Larry Cohen's 1990 Thriller The Ambulance Is a Lot of Fun For a Movie that Asks You to Root for Eric Roberts as a Mulleted Cat-caller
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Romantic comedies have long propagated the problematic notion that resilience is a virtue onto itself. These films tell us that if you love someone and they don’t reciprocate your affection then you must win them over by any means necessary.
In that respect the hokey and tradition-bound genre is out of step with contemporary social mores. We now understand more than ever before that no means no and that if someone firmly rejects your advances then you owe it to them, and yourself, and society as a whole, to respect their wishes and not see rejection as merely an opening volley eventually leading to loving.
Larry Cohen’s 1990 thriller The Ambulance makes the mistake of asking audiences to root for a protagonist who sees pretty girls on the street and starts chatting them up in hopes of scoring a date and/or sex.
Those kind of men were difficult to root for and identify with back in 1990. They’ve only become harder to tolerate, let alone like or love, in the interim. It compounds that unforced error by casting Eric Roberts as the kind of creep who hits on every beautiful woman he meets, particularly if they are complete strangers.
Roberts is a fine character actor and villain but a dodgy romantic lead because he seems like the kind of guy who would keep the female romantic lead in a torture dungeon and feed her only scraps rather than romance and marry her.
Julia Robert’s unsettlingly intense brother was unforgettable in Bob Fosse’s Star 80. Unfortunately he was so convincing playing a deranged sex-murderer and all-around creep that studios and audiences assumed that he must be playing himself on some level.
You want good, intense actors to work on your film but you do not want deranged sex murderers on your set on account of all the deranged sex murdering.
The final strike against Roberts as the lead in The Ambulance as opposed to the man who wants to castrate the hero and set his penis on fire is that for reasons I cannot begin to fathom, his comic book artist sports a mullet, that least flattering and most 1980s of hairstyles.
I know that the whole appeal of mullets is that they are business upfront and a party in the back. Unfortunately just about no one looks good with a mullet, even Eric Roberts. Mullets do not make cat-calling would-be pick up artists who look and act like Eric Roberts less creepy. On the contrary, the regrettable do of the protagonist just makes him seem more like someone you would want to get the hell away from for your own safety and protection. If a horny, mullet-sporting Eric Roberts is your best hope you might want to just take your chances with a sinister conspiracy.
The Ambulance casts Roberts as Josh Baker, a womanizing employee of Marvel, a popular comic book company whose longtime editor, Stan Lee, made the first of what would turn out to be an endless series of movie cameos as Josh’s boss.
Cohen apparently befriended Lee while working on a screenplay for Dr. Strange that was never made but the two remained pals and Cohen rightly thought that making the hero’s office the Marvel bullpen would lend the film a certain distinction and novelty.
Stan Lee appearing in a movie? Crazily enough, it happened!
The writer-director couldn’t have imagined that the ham stiffly reciting his dialogue would someday have bit parts in dozens movies that individually grossed hundreds of millions of dollars and have collectively made tens of billions of dollars.
Josh’s profession doesn’t factor much in the proceedings beyond giving an audience a tantalizing glimpse behind the curtain to where the magic happens. Josh draws funny books for small children but mostly he’s horny.
So when he sees an attractive woman played by Northern Exposure’s Janine Turner in what are honestly fairly modest work clothes he doesn’t let the fact that she’s a complete stranger just going about her day keep him from shooting his shot.
The weaselly hero tells Cheryl Turner (Janine Turner), the woman he’s courting in a very rude, overly direct fashion that he’s from the government and needs to know if she’s single or has a boyfriend.
I should reiterate here that Josh does NOT work for the government. He works for Stan Lee and Marvel comics. So he is lying to this poor woman in addition to ineptly hitting on her.
Claiming to work for the government when you do not is against the law. It’s like people with novelty tee shirts indicating that they are members of the FBI, only instead of standing for Federal Bureau of Investigation they mean Federal Bikini Inspector.
Ladies, Federal Bikini Inspector is not a real government position. There is no Federal Bureau of Bikini Inspection. So if a randy lad with a Federal Bikini Inspector tee shirt tells you that he needs to grope your bikini top to ascertain whether it is providing adequate coverage know that he is a con man and a sex criminal out to get his jollies and not an actual federal employee.
This woman is unimpressed by Josh for obvious reasons but when she is taken away in a mysterious ambulance he makes it his life’s mission to save this near-stranger from people who would do her harm.
Josh knows next to nothing about the woman except that she’s a diabetic and her name is Cheryl yet he inexplicably formed such a connection with her that he devotes all of his time and energy to finding her.
The cops think that the funny book artist is a nut with a few screws loose when he talks about an ominous ambulance that exists to hurt rather than help people.
James Earl Jones has a very entertaining supporting role as Lieutenant Frank Spencer, a gum-chewing, wise-cracking detective who talks animatedly about “funny books” but disparages them as little more than funny animal stories for children.
Josh has more luck with Elias Zacharai, a VERY old school journalist played by Oscar winner Red Buttons with an excess of moxie and pizzazz. Both men find themselves targeted by a conspiracy that is scooping up diabetics throughout New York and ferrying them to their doom.
The titular vehicle is a character onto itself, a symbol of authority and order that has been corrupted by bad guys into something sinister and evil. It’s like the cop uniform in the Cohen-written Maniac Cop series or Uncle Sam iconography in his 1996 horror film Uncle Sam.
The Ambulance is a fun, lightweight twist on the Hitchcockian perennial of the ordinary man who stumbles into an extraordinary world of danger, death and intrigue except that there’s nothing ordinary about Roberts or his mullet.
Roberts brings a light touch to the material and an innate understanding of its ridiculousness. The actor spends a lot of the film strapped a gurney, sometimes inside ambulances, legitimate or otherwise, and sometimes while speeding down streets to his seeming doom.
It’s an enjoyable lark with a wonderful kicker in Josh eventually defeating the bad guys and saving the girl only to learn that she has a boyfriend.
D’oh! He totally wanted to go on a kissing date with her but she was all, “I got a man” and he was all, “What’s your man got to do with me? I’m not trying to hear that, see?”
Thankfully he has one heck of a consolation prize in the sexy lady cop who has been assisting him in finding his crush.
The Ambulance is a thoroughly amusing diversion that is probably best known for beginning Lee’s long love affair with movie cameos.
Lee actually plays a role within the film itself, in sharp contrast to the winking, intentionally distracting flashiness of his cameos in Marvel movies. Thanks to The Ambulance, Lee’s journey through film as an unlikely but ubiquitous actor in addition to being the creator of some of film’s biggest and most popular heroes began on a modest but tremendously appealing note.
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