Q: The Winged Serpent Reviews

About an hour in, Morarty goes off the rails and Cohen gives up on plotting and good dialogue. But until then, it's one of the most unique genre movies ever, taking a totally different angle of storytelling, in the plot, in the kind of dialogue that carries us from scene to scene, in the shots of parts of New York City that create the whole, in the super high and low angles and aerial shots that are all different than we've seen before and all perfect for pulling the characterizations and the monster threat together.

The other half of what makes Q unique is the adventurous, voracious performance of Michael Moriarty. If Ratzo Rizzo was over-thought-out acting which Hoffman's second thoughts would have turned down a notch, here we get urban lowlife Jimmy Quinn and the opposite mistake. It's a method-like performance that is totally feeling driven, and might reach too much into Morarity's own reserves as an eccentric gone crazy. For a while, Quinn ( -- starts with "Q" -- ) is a amazing creation, and since he's more ordinary guy than crook, he has our empathy, and we like when he becomes a bit of a kook -- it's the common man's way of being Danny Kaye. But Quinn gets more selfish and annoying and resentful of how life has treated him, and empathy distills into pity, which is half chore. I started empathizing with the monster, who was too majestic to get shot down like Edward G. Robinson and had the whole city against him, even Jimmy Quinn.

Amusingly ridiculous monster b-movie in which a giant dragon goes round lopping off heads in New York City, and yet the NYPD finds it inexplicably difficult to find. The effects are ropey and the whole thing is just daft, but it's tongue-in-cheek enough to be able to carry it off. Just...

Not at all what I expected. The dragon portion of the film was the least interesting. Michael Moriarity's trippy, eccentric performance is the real reason to watch the film.

Now this is a modern dragon tale! It's got blood and gore and a giant dragon flying around a major city, I love it.

Richard Roundtree (Shaft of Shaft) and David Carradine (Bill of Kill Bill) fight a winged serpent in Manhattan with machine guns. That not awesome enough for you? Add boobs, decapitations, stop motion animation and a decent amount of gore, and you've got yourself a great Saturday afternoon movie.

Nice 80s horror.

Another gem, Michael Moriarty's performance is incredible, unlike anything you may have seen him do before. Larry Cohen does an excellent job of directing this entertaining little film on a very limited budget. I especially loved the Director's commentary, always interesting to hear how the movie was achieved with few funds and little time.

Excellent '80s monster movie with a classic performance by Michael Moriarity at the head of a perfect B movie cast. Larry Cohen, one of my favorite Masters of Horror, has made some great flicks (It's Alive is probably my favorite), and this is one of his best. Its a rare American giant monster movie from the '80s, and the Quetzelcoatl is an awesome beast. Add to that some great gore and minor boobage, plus some sly humor at its own expense, and you have a classic film in a genre that is represented far too little these days.

Bizarre combination of gritty, realistic New York street movie and giant-monster-attacks film with really good, believable performances.

Interesting. Kind of like Alligator but a notch or two less good. Love the 50's style stop motion effects.

Wow. That. That certain was.

My professor was shocked that I didn't know who Michael Moriarty was. I still claim that he's crazy. Honestly, Q: The Winged Serpent is one of his biggest movies. Now, I know there's kind of a cult following behind this movie. I mean, it is in Thomas Video's cult section, which means little sometimes, but Anchor Bay decided to grace this little piece of ridiculousness with a widescreen remastered VHS. While that may not sound as ridiculous as other things, take into consideration that The African Queen has never been released on DVD. Yeah. Q: The Winged Serpent was one of the few movies that was graced with a widescreen VHS copy. Maybe it was my duty to know who Michael Moriarty was. I still don't really agree with that thought, but I guess I should get onto reviewing this movie.

This movie is, and I can't stress this enough, absolutely ridiculous. I'm not saying giant people in penguin costumes fighting robots from the planet formerly known as Pluto, but it is absurd nonetheless. But the part that really eats my ass is the fact is that there's actually a decent, classy movie somewhere in here. Now, I'm not talking My Dinner With Andre here (still haven't seen it. Shut up.), but I'm saying that there's some character and story here. Sure, they all surround a giant claymation dragon that bites peoples' heads off and lays eggs all over town, but the bulk of this story surrounds Michael Moriarty and his quest to not be mediocre. Sure, he's kind of a dick and you really don't root for him, but there's something there more than just the basic "kill the dragon" story.

On top of all that character drama is David Carradine and Richard Roundtree. In most people's cases, Grasshopper and Shaft. (Or Bill, for those people born after 1990...) Now, when I see Carradine in a movie, I at least know that you can look forward to his performance. He is just a weird presence. Despite the condescending remark about 1990, I really got to know about David Carradine from Kill Bill as well. The dude is just extremely ecclectic and that always carries over to his performances. The funny thing is that he's always kind of billed as the culty actor because of his more famous parts, but he's in a lot of respectable dramas. He is third fiddle in an insane amount of really good classics and I always try to keep that in mind when I'm watching him. Then watching Richard Roundtree. This is immediately after his hayday. Most things I see with Roundtree are contemporary, building off of his campy reputation. It's fun seeing him play a one-note character, simply because that one-note is "super-serious cop." John Shaft without the sex.

The special effects in this movie are exactly what you imagine. They're half-way decent, but use a lot of claymation and blood efffects. In fact, Cohen adds this whole subplot about Quetzoquotl and the Aztecs and it's just unnecessary. But the real reason he does all of that is just so he can have a good, ol' fashioned flaying sequence. Really, the movie is a bit of a gore fest, but I don't think he had enough gore to really justify a whole film, so he sold out and actually wrote a decent story. The flaying effects, perhaps, are the grossest part of the entire movie. Everytime Q gets a hold of someone, we really get the aftereffects, whether it's a body without a head or bones, that's alll of what we get. After all, if you see Q do something, it looks like King Kong is going at it. But the real disgusting, cringing stuff comes from the cutting away of the flesh.

