In Larry Cohen’s Q: The Winged Serpent, Midtown Manhattan is being menaced by a giant bird-like dinosaur creature. That, incidentally, is not a good description of it, but it’s better than the verbal description given by the characters in the film. It also has something to do with a string of cult-like murders being investigated by Detective Shepard (David Carradine) and Sgt Powell (Richard Roundtree). It also crosses paths with Jimmy Quinn (Michael Moriarty), a failed pianist turned small time crook (now there’s a career path for you) who also seems to double as a bundle of raw nerves. None of these various menacings really cohere into anything actually menacing as a horror film, but Q’s strangenessmakes it exceedingly difficult to care about superficial things like a film’s genre or the temper it is supposed to have.

Much of that strangeness comes courtesy of the thing really menacing Midtown Manhattan in Q: Michael Moriarty, who seems to unravel the film as he passes through it. A walking psychic tremor of a man, Moriarty’s Jimmy is a human paradox who seems both deeply self-congratulatory and egotistical and essentially lost. He feels like a walking open wound of Method tics, a man feeling out his way through the world. The narrative itself – about a man who feels he has had no shot in the world and needs to command the momentary opportunity he has stumbled into, but doesn’t really know how to – reflects the performative style, which seems obsessed with controlling the space and the audience even as it is barely registering any effort. It’s a truly unmanicured performance, blistering with raw nervous energy and chaotic inner expressiveness. The most unsettling scene has nothing to do with the titular serpent but, rather, the camera’s own serpentine moves around Moriarty as he sidles up sinisterly to a piano less to tickle than prick the ivories on a frankly demented little ditty. It’s a remarkable scene, one in which the narrative content is essentially trivial but the form of the scene and its placement in the film evoke a much darker story.

While the text of the film can’t quite tease out a cohesive theme, Moriarty’s performance radiates the kind of energy that reveals truths the film may not even be fully aware of. In the contrast between this deeply disturbed, morally adrift loner and the two police officers who are nominally searching for him, Cohen’s film stages a battle between cosmic receptivity and dispassionate order. Roundtree and Carradine contrast fiercely with Moriarty, figuring two vacant icons of social institutions as avatars of insubstantial command. These desolate action movie types pass through the film, somehow above it because they are so locked into its superficial rhythms. They don’t do much, and when they do, they feel like narrative cogs. Moriarty, conversely, is so at odds with everything in the world he seems to walk in that he inhabits it from a diagonal angle, asking us to see it differently, to experience otherwise. His relationship with the titular creature is deeper than any narrative connection. Sitting within its crevices, picking on stragglers, never really being part of the world he saunters through, he might as well be the villain himself.

In general, there’s nothing particularly textured about the themes of the film, nor especially exploratory about its vibe, but there is a nice naturalism to the proceedings born of turning circumstance into an occasion. Strapped together with bandages, this is a film playing vastly above its weight class, an obvious guerrilla production that kindles a spontaneous friction because of its off-the-cuff, one-and-done energy. Admittedly, it promises more than it can deliver in its headstrong rush of an opening twenty minutes, an unhinged warpath not so much developing a story or setting a scene as horizontally splaying out from scene to scene as various people lingering around the top of Manhattan skyscrapers are picked off by some unseen something without any rhyme or reason. But if the rest of the film works at a simmer, it never loses its heat.

Ultimately, Q lacks the ferocious sanity’s-edge delirium of something like Cohen’s earlier God Told Me To, and the somewhat more stringent social satire of The Stuff. But perhaps its lower-key rhythms bestow other gifts. Q’s offhand texture is its saving grace. Nothing about Q insists on much, even offers itself up as more than a sliver of circumstance. It doesn’t even necessarily feel like a film at times. We learn, for instance, that the creature is a reincarnation of the Aztec God Quetzalcoatl, a name that transparently only serves as a pretext for the shortened title. There’s a cult, but they’re hardly presences either. This may be the Larry Cohen film with the least to offer, but there’s a peculiar poetry to its slovenliness. Emerging out of Cohen’s yesteryear, this is one of the odder corners of the ‘80s infatuation with ‘50s pop culture. While so many other films from Reagan’s decade pick and prod at the archetypes of Eisenhower’s, this one seems to nail something deep in their soul: the spirit of just barely getting by, of a film that wants to send you to hell, but is held together by nothing but prayers.  

Score: 7.5/10