Killer Babies, Winged Serpents, and the Hammer: The Guerrilla Genius of B-Movie Maestro Larry Cohen

By Keith PhippsAug. 29, 2018, 1:03 pm UTC • 11 min

A few years before he directed his first film, Larry Cohen bought a home in California. Built in 1929 by the family of William Randolph Hearst, it’s a beautiful, sprawling house with a Spanish tile roof and a lovely swimming pool,. There’s a chance you’ve seen it without knowing it. It’s the primary setting for Cohen’s first film, 1972’s Bone, and it’s easy to spot in his next movie, the 1973 blaxploitation classic Black Caesar, starring Fred Williamson. And it’s turned up, in one form or another, in just about everything Cohen directed, from spirited, low-budget action movies (Hell up in Harlem) to spirited, low-budget horror movies (It’s Alive, Q: The Winged Serpent, The Stuff), to spirited, low-budget historical epics (The Private Files of J. Edgar Hoover) to spirited, low-budget unclassifiable head-scratchers (God Told Me To, Wicked Stepmother).

“Almost every movie I made I ended up shooting one scene in my house just for good luck,” Cohen says. “Sometimes it was a nightclub, sometimes it was a hotel suite, sometimes it was a pool room. Whatever we needed, we had all kinds of flats outside stored away. We could put up false walls and we could create sets without much time or effort. It was great because I didn’t have to go to work in the morning. I could just get out of bed, come downstairs, and direct the movie.”

Cohen still lives in the house where he once shot chunks of his movies out of a combination of thrift, convenience, and superstition, though it hasn’t turned up on screen much lately. After a couple of decades of ceaseless activity, he hasn’t directed anything since a 2006 entry in Showtime’s Masters of Horror anthology series, and that arrived a decade after his last feature, the 1996 blaxploitation reunion movie Original Gangstas. But that doesn’t mean Cohen, now 77, isn’t keeping busy.

Steve Mitchell’s new documentary, King Cohen: The Wild World of Filmmaker Larry Cohen (currently playing on VOD simultaneous to a limited theatrical run), opens with longtime fan J.J. Abrams. The directing and producing star shares a story of his chance first meeting with Cohen—at a bus station—when he was a teenager. The interview ends with Abrams revealing he has lunch plans with Cohen in the near future. Presumably it’s a business lunch because other scenes capture Cohen plugging and pitching away, the ideas seemingly coming as fast as ever. As with that beautiful home, Cohen found his spot and stayed planted. In Hollywood, there’s always a place for someone with ideas.

“Larry Cohen is so much the invisible man in relation to mainstream Hollywood that it’s entirely possible to have seen a lot of his work without knowing you were seeing his work,” writer F.X. Feeney says in King Cohen, a fair assessment of a career that includes writing credits on everything from direct-to-VHS ’90s fare like Maniac Cop 3: Badge of Silence to an episode of NYPD Blue and the screenplay to box office hits like Phone Booth. The bookends of Cohen’s career have found him working quietly behind the scenes. In the ’60s, he created shows like The Invaders and Branded (even if the scene in The Big Lebowski gives someone else the credit), hence his ability to purchase the beautiful home where he still dreams up concepts. King Cohen makes it look like a creatively fulfilling life.

But for a good, long time, Cohen was out there.

“I started directing the pictures because I didn’t like the way other people were doing the directing and the producing of the films [I wrote],” Cohen says. “I would take the money, but after I cashed the check, I really had no authority anymore. I just had to sit there and watch them make a mess of it.” The black comedy Bone, in which Yaphet Kotto plays a mysterious drifter who disrupts the spiritually empty (and secretly financially bankrupt) lives of an L.A. used-car salesman and his wife, marked his first attempt to make movies his own way. Stage-y but also edgy and with some très European touches of surrealism, it turns Cohen’s home into a pressure cooker for much of the era’s racial, sexual, and political tensions. Though it found an appreciative audience in the DVD era decades later, it didn’t do well at the time, despite attempts to rerelease it under alternate titles such as Housewife and Dial Rat for Terror.

“Had that movie been more successful,” Mitchell says, “or at all successful, I think his career might have gone in a slightly different direction. He always tells stories that have something on their mind. He is more than just a guy who cranks out genre stories, although he uses genre very well.” The arthouse’s loss became the drive-ins’ gain. For his next picture, Cohen drew on the classic gangster movies he took in as a New York kid who’d sell groceries to earn enough money to watch movie after movie in Manhattan theaters. (“The big movies only played for five days, and then they were gone!” Cohen recalls. “So you had to catch the movie when it played, so I didn’t want to miss anything, so I was there every week.”) A riff on the Edward G. Robinson–starring classic Little Caesar, 1973’s Black Caesar began as a vehicle for Sammy Davis Jr. but made a blaxploitation icon of Fred Williamson when Davis left the project.