The only real problem that this movie has is that the Q part is really repetetive. Really, Q just kills a whole bunch of times and you see more and more of him as the movie goes on. The movie starts off cryptic and there's just a headless window washer. Then you start to see a tail. Then a shadow. Then a flash. Eventually, you see the creature fly, but it takes a while to get to that point. I wish there was something else Q could do, but that's about it.

Also, that flying in front of the sun is bullsh*t. What about all the people at work? Also, what about the people who aren't standing at that angle? Goofy physics, Mr. Cohen. Goofy physics.

One of my first horror movie I seen when I was Young. It was a great moment,'cause of actors and 'Q' himself. 3 stories on 1 movie's good idea. Well, good thrilling film !!!

ham horrior/fantasy... i really liked the dirt bag main guy but everyone else was irrelevant.

Q is classic!

That Rascal is hiding-out in the Chrysler building where its laid eggs.

What a terrific movie.

Michael Moriarty is so funny and great and evidently a very over-the-top guy in real life as well (he wrote A Gift of Stern Angels--a memoir about his suing of Jenet Reno -- Cheif Attorney General of the United States under Bill Clinton) .

So is David Carridine.
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Q is the Aztec god Quetzalcoatl . . .


and its FUN and you WILL ENJOY IT!

Kinda fun, but not nearly as much fun as I'd been led to believe. Crosses the line from "silly" to "sloppy," and it's just not exciting. Any monster movie, no matter how wry or satiric, should still be exciting, and this is not.

[font=Calibri][size=3][color=#000000]?Q?uite possibly one of the worst movies I have ever seen, and I am not just referring to the fifty cent FX or the cornball acting ? I can excuse those as it is supposed to be a B-movie, after all. And it actually started with promise: ?Q: The Winged Serpent? gets right to the point, well of plot A, that is, by showing several ?attacks? on the New Yorkers by a large claymation serpent. Then it turns into the B-Movie who yearns to be so much more! Unfortunately, however, both plot B (Michael Moriarty?s ? who I actually enjoyed in ?The Stuff?, but here he?s an absolute clown ?good-guy thief) and plot C (the sacrifice kings) really scream late 70?s and early 80?s TV cop drama (and speaking of cops ? wow, NYC cops are the coolest! They drink beer on the job, shoot/kill and leave the bodies to the maid service and even wear sunglasses inside.) The movie could?ve benefited if it just stuck with the movie it was meant to be: a ?Monster attacks NYC? B-movie. It worked years later for ?Cloverfield.? (Spoiler alert ? if it?s supposed to be a ?God? to be worshiped, how come: A. It?s vulnerable and B. needs to have offspring?)[/color][/size][/font]

[font=Courier New]Larry Cohen isn?t one of my favorite directors. I?ve seen a couple of his films, and for the most part I have disliked all of them so far. But the one thing that all of his films seem to have is a level of ludicrousness that makes them hard to hate. While I will say that [i]Q - The Winged Serpent[/i] isn?t that great of a movie, the strange story and the modern day time setting make for an interesting watch. Even if you are rolling your eyes throughout most of the film.

A series of disappearances have occurred from the rooftops of buildings in New York. Reports given by eye witnesses claim that there is a giant bird of some sort that is flying in and picking these people up. Detective Shepard (David Carradine) and Sergeant Powell (Richard Roundtree) are investigating these cases of missing persons. While this is going on, a botched jewelry heist results in Jimmy Quinn (Michael Moriarty) going on the run. Trying to find a good place to hide, he accidentally discovers the lair of the giant beast wreaking havoc on New York.

What made [i]Q - The Winged Serpent[/i] a viewable film was the odd performance given by Michael Moriarty. Just to watch the way he carries himself in each scene, you?d swear that he actually lived like this daily. His body moves with such peculiar jerks, and his nervous speaking pattern make his character of Jimmy Quinn a believable guy. Not a likeable one, just convincing.

It was neat to see Carradine and Roundtree, or as most people know them Caine and Shaft, on screen together. I loved that their characters weren?t the typical hard boiled cop, with no room for any funny business. There are a lot of great moments shared between these two that had me laughing. Especially their investigation of a window cleaner whose head has been torn off.

But ultimately the film tries too hard to be too much. There is an underlying story about a cult who are responsible for Q?s appearance in the city. Sure this storyline offers some nice moments of gore, but it doesn?t really add much to the overall experience. Honestly, if the film would have just focused on Q, and not so much on how he got to New York and why, then the film could have been a fun monster flick.

The ending of the film should be commended though. It was like watching the final scene in [i]King Kong[/i], just in reverse. Instead of the monster stuck on top of a building battling planes, [i]Q[/i] has our heroes on the building battling the monster as it circles them. But that wasn?t enough to win me over. I love monster flicks, but [i]Q - The Winged Serpent[/i] wasn?t menacing enough for me to care.[/font]

Starring: Michael Moriarty, Candy Clark, David Carradine, and Richard Roundtree.
Written and Directed by Larry Cohen.
Rated [b]R[/b] (for strong violence and gore, and for language and some nudity).
Running time approximately 1 hour 32 minutes.

This film is absolutely ridiculous, so it's almost a complete mystery to me how the performances are brilliant. Michael Moriarty gives a great performance here, even when he is dealing with Queztalcoatl, the giant winged serpent god from ancient Aztec times that has been reborn because of some crazy doctor's ritual sacrifices (whatever). Anyway, it's total, complete nonsense, but it's fun and the gore's crazy good. [b]**1/2 (out of ****) B-[/b]