I’d heard a bit about the late writer and director Larry Cohen. His directorial efforts were never huge hits, but many of them, often in the sci-fi and horror realms, became cult classics if nothing else. I’d heard good things about a few of them, and since I found a way to watch 1982’s Q or Q–The Winged Serpent off a streaming service I subscribed to, I decided to give it a shot.
And it was a shot well worth taking, and not just because the monster itself is rather impressive.
Set in New York City, the movie doesn’t even take the time to let us get to know anyone when a pervy window washer’s head is ripped from his shoulders as he’s cleaning the window of a skyscraper looking into the office of a woman he has apparently been flirting with for quite some time. The whole sequence involving the window washer and the office woman only takes a few minutes, but the audience is still given a chance to get to know both characters and their relationship to each other before some unseen something separates the window washer’s head from his neck. And while not every victim will get this level of character work, the fact that Cohen takes the time to do so is one of the things that makes what could be a standard creature feature into something better than the genre might lead one to believe.
At about the same time, two NYPD detectives (David Carradine and Richard Roundtree) are investigating the murder of a man who appears to have had his skin ritually removed by some unknown person. Is there a connection between this case and the thing eating people off their rooftops? I mean, of course there is, but the connection isn’t obvious right away to anyone except Carradine’s Detective Shepard.
Besides, the cops aren’t the main characters. That status would actually fall on Jimmy Quinn (Michael Moriarty), a motormouthed, lowlevel criminal who wants to be a jazz pianist. Jimmy’s been pushed around his whole life, and after he’s forced to participate in a jewelry store robbery after repeated reminders that he’s just a wheelman, he manages to escape by fleeing up to the upper levels of the Chrysler Building. And up there, he finds a nest with a very large egg in it…
Moriarty essentially makes this movie. We get a lot about this guy in just a few scenes. We learn, for example, he has a minor drinking problem, that his live-in girlfriend says he’s been abusive while drunk but who also sees a lot of good in him. He doesn’t like guns and won’t use one unless forced to, mostly by other criminals, and Jimmy never fires a shot in the entire movie. He’s also a self-confessed coward who’s afraid of almost everything. His chance discovery means that for the first time in his life, he can actually be the big man. And Quinn, well, he’s gonna take it. Life has a way of not working out for him, even here., though Det. Shepard seems to take a liking to him, and as the movie ends, Quinn’s last line is he isn’t afraid anymore. It’s a small moment of triumph for someone who, in life has always been a small man.
As for the monster itself, believed to possibly be if not the Aztec god Quetzalcoatl than at least a flesh-and-blood animal mistaken for a god by ancient peoples, it’s a rather impressive special effect. Done as a stop motion creature, it may not be as smooth and fancy as modern CGI, but it still moves well and looks appropriately menacing. Between the monster and Moriarty, this was a rather fun creature feature. I may have to track down more of Larry Cohen’s work now.
Grade: B+
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