I should warn you up front. I am
huge fan of Larry Cohen, who wrote and directed this slice of New York City insanity, and have infinite love, respect and awe for the man. So the following few paragraphs may get a bit...rave-y.
Even though Cohen has lived in LA for most of his adult life, he’s a native New Yorker and it shows in the films he does set in my city. There are sequences in this movie devoted to passerbys reacting in horror not to a Giant Kaiju flying across the skies (indeed, the one reaction shot that we get to the creature is one of befuddlement and awe, not horror), but to blood and viscera falling to the streets. One of my favorite moments is when a guy getting out of a car notices blood splattering on his white shirt and the roof of his vehicle; he seems more upset about the blood on his car. No one else quite gets that sense of obliviousness we New Yorkers have as Cohen does.
Of course, the trick in a Cohen film is that the monstrous element is to distract from what he really wants to talk about. Perhaps the most famous film he directed,
It’s Alive, is obstensively about a killer baby, but it’s actually about the stress a miscarriage puts a family through.
Q seems to be about the power of belief and where we put it. The central character learns to believe in himself and not accept the societal mandate that he is a Loser Ex-Con...and avoids being killed by the psychotic who raised the kaiju in the first place by refusing to have faith in the titular winged serpent.
...which leads us to the other great conceit. Even though there is enough cool stop-motion creature stuff and goriness to tide you over (the flayed corpse in the first act is still ooky so many decades later), the greatest special effect in
Q is one Michael Moriarty. The deNiro to Cohen’s Scorcese, Moriarty’s twitchy small-time crook and recovering junkie carries the film. It’s one of the great bizzaro performances of all time--I’ll take Moriarty’s weirdos to Nicholas Cage’s any day--and the strength of this film is how he bounces off a cast of pretty decent actors. Hell, the interactions he has with David Carradine (who could’ve been a good actor if he was given good material and didn’t indulge his alcoholism), who plays a detective who suspects the creature has a connection with a series of ritual murders he’s investigating, are positively golden. As long as Moriarty is on screen, the film crackles with a goofy energy.
There are long stretches where this film plays like an episode of
Law and Order which just happens to have a kaiju in it. Like in all of Cohen’s films, there are moments where these characters just
talk, and that’s what elevates his efforts above many lesser horror films. The way some of these characters interact are illuminating and surprising. There are some victims who get little scenes before reaching their ends that make them feel more human. As in all of Cohen’s films, there’s a sense of this story existing in a living, breathing continuum that extends beyond its time frame. This film
breathes in a way that makes it entertaining, compelling and watchable.
I recommend this film. I recommend all of Cohen’s films.
Well, maybe not
Wicked Stepmother. That’s kind of a mess.
Don't forget to head over to my
Twitter Page to vote on which film I'll be discussing in tomorrow's Halloween Horrorfest Entry!
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