriller about a man wanting to have revenge on the woman
who once had his child aborted - but unfortunately, the film is let down
by a bland, at best functional directorial effort by Mark Robson.
With
El Condor (1970, John Guillermin), Larry Cohen returned to Western
territory, but the movie, starring Lee Van Cleef and Jim Brown, failed to
create too much of a stir. After his first forays into the
world of feature films, it was back to writing for television for another
couple of years before Larry Cohen could have his directorial debut - and
he would return to the medium repeatedly (as writer, not director) even
throughout his - at times pretty successful - career as director. But
while the theatrical films he wrote scripts for early in his career seem rather on
the humble side, to judge him by them would mean doing unjustice to the
man - actually, back in the day, he wrote several screenplays that Alfred
Hitchcock - one of Cohen's idols - wanted to get his hands on, but for
some reasons, Hitchcock's
production company Universal
vetoed these collaborations. These scripts reportedly included above-mentioned Daddy's Gone A-Hunting, The
Cutting Room (which Cohen eventually directed himself in 1984 as Special
Effects) and Phone Booth (made into a feature film in 2002 by
Joel Schumacher).
A Success Story: The
1970's
If you thought that Larry Cohen was pretty well domesticated after 14
years of training in television screenwriting - and TV traditionally not
being to much of a medium open to social or political satire, much
less to any kind of outrageousness - you'd have to think again after seeing
Bone (1972), Larry Cohen's
directorial debut. On the surface,
Bone featured a rather
typical, tried-and-true grindhouse-thriller plotline: A black man (Yaphet
Kotto in the title role) terrorizes a white couple (Andrew Duggan, Joyce
Van Patten) and ultimately blackmails the husband into getting him money from
the bank while he holds his wife hostage, even threatening to rape her.
But what would have been a heap of trash in the hands of your typical
B-movie director (not that that's necessarily a bad thing) turned into
gold in Cohen's hands, a socio-political satire on the value of money, on
the difference between having and not having, on race and racial
prejudice, on perfect love gone wrong, on consumerism, and last but not
least on the American way of life as such. But while the film can be seen
as a commentary on all these things, Cohen still makes sure it's a wholly
entertaining genre film ... and in this respect, it's unfortunate that the film bombed at the box
office, according to Cohen mainly due to botched up marketing.
While
due to its black lead character and its racial subtext, Bone
can be seen as pseudo-blaxploitation, the next film Cohen directed was not
only a full-fledged blaxploitation film but also a genre classic: Black
Caesar (1973). The film chronicles the rise of a black man (Fred
Williamson) from shoeshine boy to the most powerful and most feared
gangster in New York City - and his downfall that ends in him dying in
front of his childhood home while a gang of teenagers steal his wristwatch
- one of the many moments of black humour in the film. On the outside
though, Black Caesar
resembles the Warner
Brothers gangster movies of the 1930's (and the title closely
resembling Mervyn Leroy's 1931 classic Little Caesar is of course
no coincidence), but with a blaxploitation flavour attached to it (for
better or worse) ... however, Cohen is by far not content to make a mere
genre movie with a black hero sticking it to the man, he creates a
complex world with no definitive good and bad, black and white, but a sea
of grey that allows the viewer to come to his or her own conclusions. But
again, thanks to clever writing, Cohen has wrapped his socio-political
commentary into an entertaining genre piece, and this time, the formula
worked - so much so that Black Caesar-
a AIP-coproduced
B movie - topped the box office charts for a week or so.
In
fact, Black Caesar
proved so successful that a sequel was hastily produced and brought into
the theatres later in 1973, Hell up in Harlem, again directed by Cohen and
again starring Fred Williamson, quite despite the fact that he died at the
end of Black Caesar.
Here he - or rather his character - is alive again and has his revenge on
those who wronged him. But unfortunately, the sequel does not work as well
as the original: Sure, it's still a well-made, well-paced action flick the
blaxploitation way, but the sociopolitical subtext is more or less lost in
a rather simplistic revenge-plot. The problem actually was that the film
had to be put into production too hastily because Fred Williamson was only
available for a very limited time - which is why Cohen had to come up with
pretty much everything on the spot ...
