Larry Cohen (July 15, 1936 – March 23, 2019) wrote for TV and movies, with TV shows dominating his early career--mostly crime and cops but also an alien invasion show called The Invaders, which he described as The Body Snatchers about the Black List.
He moved into movies with an inauspicious debut Return of the Seven (a sequel to the classic Western, The Magnificent Seven). While that bombed with audiences and critics, later movies grew strange. Perhaps he was constrained by budgets, perhaps by an imagination formed by TV, but the ideas are often small. Most of his movies on IMDB fell around 6/10--with a few falling below.
One movie Phone Booth was rather impressive because of its limited scope: The setting is a phone booth. An agent is trapped in a phone booth by a gunman. It is his highest rated, and I'd recommend it. Despite the limitations (or because of them), it feels like a movie of some ambition. If this had been his career, his motives would have been clear and traditional.
However, for most of his career, he wrote B-movies. They seemed to hearken back to the older B-movies. They were both serious and not. Certainly, there were no jokes, but the situations were over the top.
One of these, a friend tipped me off to: The Stuff. Frankly, I'd never heard of any of Cohen's movies, ever. And you can see why. They aren't ambitious in a tradition way, yet confidently aimed at the small. In The Stuff, we have a yogurt-like substance found emerging from the ground near a mining facility. The material seems to take over people mentally and, eventually, bodily.
My friend thought it was written in fear of yogurt which, after being in the country thirty years up until then, had taken America by storm after a commercial touted the possibility of longevity if one ate it (a history of Yogurt in America). To me, the movie was driven more by the SF impulse: industrial phony products mimicking the real thing since there were other yogurt products that were not attacked as the culprit, but just this problematic brand (I can't find the article, but there were questions in the press about products claiming to be yogurt, but were not). Although in an interview, Cohen seemed to suggest that my friend's theory was closer to the truth, I still like my interpretation better.
The absurd premise is small potatoes. That's not really the fascinating thing. The best part of the narrative is a guy who describes himself as an industrial saboteur (this also suggests my interpretation is better; Cohen may not have remembered fully what he was up to). What in the world is an industrial saboteur? Who hires him? Why? How does he get money?
The movie shows how he gets money: black mail and other nefarious means, which makes him an odd yet compelling figure.
In an interview, Cohen claimed not to be an SF or horror writer, yet he does use "Frank Herbert" as someone important at the FBI, and one movie It's Alive! gets its title from The Frankenstein SF-horror B-movie classic He's paying homage to the things he loves, consciously or not.
He also pays homage to character actors. The protagonist in It's Alive! imitates the famous Western character actor, Walter Brennan. Moreover, Cohen hired a ton of actors on their way up or out, which added experience and actor recognition to all of his movies. He said he'd find out about actors looking for work and give them a job. A good chunk of his actors had plump acting pedigrees.
In an interview titled It's Alive! Cohen states:
"B-movies. God bless them. B-movies become A movies over the years. That's when they remake them. They take a million dollar movie and spend 100 million to remake it."
Not sure how true that was for him, but it does show his passion for them. I actually formulated my ideas for Cohen and then found corroborating evidence in a handful of interviews. What he's doing is fairly transparent.
As far as patterns go, there's often a primary crime driving the narrative, and a past crime that drives or informs the protagonist and/or antagonist. As bad as his movies might be, they were entertaining and often displayed some technical writing brilliance, often in the protagonist, which is strange for B-movies. Usually, it's the bad guy or the monster that's the most powerful force, but here the protagonists outweighed the antagonists.
Cohen had a couple of movies become franchises: It's Alive! and Maniac Cop. The former had Bernard Herrmann as a composer, the latter starred Bruce Campbell. The film It's Alive! was going to be killed when new producers arrived, but three years later, new movie producers gave the movie a new release and it became an instant cult classic.
If you like good bad movies, or cult movies, Cohen's oeuvre might be something to explore. It's Alive! and The Stuff both place on a number of lists as ranking among the best B-movies. It's amazing he was able to build a lucrative career writing these.
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