Q: The Winged Serpent (1982) – Blu-ray Disc

Q
***/**** Image B-
Sound B-
Extras C

starring
Michael Moriarty, Candy Clark, David Carradine, Richard Roundtree

written
and directed by Larry Cohen


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enlarge

by
Bryant Frazer
Writer-director Larry Cohen makes
exploitation look easy. His iconic Black Caesar
was basically a remake
of Little Caesar with a black cast; his
mutant-baby flick It's Alive
amplified the generational rift created in families by the social
revolutions
of the 1960s and early-1970s to horror-movie proportions. Cohen is so
commercially savvy that his screenwriting career has continued, in
earnest,
into the 21st century, placing projects like Phone Booth,
Cellular,
and Captivity at the Venn-diagram intersection
between high-concept
appeal and low-budget execution. He also has an instinct for character,
and
it never served him better than it did in Q,
which is the story of a
little criminal in a big city as much as it's the story of a huge
feathered
serpent lording over Manhattan. Q was set up
quickly (in two days, to hear Cohen tell it), after Cohen was fired from an adaptation of Mickey Spillane's I,
the
Jury
, and it features a terrific cast (Michael Moriarty, David
Carradine, and
Richard Roundtree) improvising many of the scenes in a screenplay that
was
being written as the shoot progressed to take advantage of whatever
New York
locations Cohen was able to secure. The result isn't quite a great
monster
movie, but it gets maybe 80 percent of the way there.

RUNNING TIME
93 minutes
MPAA
R
ASPECT
RATIO(S)

1.78:1 (1080p/MPEG-4)
LANGUAGES
English 2.0 DTS-HD MA (Stereo)
SUBTITLES
None

REGION
A
DISC
TYPE

BD-25
STUDIO
Shout! Factory

The main character here is Jimmy Quinn
(Moriarty), a small-time wheelman for a gang of jewellery-store thieves
who
refuses to carry a piece and nurtures fantasies of employment as a
piano man in
a dive bar, showing off the scat-singing skills he learned in the
clink. Then there's Shepard and Powell (Carradine and Roundtree), a pair of
New York
City cops investigating a weird series of murders (here a beheading,
there a
flaying) that are seemingly unrelated. The connection between the two stories is
Quetzalcoatl, an Aztec god nesting in the empty spaces at the very top
of the
Chrysler building who feeds on unsuspecting New
Yorkers–window-washers,
construction workers, and rooftop sunbathers. But the winged Q,
who
snaps off noggins like nobody's business, isn't the only fiend at work:
there's
also a shadowy serial killer whose human sacrifices are engineered to
bring the
long-dormant supernatural critter back to life. On the run after a
botched
heist, Quinn discovers the beast's nest–a secret he uses first to lead
his own
enemies to their doom, then as an extortion plot against an
increasingly
desperate city under siege by the monster overhead.

Although Cohen's direction is pretty deadpan, the film has a gleeful sense of chaotic humour. Q
opens with a scene
where a voyeuristic window-washer leering at a pretty office-worker
inside the
Empire State Building is taken out by Q; lest you read that as a
critique of
the male gaze, it's followed fast by a vignette in which a
pretty
apartment-dweller obligingly strips off her bikini top before Q plucks
her from
her chaise lounge. The movie starts out borrowing tropes from film noir,
with Quinn's cronies hounding him over a lost briefcase full of jewels,
but
launches into different territory later, as Quinn demands a "Nixon-like
pardon" from the city in exchange for telling them where the bird
nests,
name-checking NEW YORK POST owner Rupert Murdoch as he fantasizes about
his new
celebrity status. ("Get Rupert down here with his arm around me!" he
cries as a TV crew ambushes him at a downtown diner.) Carradine and
Roundtree
give fine, by-the-numbers performances and hit all their marks, but
Moriarty is
marvellous, playing a tightly-wound sad sack who unspools, turning
positively
giddy at the idea that he might be able to put one over on the city
that's kept
his own ambitions on ice. Late in the picture, there's an undercover
cop who appears to be disguised as a tourist's idea of Manhattan, sporting mime
makeup
and an Amadeus T-shirt.

Speaking of Manhattan, the film's New York
locations are truly fantastic. The aerial photography gathered by ace
helicopter pilot Al Cerullo features lots of offbeat views of the city
from
above. Even more remarkable are the sequences shot inside the crown of the
Chrysler
building, in a setting so neglected and junk-strewn that you just know
it's the
actual landmark and not any set-dresser's idea of what's up there. Furthermore,
the view of the buildings below clearly represents a precipitous drop
and not a
mere greenscreen background replacement. Other stops on Q's
whirlwind
tour of New York include the American Museum of Natural History,
Columbia
University, Canal Street, Chinatown, a real police station, and that
spot at
the base of the Brooklyn Bridge where bodies seem to wash ashore in B
movies.
(Katy Perry is performing there for the MTV Video Music Awards as I
write these
words. It's a small city, man.) It's an oddity of film history that so
many
low-budget pictures from the 1970s and '80s have such a strong sense
of place
due to their ambitious use of locations, and Q is
no exception.