I started directing the pictures because I didn’t like the way other people were doing the directing and the producing of the films [I wrote]. I would take the money, but after I cashed the check, I really had no authority anymore. I just had to sit there and watch them make a mess of it.
Larry Cohen

An NFL veteran who’d carved out an acting career via appearances on Star Trek and in Robert Altman’s MASH, Williamson took on the part of Tommy Gibbs, a Harlem kid who reinvents himself as a pitiless gangster after he’s assaulted by the police and sent to prison. Upon release, he assumes control of the New York mob essentially by gunning down all rivals. Though he’d mostly played nice-guy roles, most prominently on the Diahann Carroll–starring sitcom Julia, Williamson didn’t worry about his image. “You gotta understand where I came from,” Williamson says. “I’m an ex–pro football player, OK? My nickname was the Hammer. I didn’t get the Hammer from picking roses. I was the kind of guy if there was 40,000 people in the stadium and I walked out on the field when they introduced me, 20,000 booed and 20,000 cheered. Didn’t matter! They were all looking at me.”

It’s with Black Caesar that Cohen’s approach to directing began to cohere, particularly the guerrilla style that would define him. In a scene in Black Caesar, an out-of-control cab careens onto a Harlem sidewalk. To pull it off, Cohen simply had a cab drive up on a sidewalk, no permits or safety measures. It typified the run-and-gun style that became a trademark.

Shooting with Williamson helped as well. “Cops came along and [would] say, ‘Hammer, you out here shooting a movie?,’” Williamson says. “And I say, ‘Yeah.’ They say, ‘We know you don’t have a permit, we’re not gonna ask you, but we’re gonna walk away for 15 minutes, we come back, you better be gone.’ So I got that kind of respect from just being the Hammer.”

Cohen kept the practice up in later movies as well. In a wordless role in God Told Me To, Andy Kaufman plays a policeman who goes on a shooting spree in the middle of a St. Patrick’s Day parade, a moment made possible by Cohen simply showing up and shooting it. (“I had to shoot it in the real parade with the real cops and the real Andy Kaufman in there firing off a gun in the midst of the parade. Otherwise, I couldn’t have done it at all.”) A few years later, he started a small panic while shooting the 1982 film Q: The Winged Serpent on the upper floors of the Chrysler Building by having extras fire blanks into the air that sent empty shell cases into the streets below. Never one to miss a chance for added production value, Cohen filmed the panic.

Both God Told Me To and Q were part of a shift to horror that began with the 1974 film It’s Alive, a film about a killer baby that became one of Cohen’s greatest commercial successes and spawned two sequels. All exemplify what made Cohen stand out in the ’70s and ’80s. Though commercially savvy, he could never be accused of following trends. Instead, he used genre films to chase bigger themes. God Told Me To doubles as a strange meditation on faith (and, to a lesser extent, extraterrestrials), and Q uses an intense performance from frequent Cohen collaborator Michael Moriarty to meld the giant monster movie to a psychologically tortured urban crime film (albeit one with plenty of shots of bodies writhing in the grips of giant talons).

Look carefully in the background of Black Caesar and you’ll see marquees for theaters playing both The Godfather and Super Fly. But while the success of those movies helped create the market for Black Caesar, it’s the way Cohen and Williamson draw on the darkness of classic gangster films that gives it its character. Like a lot of blaxploitation heroes, Tommy is a walking power fantasy, but Black Caesar doesn’t shy away from depicting the ugliness of his behavior, ugliness that brings him to a tragic end. (Sort of. Though Tommy seems to perish in the film’s final scene, Williamson and Cohen reteamed for the sequel Hell up in Harlem. Sometimes commercial savviness does override other concerns.)

As a director, Cohen mixed an understanding of what audiences want with a refusal to chase trends. After Bone, he made movies with an eye toward the marketplace, but mostly to find the spots where the market might have room for a Larry Cohen movie with something to say mixed in with all the thrills and chills that could be staged with a lot of inspiration and only a little bit of money.

