The Ambulance, 1990.
Directed by Larry Cohen.
Starring Eric Roberts, James Earl Jones, Megan Gallagher, Red Buttons, Stan Lee, Janine Turner, and Eric Braeden.
SYNOPSIS:
A man gets involved in a mystery when a woman he is flirting with collapses and gets picked up by a mysterious ambulance that no one can trace.
On the face of, cult filmmaker Larry Cohen’s 1990 movie The Ambulance is the perfect example of genre filmmaking by a director who ploughed his own field during a career that involved making movies about winged serpents, killer desserts and mutant babies. There’s the wild plot, a memorable vehicle, a charismatic lead (with a haircut that serves as the ultimate time capsule of 1990), pantomime villains and a strong supporting cast of recognisable faces. However, dig beneath the surface and… actually, there isn’t very much beneath the surface.
Josh Baker (Eric Roberts) is a comic book artist working for Marvel Comics (another snapshot of a time when Marvel wasn’t the massive movie studio it is today) and is very confident when it comes to the ladies. So much so that he spots attractive Cheryl (Janine Turner) in the street and follows her, buying her gifts from a street vendor and generally being a pest, but a friendly one.
When the diabetic Cheryl collapses, Josh goes to help but she is carted away after a few moments by a pair of paramedics in an old-fashioned ambulance. Going to the hospital mentioned by the paramedic Josh discovers that Cheryl isn’t there, and after visiting several hospitals in New York it seems she has disappeared. In fact, Cheryl has been kidnapped by a mad doctor (played by Eric Braeden) who is going to cure her diabetes by transplanting pig organs into her body, but that isn’t all he is going to do. Josh enlists the help of cop-on-the-edge Frank Spencer (no, not that one – this one is played by James Earl Jones) to try and find Cheryl, as more people around him start going missing.
So it is a perfect B-movie plot from a director who had a history of guerrilla filmmaking in and around New York during the 1970s and ‘80s, but The Ambulance also taps into Cohen’s usual themes of innocent items going rogue and becoming a killer, in this case the titular ambulance (despite the people in it being the killers, not the vehicle itself).
This is where the movie falls down a bit as the plot is utter nonsense and so Cohen keeps the action moving pretty much from the get-go, the momentum and bonkers performances from Eric Roberts, James Earl Jones, Eric Braeden and the wonderfully named Red Buttons as Elias Zacharai – an eccentric bystander who Josh picks up along the way – preventing you from thinking about what is going on too much, which isn’t that much of a problem but you can’t help thinking that a movie called The Ambulance directed by Larry Cohen should lean into the killer vehicle idea a little more, especially as the movie wasn’t that far removed from the likes of John Carpenter’s Christine and Elliot Silverstein’s The Car when it came to marketing and perception.
But pointing out what the movie isn’t doesn’t do justice to what it is, and The Ambulance is a dark, occasionally amusing and intermittently exciting thriller. Eric Roberts plays the lead a bit like a budget Kurt Russell but, like Russell, he is very likeable and works better when he is having a back-and-forth with other characters, which is where James Earl Jones comes in, because despite being theatrically trained and possessing one of the greatest voices in all of cinema, appearing in a low budget Larry Cohen movie wasn’t beneath him and he is clearly relishing playing the role of the stressed-out cop. He isn’t in it nearly enough, but his scenes are memorable and his chemistry with Roberts is fun.
Red Buttons is also fun, but his character appears to be from another movie as his introduction and subsequent onscreen friendship with Eric Roberts is established very quickly and a bit forced, highlighting that the script doesn’t allow for a lot of natural interactions between some characters as it has to hit certain beats at certain times. Same could be said for the villains, as a lot of things just happen because Larry Cohen wants them to happen, leaving an odd feel to some of the major scenes, like some material had been cut.
Nevertheless, The Ambulance achieves most of what it sets out to do and if you are well versed in Larry Cohen’s movies and his approach then there is a lot of enjoyment to be had. For anyone else, it might be a little too wacky to fully appreciate on the level it was intended, but it does feature Stan Lee playing himself before anyone outside of hardcore Marvel fans knew who he was, and 1990 is always a pleasure to revisit, if only to cringe at Eric Roberts’ mullet and wish we still had filmmakers like Larry Cohen willing to make these kinds of movies.
Flickering Myth Rating –Film: ★ ★ / Movie: ★ ★ ★
Chris Ward
