The Ambulance (1990) **1/2
Though we lost filmmaker Larry Cohen in March of this year, his madcap low budget films will continue to live on. I still have yet to discover more than a few of his films as director and I also have yet to see the documentary about the micro maverick, King Cohen (2017).
While The Ambulance (1990), like some of his other films, varies in quality—here (as the writer/director commonly did) Cohen gathered talent of varying degrees to make an entertaining acton comedy horror thriller. Eric Roberts sports a wildly distracting mullet and is completely unconvincing as an artist working at Marvel Comics (Stan Lee stars as, essentially, himself in slightly more than a cameo). He also vastly oversteps his boundaries with women and I wonder if it felt any less creepy in 1990. Roberts's acting is even more unhinged than Michael Moriarty—star of four of Cohen's films as well as the director's episode of the Masters Of Horror (2005–2007) TV series—but it definitely adds to the weird charm.
Janine Turner, Red Buttons and James Earl Jones all don't have enough screen time. Neither does Eric Braeden, but that's just as well because he doesn't make a particularly menacing villain. A lot of that is due to the fact that the character (and film) isn't given much backstory and the whole thing feels like an idea that wasn't fully fleshed out (with many of the scenes feeling unrehearsed). That's typical of Larry Cohen though, and is the nature of the beast when it comes to his films—adding to the guerrilla style and off kilter approach.
While The Ambulance (1990), like some of his other films, varies in quality—here (as the writer/director commonly did) Cohen gathered talent of varying degrees to make an entertaining acton comedy horror thriller. Eric Roberts sports a wildly distracting mullet and is completely unconvincing as an artist working at Marvel Comics (Stan Lee stars as, essentially, himself in slightly more than a cameo). He also vastly oversteps his boundaries with women and I wonder if it felt any less creepy in 1990. Roberts's acting is even more unhinged than Michael Moriarty—star of four of Cohen's films as well as the director's episode of the Masters Of Horror (2005–2007) TV series—but it definitely adds to the weird charm.
Janine Turner, Red Buttons and James Earl Jones all don't have enough screen time. Neither does Eric Braeden, but that's just as well because he doesn't make a particularly menacing villain. A lot of that is due to the fact that the character (and film) isn't given much backstory and the whole thing feels like an idea that wasn't fully fleshed out (with many of the scenes feeling unrehearsed). That's typical of Larry Cohen though, and is the nature of the beast when it comes to his films—adding to the guerrilla style and off kilter approach.
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