Cohen's next film, his first bona fide shocker, on the other hand was anything but simplistic - even
if it looked like it on the outside: On a pure plot level, It's
Alive (1974) is little more than a monster movie, the twist of
this one being that the monster is actually a baby, a baby that roams the
streets killing people and that's proficient enough from birth onwards to
escape capture for the longest time. However, behind this rather standard
monstermovie-plotline, Cohen hides all sorts of subtexts, from more
socio-political satire to enviromental issues to a pro-life message.
Add to this perfect pacing (of course), drama on a grand scope (the
on-screen goings-on concerning lead John P.Ryan almost resemble a Greek
tragedy), a convincing monster by Rick Baker (that is wisely kept in the
shadows most of the time), and a fantastic score by Hitchcock-favourite
Bernard Herrmann, and you are left with a movie that works on almost every
level. Most of the audience seemed to agree to my judgement actually, and
just like Black Caesar,
It's Alive made it to
number one of the box office charts - unfortunately, it would already be
Cohen's last number one though. However, It's Alive
was so successful that it did spawn two sequels (both directed by Cohen
himself) and a remake (not directed by Cohen, unfortunately) - but more of
that later. By the way, Larry Cohen later claimed
that Steven Spielberg took much of the inspiration for his blockbuster
movie E.T. (1982) from It's
Alive, even copying some sequences shot by shot. And seeing the
two films back-to-back, one feels inclined to believe Cohen - and it's
kind of ironic that an incredibly intelligent B-shocker for adult
audiences has become the template for a simplistic multi million Dollar
kiddie movie.
Apart from Bone
maybe, Larry Cohen's satirical edge was never more apparent
than in his next film, God
Told Me To. God
Told Me To is Larry Cohen at his most radical, tackling nothing
smaller than religion (pretty much any religion) as such. The film is
about innocent people who all of a sudden kill in the name of God. Only
God is not this man with a white beard high up in heaven (or however else
you picture your God), but a man (Richard Lynch) immaculately conceived by
a human mother during an alien abduction who has suddenly found himself
with all these amazing powers at his disposal - and to no one's real
surprise, he can't help but use them to his own ends, while he also
manages to make several people believe that he really is God. Thing is,
the cop (Tony Lo Bianco) after him eventually finds out he is an
alien-human hybrid too with the same powers as his opponent, and before
the film ends, he might have already fallen prey to the many lures these
powers possess. Other than in his previous films, Cohen hasn't hidden
his criticism and satire in the subtext, this time around, everything is
in plain sight - which possibly prevented God
Told Me To from becoming another bona fide box office success ... but over
the years, it has become a cult item with leftist film fanatics. Like
God
Told Me To, Cohen's next film, The Private Files of Edgar J.
Hoover from 1977 was very direct in its criticism and satirical
approach, chronicling the life of the controversial and possibly dangerous
head of the FBI. However, the film never really caught on with the
audiences, neither in the short nor the long run, because it not only
takes apart Hoover himself (as played by Broderick Crawford) but also
boldly takes shots at such national icons as Franklin D.Roosevelt (Howard
Da Silva), Martin Luther King (Raymond St.Jacques), and John
F.Kennedy (William Jordon) and his brother Robert F. (Michael
Parks) - something that didn't go too well with the liberals, who probably
would have loved the film otherwise. This of course makes the film all
more likeable for its sheer audacity ...
After The Private Files of Edgar
J. Hoover flopped at the box office, Cohen palyed it safe with It Lives Again
(1978), the (first) sequel to his landmark It's
Alive - and unfortunately, the sequel, starring veteran actor
Eddie Constantine [Eddie
Constantine bio - click here] in a supporting role, does by no
means match the first part. Though it raises pretty much the same
questions as its predecessor, It
Lives Again is no more than a fairly intelligent genre pic where It's
Alive was truly thoughtful. And the monster babies (yup, this time
there are more than one), while still scary, fail to pack the same kind of
punch this time around and are left in plain sight way too much. Still,
the film delivers some solid genre entertainment, and it was successful
enough to eventually spawn another It's
Alive-sequel.
