Larry Cohen, director of fondly remembered cult thrillers such as Black Caesar, It’s Alive and Q: The Winged Serpent, has died aged 77, it has been reported. Cohen was a key figure in exploitation movie circles in the 70s and 80s, as well as writing scripts and storylines for TV shows such as The Fugitive and Columbo, before staging a feature film comeback with the script for the Colin Farrell thriller Phone Booth in 2002.
The Shape of Water director Guillermo del Toro praised him as “a true iconoclast and independent”, while Baby Driver director Edgar Wright wrote on social media: “For so many fun high-concept genre romps with ideas bigger than the budgets, for so many truly inspiring cult movies, I thank you Larry.”
Cohen – whose sister Ronni Chasen was a well-known Hollywood publicist before her murder in 2010 – was born in 1941 in New York and starting producing TV scripts in the late 50s, creating a number of series including alien-threat classic The Invaders. His feature film career began – characteristically – with a script for a sequel to the landmark 1960 western The Magnificent Seven. Cohen moved into directing as part of the blaxploitation wave of the 70s, making the home-invasion comedy Bone starring Yaphet Kotto, and the 1973 Fred Williamson mobster pic Black Caesar, a remake of the Edward G Robinson classic Little Caesar, and its swiftly completed sequel, Hell Up in Harlem.
Cohen’s ability to corral big names into his low-budget projects came in useful for his next film, It’s Alive, a gruesome horror film about a murderous mutant baby, which included a score by Hitchcock’s composer, Bernard Herrmann. Probably the best known of Cohen’s directorial efforts, It’s Alive spawned two sequels: It Lives Again (1978) and It’s Alive III: Island of the Alive (1987) – all three written, produced and directed by Cohen. The first film was also remade in 2009 during the short-lived slasher revival. In 1976, Cohen made God Told Me To, starring Tony Lo Bianco (The Honeymoon Killers) as a cop investigating a series of murders apparently inspired by a religious cult.
In 1982, Cohen began a long association with actor Michael Moriarty by casting him in Q: The Winged Serpent, a horror thriller about an ancient Mexican monster-god who nests in the Chrysler building in New York. Moriarty would also appear in The Stuff (1985), a horror-satire about a dessert that turns people into zombies, as well as It’s Alive III and A Return to Salem’s Lot, Cohen’s 1987 sequel to Stephen King’s smalltown vampire tale. In 1988, Cohen started another exploitation franchise with Maniac Cop, writing all three instalments, and directed Bette Davis’ last screen role in Wicked Stepmother (1989).
During the 90s, Cohen’s directorial output slowed, with the 1996 blaxploitation homage Original Gangstas, starring Fred Williamson alongside other giants of the genre such as Pam Grier, Jim Brown and Richard Roundtree, proving to be Cohen’s last feature directing credit. However, his writing work continued successfully, with scripts for high-profile TV shows such as NYPD Blue and contributing the story for Abel Ferrara’s 1993 remake of Invasion of the Body Snatchers.
In the early 2000s, Cohen found himself elevated to major feature-writing status when his script for a single-location thriller – Phone Booth – became the subject of a bidding war and was filmed by Joel Schumacher with star Colin Farrell. Cohen then came up with another phone-oriented thriller, Cellular, that became a vehicle for Kim Basinger. Cohen’s second coming eventually tailed off, but he appeared in the 2017 documentary tribute King Cohen, in which he defended his film-making habits: “I don’t know what exploitation means. Every movie is exploitation. So what?”
