My daughter is celebrating her birthday this weekend. We spent a large chunk of last night putting up decorations, cleaning the house, and otherwise preparing for her party. By the time we were done, I was whooped. I managed to watch this movie, but I was way too tired to write about it. So once again you get a Friday Night Horror Movie on Saturday morning.
When I think of movies from the 1980s, I naturally think of movies I loved as a kid. Movies I actually watched during the ’80s. Then there were also movies that I did not watch. Movies I knew about, but that wasn’t for me. Weren’t for kids. Movies for adults I had no interest in. There were other movies that I’d see in the video rental store but didn’t rent for one reason or another. And finally, there are movies like Q: The Winged Serpent. Movies I’d never heard of until much later. Way after the 1980s. I mean, I don’t think I saw this film in a video store; surely I would have remembered that crazy cover of a dragon-looking monster on top of the Chrysler Building.
But as an adult, this film kept popping up in my feeds. Someone would talk about it on social media, or it would come up in some list. It definitely kept rearing its head when I went searching for movies to watch from the 1980s.
I put off watching it for a long time because I kept getting it confused with another 1980s horror movie. One whose name I can’t remember now, but that apparently has some pretty nasty rape scenes, and I’m never in the mood for that.
But it popped up again last night, and the Letterboxd reviews didn’t mention any nastiness, so I put it in. It’s actually pretty good for a goofy, low-budget monster movie.It was directed by Larry Cohen, who was kind of the king of surprisingly good low-budget horror movies in the 1980s. He made movies like
The Stuff,
A Return to Salem’s Lot, and
Special Effects.
Someone is killing people in a gruesome, ritualistic way. At the same time, a number of people have literally lost their heads (and other body parts) whilst wandering around New York City. Detective Shepard (David Carradine) and Sergeant Powell (Richard Roundtree) are on the case.The ritualistic killings seem to be a part of some kooky Aztec cult, and Shepard starts to think they might have awakened Quetzalcōātl, an ancient Aztec serpent god. He’s right, of course; otherwise we might not have a movie.
Accidentally mixed up in all this is Jimmy Quinn (Michael Moriarty), a cheap crook who really just wants to play jazz piano. He gets mixed up with the wrong guys, and when a robbery goes bad, he decides to hide in the top of the Chrysler Building. Guess where old Q the Winged Serpent, is hiding out, has made a nest, and laid an egg?
Made on a very modest budget of $1.1 million, Cohen keeps the monster off screen for most of its runtime. He makes great use of shadows sweeping across the New York City landscape, and we get snippets of wings, claws, and beaks. Once it fully shows up toward the end, it looks like…well, it looks like a claymation monster made on a budget. But I’ll still take that over most of the CGI slop we get these days.
The acting is quite good for a film like this. Moriarty plays Jimmy in a way that is both sleazy and heartbreaking. He’s a guy who just can’t catch a break, and yet constantly makes the dumbest decisions. After learning where the monster lives, he goes to the authorities but refuses to tell them where it is until they agree to give him $1 million in cash, amnesty for all his crimes, and photographic rights to the serpent.
Carradine and Roundtree are having a lot of fun as the cops. They are tough and smart-assed. Cohen keeps things moving at a clip, and he creates plenty of modest thrills.I’m a big fan of the low-budget monster movies they made a lot of in the 1950s, and it’s always fun to see homages like this from later decades. It isn’t a great movie, but darn if it isn’t a fun one.
themidnightcafe.org 