Love God

Toronto International Film Festival Program Book
1997

Love God
Frank Grow
USA, 1997
82 minutes
Colour/35mm
Production Company: Good Machine/Only Hearts/Crystal Pictures
Executive Producer: James Schamus, Ted Hope, Shimpei Okuda, Ruth Robles, Louis Robles
Producer: Anthony Bregman
Screenplay: Frank Grow
Cinematographer: Terry Stacey
Editor: David Frankel
Production Designer: Clay Brown
Sound: Tracy McKnight
Music: Stuart Gray
Principal Cast: Will Keenan, Shannon Burkett, Yukio Yamamoto, Kerri Kenney, Michael Laurence, Dale Soules, Kymberli Ghee

Imagine a cacophony of epilepsy-inducing images, a galaxy of stomach-turning monsters, spine-crushing sound and a tsunami of unidentified bodily fluids, all fertilized by a lethally deranged plot. Suffice to say that Love God defies easy characterization. Suffice to say that, once the nausea passes, Love God will change your life.

Larue, a diagnosed schizophrenic with compulsive reading disorder—a rare ailment which causes the patient to read and then destroy everything in view—is prematurely discharged from an overcrowded New York City hospital. Desperate for a normal life, he flushes his medication down the toilet and takes to the streets with super-thick eyeglasses, leaving him practically blind but relatively well-adjusted. But that night he is attacked by a giant parasitic worm—also the central figure in a subplot involving a mad doctor and his reverse evolutionary theories—and pursued by a malformed goddess monster through the streets. Meanwhile the other members of his half-way house interact with him and each other: a Tourette’s Syndrome-stricken punk rocker; Kali, the blue-skinned Hindu goddess of destruction; and the hardcore clean-aholics across the hall, Helen—Larue’s girlfriend, a nymphomaniac in a house dress—and Connie.

One of the many intriguing elements of Love God is the way it looks. To save money on production, the filmmakers shot the film with many kinds of video cameras simultaneously and then cross-cut and manipulated the images—with a dazzling array of effects—to look like neither film nor video. As a result, colours, close-ups and eyeballs pop off the screen in unprecedentedly confrontational ways. Grow’s radically extreme rapid cutting style—the movie has 3,700 cuts and 68 music cues—only adds to the hallucinogenic esprit. Love God also contains one of the most unusual erotic moments ever conceived, anywhere. Director Frank Grow’s earlier short, Red & Rosy, was a major cult item on the black market tape circuit a few years ago; Love God ensures that either Grow will be forever considered a prophet of cinema’s future or end his days languishing in some nasty prison.
—Noah Cowan