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THE AMBULANCE
Rating: 
USA. 1990.
Director/Screenplay – Larry Cohen, Producers – Robert Katz & Moctesuma Esparasa, Photography – Jacques Haitkin, Music – Jay Chattaway, Special Effects Supervisor – Kevin McCarthy, Makeup – Rob Benevides, Production Design – Lester Cohen. Production Company – Epic Productions/Sarlui-Diamant/Esparasa-Katz Productions.
Cast:
Eric Roberts (Josh Baker), Megan Gallagher (Sandra Malloy), James Earl Jones (Lieutenant Spencer), Red Buttons (Elias Zacharai), Richard Bright (Detective McClosky), Eric Braeden (The Doctor), Janine Turner (Cheryl)
Plot: Comic-book artist Josh Baker tries to chat up a beautiful girl he meets on the street but she faints. An ambulance arrives and and she is whisked away. However when he tries to find her he can find no record of her being admitted at any hospital. He becomes obsessed with finding her. But as he tries to do so he stumbles onto the scheme of a scientist who is using an ambulance to abduct diabetic women to become subjects in illicit experiments.
The films of Larry Cohen – which include the likes of It’s Alive (1974), Demon/God Told Me To (1977) and Q: The Winged Serpent (1982) – are usually ingenious and wittily quirky efforts of great originality made on B-budgets. But this was somewhat of a misfire from the usually ingenious Cohen. It is very fast paced, but that doesn’t quite carry it past Cohen’s willingness to skip roughshod over an enormous number of plot holes and frank incredulities that weaken it almost entirely. One of the major plot points, for example, involves Eric Roberts being poisoned – but Cohen never deigns to explain how, why, or who did it, in fact never refers to the matter again in the film as soon as Roberts recovers. Nor is it ever explained what the illicit medical experiments are about or why they require the kidnap of diabetic women. Several times the plot depends on the ambulance with almost omniscient intuition turning up when one of the cast members falls ill or is beaten up, or people just happening to find the ambulance parked outside the very place they turn up to – at one point it even appears in the middle of a disco dancefloor as though that is the most natural place in the world to park an ambulance. Perhaps Cohen intended all these amassings of improbability to be amusing but it just creates a film that feels ludicrously implausible.
There are still a number of Cohen’s characteristically quirky eccentricities flourish to be found – like James Earl Jones’s death scene, which is measured by the continued involuntary chomping of peanuts that slows down as he eventually expires. Everybody gives amusing performances, especially Red Buttons, although Eric Roberts with his lazily, laidback Southern drawl is miscast as the sensitive put-upon average guy that the film requires he be. Roberts’ comic-book character works for Marvel Comics and the film was shot in the Marvel offices and contains the requisite cameo from Stan Lee.
Larry Cohen’s other genre films are:– the killer mutant baby film It’s Alive (1974), the bizarre alien messiah film Demon/God Told Me To (1977), It Lives Again/It’s Alive (1978), the werewolf comedy Full Moon High (1982), the monster movie Q – The Winged Serpent (1982), the sentient fast food takeover film The Stuff (1985), It’s Alive III: Island of the Alive (1974), A Return to Salem’s Lot (1987) and the witch comedy The Wicked Stepmother (1989). This was the last genre film that Cohen would direct – his only other film so far has been the modern Blaxploitation film Original Gangstas (1996). These days he has gone into seeming retirement as a director at least – which is a great loss to the world of genre cinema at the very least – and his only work consists of screenplays for the Maniac Cop series beginning with Maniac Cop (1988), various Ed McBain’s 87th Precinct tv movies, the original story for Abel Ferrara’s Body Snatchers (1993) remake, the stalker film The Ex (1996), Uncle Sam (1997) about a patriotically minded undead Gulf War veteran, the hilarious psycho sperm donor film Misbegotten (1997), and occasional A-budget cinematic releases like Guilty as Sin (1993) and Phone Booth (2002).
Copyright Richard Scheib 1993
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