It should also be noted (and has actually already been noted
above) that Larry Cohen during his most successful period in the 1970's
never stopped writing for television, among other things creating the
short-lived crime series Cool Million (1972), writing the
stories for a few episodes of the popular crime-series Columbo
in 1973 and 74 (third and fourth season of the series), including the Emmy-winning episode Any Old Port in a
Storm (1973, Leo Penn) starring, besides Peter Falk of course, Donald
Pleasence as the villain [Donald
Pleasence bio - click here], and delivering the story for Burt
Kennedy's Shootout in a One-Dog Town (1975) starring Richard Crenna
and Stefanie Powers.
Slow Decline: The 1980's
The first film Larry Cohen directed in the 1980's was rather a
disappointment: Full Moon High (1981), a highschool horror comedy
about a teenager (Adam Arkin) who is turned into a werewolf - which in
this film also means that he remains a teenager and has to go to
highschool forever - yikes. True, the film does feature some nice ideas
of its own, but in all it's just too nice a highschool comedy to live up
to Cohen's earlier work. Still, at least it is way more entertaining than
the Michael J.Fox-starrer Teen Wolf (1985, Rob Daniel), a film that
used Full Moon High as its template. From Full Moon High, Cohen even
took one step back to direct his first movie for television, See China
and Die/Momma the Detective (1981), basically a showcase for
Esther Rolle, a black actress in her 60's, playing a resolute maid
becoming entangled in a murder mystery. It might not have been one of
Larry Cohen's better or more sophisticated films, but it was still a likeable
little comedy. Cohen was next set to direct I, the
Jury (1982), a Mickey Spillane-based Mike
Hammer film based on Cohen's own script with Armand Assante in the lead
and Barbara Carrera and Lauren Landon giving able support (interestingly
both Carrera and Landon also turn up in Cohen's Wicked Stepmother
from 1989). However, Cohen eventually fell out with the producers,
direction of the film was handed over to Richard T.Heffron, and the script
was changed considerably.
Being removed from I, the
Jury, Cohen made the best of the situation and decided to make Q:
The Winged Serpent - since he was already in New York and that
movie needed New York locations anyways. And while
Larry Cohen's last directorial effort Full Moon High might have
been a disappointment, it was back to form with Q:
The Winged Serpent (1982), one of the most charming and
intelligeng monster movies this side of the 1950's. Essentially, Q
was about a flying serpent (the Aztec God Quetzalcoatl to be precise)
killing of people on rooftops all over New York City, a failed pianist
(Michael Moriarty) who's the only one knowing the secret of the giant
reptile, and a cop (David Carradine) who's trying to make head and tails
of the whole thing. Granted, Q
is not as thoughtful and thought-provoking as the best of Cohen's earlier
films, but it still features its fair amount of social satire and above
all, it's amazing fun to watch - and Dave Allen's stop motion creature
effects are nothing short of wonderful. Plus it should also be noted
that Q
was Cohen's first collaboration with Michael Moriarty, who is not only
great in this one but would also become Cohen's most frequent leading man
over the years. And no matter how unimpressive Moriarty might sometimes be
in films
for other directors, Cohen always manages to get incredibly quirky and
suitably off-beat performances out of him. And by the way, ultimately, I, the
Jury and Q
opened almost simultanously - and the much cheaper Q
outdid the other film circa 3 to one - plus it has gathered over the years
quite a cult following while I, the
Jury is by now largely forgotten.
Larry Cohen's next two films, Special Effects and Perfect
Strangers, shot back-to-back in 1984, had even less to offer in terms of socio-political subtext than
Q. This doesn't automatically mean
they are bad movies though, they are actually pretty good at what they
are, Special Effects being a suspense film in Alfred
Hitchcock-tradition (the film's script was actually offered to and even
accepted by Hitchcock, see above) starring Zoe Tamerlis (aka Zoe Lund) of Ms
.45 fame (1981, Abel Ferrara) and Eric Bogosian, while Perfect Strangers is a
modern day film noir.
