Q: THE WINGED SERPENT (1982)
Director: Larry Cohen
Genre: Monster-on-the-loose/Detective/Crime/Exploitation
THE MOVIE
An Aztec god. A series of ritualistic murders. A botched Jewelry store robbery. A small-time crook in over his head. David Carradine and Richard Roundtree are on the case. No it’s not Quentin Tarantino and Robert Rodriguez’s next collaboration; it’s Larry Cohen’s Q: The Winged Serpent, a potent mix of Amerian monster movie, gritty crime drama, and plain old horror exploitation film.
No, nothing suspicious about this at all...
I checked out Q because I was writing a story that features Quetzalcoatl as a giant monster and this film’s creature is based on the same Mesoamerican legend of the “feathered serpent.” The Anthropology is fuzzy and the effects are pretty bad but Q is the kind of movie that has a great time reveling in its own cinematic trashiness. For example: a scene in which a rooftop sunbathing woman removes her bikini and rubs suntan lotion on her breasts, her nipples unnaturally erect. It’s an R-rated movie so, of course, she takes longer to do this than she would in real life. She’s then eaten by a giant monster.
Mmmm...Art Deco...yummy...
I watch a lot of monster movies and the monster-less scenes are generally pretty boring but this movie is actually interesting to watch apart form the fact that it features a giant Quetzalcoatl nesting in the Chrysler building and terrorizing New Yorkers. Michael Moriarty plays Quinn, a criminal/jazz pianist who gets involved a bungled jewel heist and in his attempts to escape the police and the mob he stumbles into Quetzalcoatl’s lair. Moriarty gives a wildly neurotic performance and he’s so weird and crazy that it is hard to take your eyes off him when he is on screen. The movie seems torn as to whether it is about him or about the titular creature.
By contrast, David Carradine is disconnected and laconic kind of like Clint Eastwood on Quaaludes and he has a habit hilariously stating the obvious in a way they only do in movies such as when he first sees Quetzalcoatl he mutters, “Man that thing is big” or after he shoots a knife wielding cultist who returns from seeming death for the forth time Carradine calmly observes: “You don’t die easy.”
And finally, Q features one of my favorite monster movie cliché sequences in which the hero studies a series of well-illustrated books about the monster in question (most famously done in Jaws.) In this instance, he borrows the books from a museum curator. He visits the curator to do background research on the Aztec cultists and the two discuss Aztec culture while walking through an exhibit of colorful and exotic artifacts from Indians of the Pacific Northwest of the United States. The curator never actually says that they are Aztec artifacts; he only sort of vaguely acknowledges them, giving the movie some wiggle room in case someone like me points out that those are clearly not Aztec in origin.
THE MONSTER/EFFECTS
You don’t actually see much of the monster in this movie until the last quarter, which works well because the movie does a good job of making you feel Quetzalcoatl’s presence while either not showing any of her at all or doling out small glimpses and also because once you do see it, it is a bit of a let down. This interpretation is very monochromatic and avian and vaguely resembles the Fell Beasts from the latter two “Lord of the Rings” movies.
Where Brooklyn at?
MONSTERS FEATURED
Quetzalcoatl, mama and baby.
SEQUELS
None.
Eagle Man gets his revenge.
SEE ALSO
The Feathered Serpent (1946)
TRAILER
Trivia
This is not Quetzalcoatl’s first foray into giant
monsterdom. He was previously featured in the 1946 film,
“The Feathered Serpent.” A monster named Quetzalcoatl
also appeared in the “Bird of Paradise” episode of the
animated “Godzilla” series based on the 1998 American
movie. This episode featured numerous allusions to Cohen’s
film, proving that the shows writers were actual monster
movie nerds.
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