Q: The Winged Serpent: Larry Cohen's Rooftop Monster

Larry Cohen was fired from a film called I, the Jury a few days into shooting in 1981. He was in New York with a crew, a camera package, actors on contract and no picture. Most directors go home. Cohen wrote a monster movie over a weekend, kept the crew, and shot it immediately.

The result is Q: The Winged Serpent, in which Quetzalcoatl — the feathered serpent of Aztec religion, summoned back into being by a cult performing skinnings in midtown — builds a nest in the crown of the Chrysler Building and starts taking sunbathers off Manhattan rooftops. It is a stop-motion creature feature made out of spite and spare parts, and it contains the single best performance ever given in an American monster movie.

The film is about the crook

Here is the structural manoeuvre that makes Q worth a serious argument. The monster is the marketing. The film is about Jimmy Quinn.

Quinn (Michael Moriarty) is a failed jazz pianist, a small-time crook, a coward and a whiner — a man who has never been competent at anything and knows it, and whose life is a sequence of humiliations he narrates to himself as near-misses. After a robbery goes wrong he hides at the top of the Chrysler Building and finds the nest. And Quinn, who has never had leverage over anything in his life, realises he is the only man alive who knows the monster’s address.

So he does the most human thing in the history of the genre. He goes to City Hall and demands a million dollars, tax free, in cash, plus full immunity, plus exclusive rights to his own story — and he negotiates, badly, at length, while people are being eaten.

That is the film. The creature is a real estate problem; the drama is a man with one asset trying to price it. Cohen understood that a monster over Manhattan is only interesting if somebody in the city wants something from it, and by putting a grasping nobody between the beast and the police he built a film with an actual engine underneath the rubber.

Moriarty improvised a great deal of it, and it shows in the best way — the performance has the halting, over-talking, self-sabotaging rhythm of real cowardice, a man who cannot stop making his own position worse. David Carradine, playing Detective Shepard opposite him, does something generous and clever: he underplays completely, becomes a wall, and lets Moriarty smash himself against it. Richard Roundtree is his partner. Candy Clark, as Quinn’s girlfriend, gets the film’s only scenes of anybody being kind to him.

The anecdote everyone tells about Q is probably true and certainly deserves to be. Rex Reed, having seen it, remarked to the producer Samuel Z. Arkoff that the film contained this astonishing Michael Moriarty performance in the middle of all that dreck — and Arkoff replied that the dreck was his idea. Both men were right, which is the whole point of the picture.

The bird is stop-motion and that matters

Quetzalcoatl was animated frame by frame under David Allen, and Q arrived in 1982 — the year the optical monster was already being overtaken, and a decade before the computer made the argument academic.

The animation is not good in the sense of being seamless. The creature judders. The composites show their edges. What it has instead is presence: an object that physically existed, was lit, and was photographed, with the peculiar dreamy weight that only stop-motion has. When the serpent banks over an art-deco spire in daylight, the shot has a tangibility that a rendered creature struggles to reach, precisely because a human hand moved it a sixteenth of an inch at a time and the film remembers that.

Its direct ancestor is unmistakable and Cohen never hid it. King Kong, 1933: Willis O’Brien’s animated impossibility on top of the newest and most beautiful skyscraper in New York, brought down by aircraft, filmed with the city as scale model and co-star. Q is that film’s grandchild with the empire state of mind intact and the budget removed — the same idea about what Manhattan’s vertical architecture does for a monster, which is to provide a nest nobody thinks to look in. Cohen’s addition is bureaucratic: Kong was an attraction, Quetzalcoatl is a zoning violation.

The wider tradition is mapped in ten essential creature features, and the case for the handmade monster over the rendered one is made at length in what latex knows that pixels don’t. Q is exhibit A for both: a creature that is visibly artificial and completely alive.

Cohen’s New York again

As in God Told Me To six years earlier, the city is shot as itself. Cohen’s camera is on real rooftops, in real streets, up real buildings, and the film’s most memorable images are the ones that required nothing except nerve and a long lens: a rooftop pool, a sunbather, a shadow passing over.

He gets extraordinary value from a simple trick of point of view. Half the attacks are staged from above — the creature’s sightline, looking down on a city that has never once looked up. New York is the only American city that has organised its whole population into unroofed boxes at four hundred feet, and Cohen noticed. The film is genuinely funny about this: the sheer bother of the thing, cops squinting into the sun, a mayor’s office irritated at the paperwork, a metropolis processing a god as a nuisance.

The cult subplot — the skinnings, the reawakening of an Aztec deity through blood ritual in modern Manhattan — is the film’s weakest limb and is best understood as scaffolding. It exists to explain why the bird is there and then gets out of the way.

Why it works

Q works because Cohen swapped the genre’s usual protagonist for its usual victim. The standard creature feature gives you a scientist, a soldier or a cop — someone with competence, who can be relied on to do the right thing at the right time. Cohen gives you a snivelling opportunist who wants to be paid, and in doing so makes the monster movie about the city rather than about the monster: what an American metropolis does when a god arrives is convene a meeting and haggle.

The film’s failures are on screen and easily listed. The pacing sags whenever Moriarty is off it. The cult scenes are threadbare. The effects are exactly as expensive as they were. And the thing rises above all of it because its central performance is a genuine piece of acting — funny, pathetic, agonising, entirely unarmoured — dropped into a picture that was assembled in a hurry out of a firing.

Where to watch: the Blue Underground release is the one, and the film rewards a decent transfer more than you would expect, since the daytime rooftop photography is what sells the monster. Watch it as a double bill with It’s Alive for the two halves of Cohen’s method — the same appetite for an idea that sounds like a joke, pursued with total seriousness on no money.

The verdict is that this is the funniest great monster movie America made, and the only one where you spend the last act hoping the protagonist gets his cheque.

Spoilers below

The nest is the film’s best sustained sequence, and it works because it is procedural. The police, having finally bought Quinn’s information at his price, go up the Chrysler Building — into the crown, into the maintenance spaces above the offices, into a dusty art-deco cavity nobody has visited in decades — and find the egg and the bones, an enormous ossuary of picked-clean remains at the top of one of the most photographed buildings on earth. Cohen stages it as a raid rather than a revelation: men with torches and rifles in a confined metal space, doing a job.

The kill is deliberately unheroic. There is no clever weapon, no mythological rule about how a feathered serpent must be dispatched, no cult ritual reversed at the last moment. They shoot it. A great many police officers, on a spire, fire a great many rounds into it until it falls — the same solution the biplanes brought to the Empire State Building in 1933, executed with less grace and more overtime. Quinn is up there in the middle of it, useless and terrified, having sold the address and been forced to attend the viewing.

Then the egg. It is destroyed, the city exhales, and Cohen closes with the coda that gives the film its final shrug: somewhere else, in another dark and unregarded corner, another egg, cracking. The god was never a single animal, and the cult that called it is still out there — a sequel hook offered by a man who had no intention of making one, and a last joke about a city that has just spent a fortune solving one instance of a recurring problem.

The most Cohen detail is what happens to Quinn’s money. He negotiated, he got the deal signed, and the film leaves the strong impression that the city will find a way not to honour it. He is the only man who ever had leverage over New York, and he still ends up where he started.