But if you thought Cohen had lost his edge completely in the mid-1980's, think again when watching The Stuff (1985), a film in which
he boldly takes on the FDA and the food industry as a whole. The titular Stuff
is actually an FDA-approved dessert from the center of the earth, but
also a dessert that's incredibly addictive and that literally eats up its
consumers from
the inside. And all that stands in the way of the stuff taking over the
USA is ... Michael Moriarty. The whole concept is of course incredibly
silly, but Cohen manages to pull it off anyhow by adding massive doses of
black humour ans satire to the obligatory horror and gore, and thus he
turns what could have been a stupid piece of trash into a clever social
commentary ... but whoever thinks that this film was made especially to
please left-wing filmfans would be eventually proven dead wrong by Cohen,
who never liked to be pinned down to any one political ideology, as the
film ultimately has Moriarty save the world with the help of a right-wing
militia-leader and white supremacist (Paul Sorvino). Sure enough, Cohen
does not portray the character in a favourable light, quite the contrary,
but the fact alone that such a character is allowed to do something
positive must have been a (long deserved) slap in the face of the
politically correct establishmant - and only adds to the subversiveness of
The Stuff.
In all, The Stuff,
while not as successful as some of his earlier films, showed Cohen on top
of his game - but unfortunately it went downhill from here: While so far,
all of Cohen's films (as a director) had been released theatrically (apart
from See China and Die of course), his
next two, Island of the Alive, the third part of the It's
Alive-series, and A Return to Salem's Lot, an unofficial
sequel to Tobe Hooper's Salem's Lot miniseries (1979) featuring Sam
Fuller - both films
from 1987 and both starring Michael Moriarty, incidently - were intended
to only be released on video. Ultimately, both films received a limited
theatrical run (at least), but that was only little comfort to the man who
topped the box office charts (however shortly) no 15 years back.
Even apart from this though, the films showed that Larry
Cohen has at least lost some of his edge. True, neither Island of the Alive
nor A Return to Salem's Lot could be described as exactly
conformist, but they also lacked the sharp tongue, angry bite and wicked
humour of The Stuff and
other Larry Cohen-masterpieces. Next came Deadly Illusion
(1987), a film he was fired from halfway through production and that was
finished by William Tannen. As a hole though, the movie, a rather
labyrinthine murder mystery, starring Billy Dee Williams, Vanity, Morgan
Fairchild and John Beck is at best of marginal interest ... Of
a little more interest is Wicked Stepmother (1989), a tale about
modern-day witches, not so much because it is all that much of a better
film but because of its filming history: First of all, it was Hollywood
icon Bette Davis' last ever performance (she died in late 1989), secondly
she walked out of the film after only one week of filming - she claimed
because of Cohen's bad script, he claimed because of Davis' bad health -,
and instead of just abandoning the film, Cohen found a way to replace
81-year old Davis with sensual Barbara Carrera, who was about half her
age. It's entirely to Larry Cohen's credit that the film's plot still works, and even was funny to an extent, but that said, Wicked
Stepmother is anything but a great film.
Probably Larry
Cohen's most interesting work in the latter half of the 1980's was a film
he only wrote and produced, William Lustig's classic Maniac Cop (1988), a film about a cop (Robert Z'Dar) in New York City
who, well, goes bonkers and starts killing those he has sworn to protect. While
on the outside nothing more than a run-of-the-mill slasher, Maniac Cop
has an antiauthorian streak running through it, best exemplified in scenes
where ordinary citizens start attacking regular cops just to defend
themselves from the maniac. Unfortunately though, director William Lustig
is much more an artisan and much less an auteur than Larry Cohen, so he
put much more emphasis on the main narrative and action, and much less on the subtext
to turn this into a rather standard - if well made - thriller. Still, the
film also starring B-movie favourites like Bruce Campbell, Laurene Landon,
Richard Roundtree and William Smith, became an instant hit with the
horror crowd and even spawned two sequels - both brought to life by the
Cohen-Lustig duo as well ...
