Review by Eric Hillis
Directed by: Larry Cohen
Starring: Eric Roberts, Megan Gallagher, Janine Turner, James Earl Jones, Red Buttons, Eric Braeden, Stan Lee
Throughout his career, writer/director Larry Cohen liked to take symbols of comfort and benevolence and turn them against us. Think of the mutant babies of the It's Alive series, the evil angel of God Told Me To, the monstrous police officer of Maniac Cop, even the treacherous dessert of The Stuff. His second last film as director, 1990's The Ambulance, saw Cohen take the eponymous symbol of mercy and make it malevolent. Cohen claims he was inspired by an incident in which he became paralysed by severe food poisoning. The vulnerability he felt while being taken away in an ambulance got him thinking about he was completely at the mercy of the paramedics.
The Ambulance's plot falls somewhere between the vehicular horror of films like Duel, The Car, The Wraith and Christine, and the medical horror of Coma, X-Ray and Visiting Hours. But tonally it's more in tune with the classic horror comedies of the 1930s and '40s. The traditional mad scientist has been replaced here by an exploitative surgeon (Eric Braeden) while the entirety of New York City serves as his old dark castle.
The sort of nebbish male protagonist that might have been played by Bob Hope is essayed here by Eric Roberts at the peak of his scenery chewing career. He plays Josh, a comic book artist (for Marvel no less) who attempts to pick up a beautiful young woman, Cheryl (a pre-Northern Exposure Janine Turner), on a busy New York street. Cheryl fends off Josh's awkward charm before collapsing. As luck would have it an ambulance just happens to be passing by and takes her off to hospital. But when Josh arrives at the hospital to which the paramedics claimed they were taking Cheryl, he's told that no young woman matching her description arrived. After checking the rest of the city's hospitals, Josh goes to the police, who show little interest. Taking matters into his own hands, Josh begins his own shoddy investigation into Cheryl's disappearance and stumbles into a medical conspiracy that sees diabetic New Yorkers snatched off the street and used in grisly experiments.
Like the classic horror comedies from which it takes so many of its cues, The Ambulance pairs its idiotic male lead with a competent woman, in this case Sandra (Megan Gallagher), a police officer who comes to believe Josh's wild claims of conspiracy. Cohen subverts our expectations by making Josh the object of Sandra's romantic pursuit. Sandra keeps hitting on the hunky himbo but he's too obsessed with Cheryl to notice her flirtations. This dynamic provides much of The Ambulance's charm, and Roberts and Gallagher have a crackling comic chemistry, even if Roberts is often in his own world when it comes to his distinctive dialled to 11 acting style.
Cohen nods to the vintage comedies that inspired him with the casting of Red Buttons as an elderly newspaper reporter who takes an interest in Josh's story. Long before we got sick of seeing him cameo in MCU productions, former Marvel supremo Stan Lee plays himself as Josh's long-suffering boss. Even James Earl Jones is given a rare chance to play comedy, with Darth Vader himself hilarious as a gum-chewing riff on the cliché of the angry black police chief. There's a lovely moment where Jones angrily chews out one of his subordinates before smiling to himself, the film's way of winking at the audience and letting us know it's very aware of its own clichés.
Some critics have perhaps read a little too much into Cohen's film as a critique of America's healthcare industry, though there is an astutely funny line about Cheryl's abductors sounding "more like salesmen than doctors." The film moves too quickly to ever really dig into this theme though, and Cohen is far more interested in entertaining us than providing a lecture. He does so with a smartly constructed comic thriller that combines whip smart dialogue, tight action scenes and unrequited sexual chemistry for 90 minutes of the sort of thrill a minute entertainment that was Cohen's trademark. This doctor has no hesitation in prescribing The Ambulance.
The Ambulance is on UK bluray from October 13th from Eureka Entertainment.