God Told Me To (1976) on Netflix
In New York City, a sniper opens fire from a water tower. Detective Peter Nicholas works the case, and every killer gives the same calm account: God told them to.
- Netflix2.7/5
- IMDb6.3/107,532 votes
- Rotten Tomatoes73%
Trailer
Plot summary
Peter Nicholas, a Catholic detective in New York City, takes on a string of killings with no shared motive. A gunman fires on pedestrians from a water tower; a man stabs shoppers in a supermarket; an officer turns his gun on the crowd at the St. Patrick's Day parade; a father kills his family. Each assailant is an ordinary person with no link to the others, and each one, once caught, says without agitation that God gave the order. None of them tries to flee; each stays where the crime happened and waits to be taken. Nicholas climbs the water tower to face the gunman himself, and he reports to superiors who will not accept a religious explanation for the crimes.
Cast
- Jo Flores Chaseas Mrs. Gorman
Did you know?!Facts and trivia about God Told Me To (1976)
Can contain spoilers, watch the movie first.
- Bernard Herrmann, who had scored Larry Cohen's earlier film It's Alive, was assigned to score God Told Me To, but died within 15 hours of seeing a first cut and making notes on how it could be scored, Cohen said. Miklós Rózsa then turned the job down, saying "God told me not to."
- Robert Forster was originally cast as the lead in God Told Me To but quit a few days into filming after a falling out with writer-director Larry Cohen, who replaced him with Tony Lo Bianco, then appearing in Cohen's play The Nature of the Crime.
- Andy Kaufman's first role in any film was in God Told Me To, as a possessed policeman who goes on a shooting rampage at the Saint Patrick's Day parade, and the same footage was later used in the documentary The Passion of Andy Kaufman.
- The alien abduction sequence, in which a naked woman is drawn up into the cavernous interior of an extraterrestrial spacecraft, was made with manipulated generic stock model footage from Gerry Anderson's science fiction TV series Space: 1999.
- God Told Me To was financed by Edgar Scherick and Daniel Blatt, who were credited as executive producers until they saw the finished film and insisted their names be taken off it, according to Larry Cohen.