Back to the Writing Desk:
The 1990's and 2000's
The 1990's were no longer as rewarding a decade for an independent
director as the 1970's and (to an extent) the 1980's were - a fact Larry
Cohen painfully had to come to terms with when he found it almost
impossible to get his film The Ambulance (1990) a decent release.
Which is a shame too because The Ambulance, starring Eric Roberts,
James Earl Jones and Megan Gallagher, with Cohen regular Laurene Landon
and Marvel
Comics publisher Stan Lee giving support, is a rather well-done
little horror-thriller with a busload of chase sequences about a killer
ambulance (not in the literal sense). True, the film is not quite as edgy
as some of Cohen's earlier efforts and almost a little too slick for its
own good, but it's still enjoyable, even intelligent genre entertainment
by all means. The only way around distribution problems in those
days would be throwing in with a major production company, but as a
director, Cohen insists on absolute creative freedom - and if that is not
granted, his films usually lead to relative desasters like I, the Jury
and Deadly Illusion, both projects he didn't see to their
conclusion ... and thus, after The Ambulance, he left the director's chair for a while.
But
Cohen was still held in high regard as a writer, so before long he had
penned two sequels to genre fave Maniac Cop,
Maniac Cop 2
(1990, William Lustig) starring Robert Davi in the lead plus Robert Z'Dar
as the title character, Bruce Campbell, Laurene Landon and Charles Napier,
and Maniac Cop 3: Badge of Silence (1993, William Lustig, Joel
Soisson), starring Davi and Z'dar. While both films paled in comparison to
the first part let alone Cohen's best films, they were still some fun to
watch and sure enough found there audience among genre fans.
With the film Body Snatchers (1993, Abel Ferrara), for which
Larry Cohen co-wrote the screen story, he at least remained true to the
sci fi horror genre he has become associated with, and he also took the
opportunity to infuse some subversive ideas of his own into the film. Of course,
essentially, Body Snatchers was the adaptation of Jack Finney's
novel The Body Snatchers, the novel which was also the source for
Don Siegel's classic The Invasion of the Body Snatchers from 1956
(and two more films so far which shall remain unnamed), but Ferrara's film
should be credited with the fact that it went out of its way to not remake
the earlier film as such but to infuse fresh ideas into the concept. How
many of these fresh ideas can be credited to Larry Cohen though is left at
anybody's guess.
Far less interesting than Body Snatchers
was Sidney Lumet's Guilty as Sin, also from 1993, in which lawyer
Rebecca De Mornay has to defend wifekiller Don Johnson in court ... but
has to more and more realize he's not really a good guy - well, him being
a wifekiller might have been a clue. True, the concept of this film might
sound kind of interesting, but the film is let down every step along the
way, from forgettable central performances to a tired directorial effort
to a by-the-numbers script by Larry Cohen, who must have had one of his
worse days writing this. Larry Cohen gave directing another try
in 1995 with the television movie As Good as Dead starring Crystal
Bernard, Judge Reinhold and Traci Lords, a weird thriller about two women
switching identities - to the worst of outcomes. Pretty much your standard
TV-fare, the film still manages to take a few jabs at the American social
security system in best Larry Cohen manner It should also be
mentioned that The Invaders, the alien-invasion-TV series
Cohen created back in the 1960's, was remade into a miniseries directed by
Paul Shapiro and starring Scott Bakula in 1995 - but without Cohen's
direct involvement.
In 1996, Larry Cohen
directed another film for theatrical release, and unfortunately his last
so far: Original Gangstas. Interestingly it was also his first film as a
director he didn't also write, Aubrey K.Rattan did the honours. Original
Gangstas is something of a footnote to the blaxploitation genre, done
by a man who made one of the best and most interesting blaxploitation
movies and starring a cast of blaxploitation regulars: Fred Williamson,
Jim Brown, Pam Grier and Richard Roundtree, plus jazz singer Oscar Brown
jr and B-movie regulars Charles Napier and Wings Hauser. The film is
interesting inasmuch as it takes apart modern gangster clichés as made
popular by rap music, and has them clash with original gangsters, meaning
old school blaxploitation veterans (with the genre of course having been a
big influence on rap music, music-wise as well as style-wise).
