A happy-go-lucky comic-book artist, Josh (Eric Roberts), tries to pick up a brunette (Janine Turner) on the streets of New York City. She is clearly charmed and then collapses on the street because, you know, she is a diabetic and had a three-martini lunch! A creepy guy in a limo (Eric Braeden, no less calculating than his eternal role on "Young and the Restless") witnesses the event and calls someone after she is picked up by the ambulance. Of course, this is no ordinary ambulance because it travels to an unnamed hospital that is not in the yellow pages. Braeden is the top-level surgeon who tells the brunette that she will get an implant of brand new pancreas from a pig and then her diabetes will be cured. After that, he will kill her! Say what? Oh, yes, to sell the body to research centers. Okay.
Josh chases this brunette but never finds her. Of course, in due time, he discovers through a nightclub that the ambulance is bad news. In one incredibly funny scene, Josh get sick in his apartment and vomits in the hallway. Later he finds that dreaded ambulance outside of the New York Post building! This is after he has been admitted to a hospital and runs into a fellow patient (Red Buttons, who gets to swear) who was a former photo journalist, I think. Can everyone follow this movie because if you understood it, please email me.
Writer-director Larry Cohen has occasionally filmed screenplays of varying degrees of quality that sometimes made sense (His directorial debut "Bone" is still his best). There is no sense to be made from "The Ambulance" which is billed as some sort of comedy thriller and works as neither. Spirited cameos from James Earl Jones and Stan Lee makes the picture come alive temporarily. Eric Roberts tries his damnedest but comes across as some hopelessly romantic fool. Only Megan Gallagher has the right tone and attitude playing a police detective who hopes to shoot male suspects and is smitten with Josh (she also appeared as a police officer in the 1980's TV series "Hill Street Blues"). But the whole movie doesn't work as satire or comedy nor is it especially thrilling - it drags after a fairly funny half-hour. A perfunctory affair.
