“Oh my God!” bellowed FX guru Randy Cook when I mentioned Q: The Winged Serpent to him during an interview. Actually, the man who has won two Oscars for his work on the Lord Of The Rings trilogy didn’t so much shout as emit a scream similar to that of the giant lizard-bird at the centre of Larry Cohen’s exploitation movie.
“I haven’t been asked about Q in aeons!” he added, to explain his histrionics. “That’s one of the films I cut my teeth on - that and a number of other films nobody has ever seen.” But while Q’s effects weren’t a patch on Weta’s best work (“the monster deteriorated very quickly - we spent most of out time patching it up”), Cook’s endeavours paid off in his later life:
“When Peter Jackson first talked to me about working on Rings, he said he’d seen Q on late-night TV in New Zealand when he was young, and he’d loved both the movie and my work on it. So my efforts on a film I thought everyone had forgotten about helped get me the job of a lifetime.”
Cook’s stop-motion work in Q isn’t at all bad, actually. However, Cohen’s film is less an FX-fest than a gritty, often amusing crime drama that just happens to have an Aztec serpent god at its centre.
Michael Moriarty stars as Quinn, an ex-con who discovers said winged beast’s nest at the top of the Chrysler Building. While Quinn tries to profit from this knowledge, the NYPD try to solve a spate of ritual sacrifices that might be linked to reported sightings of a huge pterodactyl over the Upper East Side.
Q’s cult credentials really are second to none. Besides Moriarty - who gives a typically to-the-edge performance - David Carradine stars as the investigating police officer. You should also keep an eye out for Richard Roundtree, aka John Shaft, Candy Clark late of Nic Roeg’s The Man Who Fell To Earth and Irish-American institution Malachy McCourt.
As the man responsible for demon baby movie It’s Alive, poison yoghurt picture The Stuff and the script for sniper flick Phone Booth, Larry Cohen can rightly claim to be the king of exploitation cinema. While his questionable taste has often translated into terrible pictures, Q (one of Quentin Tarantino’s Reservoir Dogs touchstones) would be a stand-out on anyone’s directorial CV.
Shot on the run in just 18 days, Cohen’s guerilla approach to filmmaking lends Q an exciting, semi-documentary feel. It’s this finesse together with a clutch of strong performances and Cook’s bargain basement heroics that make Q a great advert for a largely reprehensible type of cinema.