In the latter part of the 1990's, Larry Cohen wrote
screenplays for quite a few films and TV-shows, but nothing really
groundbreaking. The most interesting film from that era might be Uncle
Sam (1997), another collaboration with William Lustig. Uncle Sam is a
shocker about a soldier who got killed in a friendly fire (horrible
word by the way) in the first Gulf War. But once brought back to his
hometown, he rises from the dead and punishes the un-patriotic. The film
itself has a satirical, anti-authoritarian edge to it just like you'd
expect from Larry Cohen, but unfortunately it failed to catch on with the
audiences just like Maniac Cop
and its sequels did. Of
rudimentary interest might also be The Defenders: Choice of Evil
(1998, Andy Wolk), a TV-movie Cohen co-wrote based on the 1960's courtroom
drama series The Defenders he wrote for, even starring the
original series' lead E.G. Marshall. In the 1990's, Larry Cohen
also wrote a screenplay, Cast of Characters, together with Martin
Poll. In this script, which he allegedly tried to sell to 20th
Century Fox numerous times between 1993 and 1996, several
characters of literature gathered to fight evil. Nothing ever came of the
film, but in 2003, 20th
Century Fox released the film The
League of Extraordinary Gentlemen (Steve Norrington), a film based
on the popular comicbook by Alan Moore (writer) and Kevin O'Neill
(artist), but the film took several liberties with its source material
that would suggest that it was at least partly based on Cast of
Characters ... and gave Larry Cohen reason enough to sue the company. 20th
Century Fox dismissed Cohen's allegations as nonsense - but
they ultimately settled the case out of court paying an undisclosed amount
of money ... hm. The really sad thing about the whole affair is though
that 20th
Century Fox used writer Alan Moore as their scapegoat in court -
even though the whole case primarily revolved around characters and plot
elements that weren't even in the comicbook. The whole affair left Alan
Moore gravely embittered about Hollywood as a whole, and from that point
on, he refused to have anything to do with Tinseltown - which is why his
name doesn't even appear on adaptations of his comicbooks like V
for Vendetta (2006, James McTeige) and Watchmen (2009, Zack
Snyder).
By the turn of the millenium, it already seemed as if
Larry Cohen's career was essentially going nowhere, and nowhere fast, when
in 2002 he hit gold with Phone Booth (Joel Schumacher), a
blockbuster of a movie. Phone Booth
was actually a script Cohen
wrote for Alfred Hitchcock back in the 1960's, and after years of being
locked away in some drawer or other, Cohen dusted it off and
wanted to bring it to the screen himself, as he saw its plot, a man pretty
much captured in a phonebooth and unable to hang up, as the perfect
antithesis of blockbuster filmmaking of the early 2000's with all its
mindless explosions and impersonal special effects. By its concept alone, Phone Booth
was a much more intimate and involving movie, lacking the
spending of silly amounts of money on meaningless plot devices. Then
though, several big Hollywood studios and Colin Farrell personally showed
interest in the screenplay, and Cohen preferred to back out of his own
movie, as with big Hollywood stars and money he would have seen his
creative freedom gone. Ultimately, direction was handed over to impersonal
studio hack Joel Schumacher - and he did turn in one of his better films
... though that's not saying all that much considering his track record so
far. It just would have been interesting, what Cohen himself would have
made out of the script, but I guess we'll just never find out. By the way, besides Farrell, Phone Booth
also stars Kiefer Sutherland,
Forest Whitaker and Katie Holmes.
