Q (1982, Larry Cohen)

55/100

Every low-budget genre auteur should have a regular eccentric lead actor like Michael Moriarty. When you don't have much money to spend on "production values"—and I confess to being unprepared for just how adorably chintzy Q's title character looks, both when glimpsed early on and when seen squarely toward the end—it's enormously helpful to have someone constantly pulling focus from what's absent via behavior so arresting that you have little desire to look anywhere else. I'd previously seen Moriarty in Cohen's The Stuff, and praised his "sheer anarchic nuttiness"; "if you didn't know he was the movie's star," my review noted, "you'd initially assume he was playing its villain." That's perhaps slightly less true here, if only because Jimmy Quinn's such a cringing nebbish at the outset, incapable of standing up to various tougher crooks for whom he's the wheelman. As the film goes on, however, Moriarty gradually makes Jimmy more and more of a preening, selfish asshole, until eventually he's smirking his way through a meeting in which he shakes New York City down for a million dollars and blanket criminal immunity. Rarely do you see such utter disregard for retaining the viewer's goodwill, and while Moriarty lacks Nicolas Cage's innate charisma and experimental courage, he demonstrates a similar commitment to ignoring received ideas about how much is too much. Q gets especially fascinating whenever he shares the screen with David Carradine, who's even more ah-who-gives-a-fuck than usual as the primary detective investigating...

...well, that's where the movie falters badly for me. Things get off to a hilariously quick start, with the Empire State Building's horniest window-washer getting his head chomped off mid-catcall before we've even hit the two-minute mark. (I golf-clapped just at the apparent bland NYC establishing shot that then pans over to find him at work, much closer to the lens than you'd anticipate even if you knew what was coming.) And while the basic idea of a huge Aztec god-monster living and nesting in the Chrysler Building's crown doesn't make a whole lotta sense—why are there openings large enough for it to come and go? how is it possible that nobody ever goes up there?—it seems downright churlish to complain about logic* when you've got goofy stop-motion carnage happening every few minutes. Problem is, Cohen apparently felt compelled to establish where Quetzalcoatl came from. A: Who cares? But we get an entire parallel plot involving people being flayed alive, and while it's clear that this must be related to the monster (nor is it especially difficult to guess how), I neither expected nor wanted the demented-dorky-human part of Q to become much more prominent in the home stretch than is the carnivorous-flying-pterosaurish-beastie part of Q. Not even Moriarty's antics can cover for that misjudgment (which may well have been budget-dictated, but still, it's a monster movie). Actual ending's slightly redeemed by Cohen's sense of humor (my favorite example of which is definitely the gang robbing a jewelry store called Neil Diamonds), featuring a deliberately belabored parody of the trope, already tired even way back then, that sees the bad guy leap up and attack again after seemingly having been killed. And of course there's the de rigueur final shot that teases a sequel. Yet I still feel bad for poor featherless Q, who somehow winds up nearly forgotten.

* I did appreciate that Cohen makes an attempt to explain why there aren't initially thousands of witnesses to an enormous creature swooping around Manhattan, with someone positing that it emerges only to quickly feed, deliberately flying so that people's sightlines get sun-dazzled. That, too, doesn't really make sense (people are fucking everywhere in New York), but at least there is an answer to the obvious question.