Q (1982)

a.k.a. Q - The Winged Serpent / The Winged Serpent
Directed by: Larry Cohen

I don't know what it is about giant monster movies that I love so much, but love them I most definitely do. This goes back to me when I was very young and loved anything about dinosaurs, I couldn't get enough of dinosaur action and if I was lucky enough to get to see some black and white stop-motion dinosaurs in a movie I was happy as I ever could be. More than 30 years later I'm still pretty much the same... give me some Harryhausen creatures, the original King Kong, Godzilla, Gorgo... hell, anything bigger than a house and I am back feeling the same thing I did all those years ago: total happiness. Giant monsters rule and if you don't think the same you are wrong and should be ashamed of yourself!

The thing is that I can stand a lot of boring stuff in a movie just for those scenes of the monster doing his (or her) thing... I'm not gonna go so far to say that this movie bored me, but there were quite long parts that I just didn't really care for - I wanted to see some monster action and here we were stuck in something that felt more like a B-movie cop thriller with some drama touches. A lot of the old Godzilla movies were like that as well, the b-plot with criminals trying to take over the world, aliens trying to take over the world or just about anyone trying to take over the world took up more space in the movie than Godzilla himself, but that was easier to take as those weird b-plots were usually so damn over the top they were just as fun to watch as the monster mayhem that always broke lose at the end of the movies.


The cops of New York city are baffled when first a window cleaner gets his head chopped off while hanging on the outside of a big office building. It doesn't get better when a woman who's sunbathing on top of a skyscraper is picked up by something big that can fly and disappears, and if that wasn't bad enough, a construction worker is also snatched from the top of a building and pieces of him are plopping down on the streets below... At the same time the two cops Shepard (David Carradine) and Powell (Richard Roundtree) are working on a case with dead bodies that has been ritually sacrificed (flayed alive and hearts cut out).

The good thing about detective Shepard is that he's pretty open minded and with the help of a museum curator he starts to suspect the killings are made by a cult worshipping the Aztec god Quetzalcoatl. And wouldn't you know it, good old Quetzalcoatl is a flying serpent... could he be the reason people disappear from high buildings?

At the same time we get to spend a lot of time with the loser Jimmy Quinn (Michael Moriarty) who manages to get involved in a diamond robbery that goes really wrong. While fleeing from the scene he hides out in the top of the Chrysler building, and there he discovers a big nest with a huge ass egg in it. The cops are now believing there is a big flying creature terrorizing New York City, but no one knows where it hides out between his afternoon flights to find people to munch on...

This is where Jimmy manages to get arrested by the cops and find himself in the middle of the search... He knows where the creature is hiding out, but demands a pardon for any crimes he might have commited as well as a million dollars before he tells the cops anything about the nest he have found... The money is delivered and he takes the cops to the Chrysler building where they get involved in a machine gun fight with the creature, who finally crashes into another building and dies... but, is this the end? What about the cult that brought Quetzalcoatl to New York and who has been sacrificing people to this ancient god? I can tell you that the use of the word "cult" is quite wrong here, it's one guy and one guy alone who's responsible and he'll get what he deserves...

If I'm not totally mistaken, this is a movie Larry Cohen threw together fast when another movie fell through... he had some money and wrote a script in a week or so. And that shows... this is a pure B-grade movie, but it never takes itself serious and the actors seem to have fun with their roles. Michael Moriarty does a good job at playing the loser Quinn so much that I really started to get extremely annoyed every time he was on screen (and that is a lot in this movie), it takes a good actor to conjure up those kind of feelings for a damn character in a silly movie. It was also cool to see David Carradine playing a good guy (maybe it's because I first saw him in the TV show "North and South" back in the 80's that I always seem to think of him always playing assholes) that actually did some police work in the movie rather than the usual refusal of believing anything anyone says...

I can't say that I loved the movie, too much downtime between anything really happening for me to love it, but either way it was an ok movie. I would have loved some more monster action, but with a budget this low (I read somewhere that it cost 1,1 million dollars to make) it's understandable that they couldn't have more than they had. It was fun to see some good old stop-motion action with Q though, or was that claymation? Who cares! If you're only looking for an insane giant monster battle this is not a movie for you, but if you're looking for a cheap looking b-movie where at least a giant monster appears now and then you should check it out.