With Phone Booth
having become a success, Cohen was soon invited to write another thriller
- again with a telephone theme oddly enough: Cellular (2004, David
R.Ellis). The basic plot seems interesting enough (if totally
far-fetched): Kim Basinger plays a kidnapped woman whose only link to the
outside world is her cellphone that's running alarmingly low on battery,
and Chris Evans is a random guy she reaches on the phone who's now rushing
to her rescue. Unfortunately, Cohen only wrote the story for this one,
and every now and again, the plot with all of its twists and turns seems
to get a little out of hands of first-time screnwriter Chris Morgan and
director Ellis. Still, the film was a reasonable success.
Unfortunately,
the same cannot be said about the horror thriller Captivity (2007,
Roland Joffé), a film about a model (Elisha Cuthbert) kidnapped and
locked into a cell in a cellar, where she is tormented - but the more she
finds out about her captor, the more unpleasent things get. The film bombed
at the box office - but in all fairness, it was running against Harry
Potter and the Order of the Phoenix (2007, David Yates), a surefire
winner - and even received three Razzie nominations (screenplay not among
them, but worst excuse for a horror movie) ... ultimately though all Razzies Captivity was nominated for
(as well as a few others) went to I
Know Who Killed Me (2007, Chris Sivertson). The film though, which
Cohen co-wrote with Joseph Tura, is considered as little more than torture
porn ... something which actually has become quite fashionable in the
latter part of the 2000's, even if it was an aspect of the horror genre
that did not really interest Larry Cohen. Times were not all
bad though for Larry Cohen lately, and the best news is that he found his
way back into the director's chair, first for a documentary (something
very unusual for a filmmaker with Larry Cohen's track record), Air Force One: The
Final Mission (2004, co-directed with Michael Cohen), about the final
journey of the famed Boeing called Air Force One - by truck and totally
disassembled.
Then though Cohen's past came catching up with him - in
a good way: In 2006, Mick Garris gathered many an old-school horror
director from Joe Dante to Tobe Hooper, from John Carpenter to Stuart
Gordon, from Dario Argento to John Landis, around himself to produce a
horror anthology television series called Masters
of Horror (2005 - 2007) for Showtime, where each
director would have total creative control over his segment, provided he woldn't outspend
his respective budget and would turn in a 50 minute horror featurette. And while some of Garris' choices for
the series were questionable (starting with his own involvement as a
director,
actually), he at least had the good judgement to also hire Larry Cohen to
do one segment, Pick
Me Up (2006) - and Cohen delivered one of the funniest episodes of
the whole (uneven) series, the story about two serial killers (Michael
Moriarty, as mad as ever in a Larry Cohen film, and Warren Kole)
specialized on killing hitchhikers fighting over supremacy of a certain stretch of
highway, and especially over one girl (Fairuza Balk), who just refuses to
be killed. The film showed Larry Cohen was still at the height of his
game, even if it wasn't scripted by himself but by David J.Schow, who
based the screenplay on his own short story.
The Future/Final
Thoughts Born in 1941, Larry Cohen has well reached
retirement age in 2008 - but fortunately that doesn't necessarily slow
him, one of the most intelligent and interesting heads in genre cinema,
down too much. As of speaking, several films based on his scripts are in
production, among them Connected (2008, Benny Chan), a Hong Kong
remake of the 2004 film Cellular - and it's more than just a little
interesting what this film would turn out to be once given the Hong
Kong-treatment -, the long announced remake It's Alive (2008, Josef
Rusnak), for which Cohen also cowrote the screenplay and which he was originally
also going to direct, Message Deleted (2008, Rob Cowan), quite
possibly another thriller with a telecommunications-theme, and Tremble
(2008), a project about which next to nothing is known as of yet (August
2008). And then there's also Doctor Strange, a script that he has
worked on with (former) Marvel-mastermind
(and Doctor Strange-creator) Stan Lee, a film that has been
announced for an incredibly long time, and that might never see the light
of day - at least not with Larry Cohen's name attached to it. And I personally refuse to give up hope that he will eventually
direct another film himself, a genre film he has complete creative freedom
over, as in today's movie world of faceless, over-budgeted blockbusters,
where many a genre veteran has long sold out to the major studios, a
filmmaker as original, as unconventional, as satirical and as
anti-autoritarian as Larry Cohen is sadly needed ...
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