With, for instance, It’s Alive, Cohen wanted to use a monstrous infant to comment on the era, just one year after the Roe v. Wade decision, though when I suggest it might have been inspired by the debate over abortion or the thalidomide disasters of the ’50s and ’60s, Cohen waves off the idea. “I wasn’t thinking about that. I was thinking about articles that I saw where parents kill their kids because they were so drugged up and so violent and so intimidating that they were terrifying the parents,” Cohen says. “Suddenly, these people found out that the little boy that they had in their home had suddenly turned into some kind of monster that they feared. In several cases they actually kill their own kid. So I said, what about if it’s a baby, and nothing more angry than a frustrated baby, so I just decided to make the movie.”

It’s Alive was part of a long habit of, in Cohen’s words, “taking something that is considered benevolent and turning it into some kind of monstrosity,” an approach also found in his 1985 film The Stuff, a satire of consumerism about an addictive yogurt-like substance. This being a Cohen film, it’s actually a kind of parasite that consumes those that consume it, but one so cleverly marketed that it spreads unchecked, possibly until it’s too late to stop it. It’s a satire colored by a streak of pessimism found throughout Cohen’s films, one that makes their politics hard to pin down. That’s especially true of the ambitious, Broderick Crawford–starring 1977 biopic The Private Files of J. Edgar Hoover, which treats all corners of Washington as equally seedy by depicting everyone from FDR to the Kennedys to Nixon as amoral players consumed by the need for power, a kind of precursor to James Ellroy’s Underworld USA trilogy. “The reason it didn’t succeed,” Cohen says, “was because we didn’t take sides. In America, if you want to make a movie about politics, you’ve gotta take a position either on the right or the left. You can’t be independent, and that picture was extremely independent, just like all my pictures.”

By the end of the 1980s, the movie landscape had started to shift. Cohen’s 1989 horror comedy Wicked Stepmother mostly played video stores after a difficult production that saw star Bette Davis leave the shoot after a few weeks due to a problem with ill-fitting dentures. (Cohen improvised and finished the film despite having only 15 minutes of footage with Davis.) The drive-ins and neighborhood theaters in which Cohen’s movies had once thrived started to disappear. After the Eric Roberts–starring 1990 film The Ambulance, Cohen directed less and wrote more. The Williamson-produced Original Gangstas — filmed during a sweltering summer in Gary, Indiana — found him working alongside his old star, but not without some creative clashes. That nice house in Los Angeles probably started to look more appealing. Maybe being an invisible man wasn’t such a bad thing.

His relative absence from movie directing in the past 20 years doesn’t mean Cohen isn’t missed. Or the fact the kind of movies he made have begun to vanish has is unnoticed. In King Cohen, no less than Martin Scorsese laments what’s been lost as movies have found less room for filmmakers with odd, passionate visions (who maybe didn’t care that much about safe filming conditions and whose filmmaking skills couldn’t always keep up with their outsized ideas). “I miss the spirit of the times,” Scorsese says, “which we can say was truly a renegade spirit.”

I think one of the problems that exist today, certainly in low-budget movies, is that people just want to shoot. Well, Larry went out and shot, and he shot like a crazy person, running around the way he did. [But] he always has story in his head, he always understood the characters, and more importantly, he was trying to say something.
Steve Mitchell

“The movie is about Larry but it’s also about a bygone era of filmmaking,” Steve Mitchell says. “Anybody can go make a movie, but I think [those] movies were made by people who had a certain mind-set and a certain attitude toward filmmaking. Any movie that you sat down to watch in the last five or 10 years that you really like was not about the technology making the movie. It was about the story, and most importantly, the characters. … I think one of the problems that exist today, certainly in low-budget movies, is that people just want to shoot. Well, Larry went out and shot, and he shot like a crazy person, running around the way he did. [But] he always has story in his head, he always understood the characters, and more importantly, he was trying to say something.”

But Cohen is sanguine about the changing times. He’s still got scripts in motion, still jotting new ideas down every day. “I still write them and sometimes they get made,” he says. “I’ve had a very, very, very fruitful career. I’m very pleased with what happened. I don’t think I would want to do it any other way, and I have some great stories that came from making these movies.

“You know, it wasn’t just going to a studio like a factory laborer and making pictures and going home every night,” Cohen says, reflecting on nearly 60 years in the business. “We were out there in the jungle making these movies, improvising, and having fun, and creating movies from out of thin air without much money. … You’ve gotta make the picture your way and no other way. Because it can’t be made otherwise.”

Keith Phipps is a writer and editor specializing in film and TV. Formerly: Uproxx, The Dissolve, and The A.V. Club.

Keith Phipps

Killer Babies, Winged Serpents, and the Hammer: The Guerrilla Genius of B-Movie Maestro Larry Cohen

Killer Babies, Winged Serpents, and the Hammer: The Guerrilla Genius of B-Movie Maestro Larry Cohen

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