Q is
compromised, perhaps, by Cohen's accelerated style of production, since
the
screenplay doesn't quite hang together. Both Quinn's hard-luck crime
story and
the presence of Q overhead really capture the imagination, but the
subplot
about a high priest performing human sacrifices on the ground is a
useless
appendage. It's hard to imagine developing any sort of emotional
investment in
that business, and it's the part of the film that feels the most like a
run-of-the-mill horror scenario. The special effects, too, are a little
slipshod, surely a function of the speed with which the movie was put
together,
allowing no time for the creature team to consult on the production in
advance.
Still, the sometimes-dire stop-motion animation packs way more
entertainment
value than would its slick computer-graphics replacement.

Moreover, Q is just a lot of fun. It has
integrity, amounting to an emotionally coherent sketch of a city where
lower-class hoods dream of making it big, or at least of finding a
sharp and
friendly beak to dismember and disembowel the hooligans hounding them
for cash.
Moreover, it holds its own among other fantastic movies of the era that
created
a kind of new New York mythology: cannibalistic humanoids live in the
sewers,
Manhattan Island will one day become a maximum security prison, and
also
there's a giant Aztec bird nesting in the top of the Chrysler Building.
What
more could you ask of an evening's entertainment?

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THE
BLU-RAY DISC

Shout! Factory's new Blu-ray is inarguably
the most accurate transfer of Q to date, though
some viewers will
question the value of a high-definition upgrade to such a fundamentally
primitive-looking film. Q was shot quickly, on
the cheap, and it shows.
There are several shots where the focus is off by a margin–in one
close-up, only Quinn's ears appear in sharp focus, with the rest of his
face
rolling into softness–and the high resolution of Blu-ray accentuates
the
error. And many of the optical process shots, such as the ones
where Q
appears in frame with live-action photography, look lousy, frankly, in HD. All that aside, much of the film is quite competently
photographed,
especially many of the exteriors, which gain a lot in both historical
interest
and general atmosphere thanks to the increased visible detail. The more controlled interior shots tend to look pretty good, too–see
the
texture of Carradine's suit jacket in the excellent diner scene where
he spars
verbally with Moriarty late in the film, or the details on the
Chinatown
storefronts early on during the heist.

The overall quality of the image is
variable. Film grain is convincing in some shots, but an indistinct
meshwork of
mush in others. I really started giving this transfer the stink-eye
when I
stepped through sequences and watched details on walls, for instance,
flicker
in and out of visibility from frame to frame as the camera moved past
them, a
type of artifact I've always associated strongly with injudicious
quantities of
digital noise reduction. Having said that, I don't think the presentation is
that
bad for a low-budget title of this vintage. I'm pretty sure it could
look more
filmlike–but maybe not without a heavy trade-off in terms of the
quantity of
grain that's visible on screen. If I were being picky, I’d complain that
the
1.78:1 aspect ratio should be 1.85:1, but why quibble?
Since Q
probably isn't on Criterion's radar, this Blu-ray will have to stand as
an
adequate HiDef version of the film.

The quality of the movie’s original audio
recording is variable, but it’s reproduced as well as you could ask on a 2.0 DTS-HD MA track that boasts a reasonable amount of dynamic
range–again, taking into account Q's status as a
Sam Arkoff production
from 1982. There's some depth and atmosphere in the soundstage, clarity
in the
music and most of the dialogue, plus a reasonable amount of
low-frequency
impact in the sound-effects department. While I've seen this audio track described elsewhere as mono, that's incorrect: there is definitely some
directionality to
it. I listened to it in Dolby Pro-Logic II mode, which generated a
mildly
enveloping surround mix that at least kept all my speakers busy. Since
IMDb
describes the theatrical soundmix as "mono," I'm going to assume this
is an adulteration and dock the Blu-ray half a grade for not offering a mono
option.

What is included is a Larry Cohen
commentary. This is not the same one as the Bill Lustig-moderated yakker featured on Blue Underground's 2003 DVD, although it's
mostly
a rehash of the stories Cohen told on that track. I can't complain too
much,
since Cohen is always a hoot to listen to, and his instinctive
defensiveness
when it comes to Q is endearing. At one point, he
starts reading from a
long list of positive reviews to bolster his claim that the picture was a
critical success, contending at one point, "Even THE NEW YORK TIMES
liked
it." Wait, what? Cohen seems to have misread Janet Maslin's typically
contemptuous piece on the film (no fan of genre pics, she proudly
claimed to
have endured only 15 minutes of Dawn of the Dead
before writing her
non-review), in which she couldn't be bothered to summarize the plot
correctly.
In fact, there's no indication she stayed in the theatre beyond the
22-minute
mark.

In a more self-deprecating mode, Cohen
notes happily that half of the first preview audience for Q
bolted when
it realized the new Spielberg movie wasn't screening as rumoured. Cohen
says
the audience was expecting to see Close Encounters of the
Third Kind
,
but he definitely has that wrong, since CE3K came
out in 1977. (I have to
assume he meant E.T..) I was a bit surprised to
hear Cohen lament the
inclusion of gory violence in Q, citing the (relatively mild)
human-sacrifice scenes as the worst offenders and offering a kind of
apology:
"It was supposed to be a horror picture of sorts, so we had to have
some
horror in it." Finally, he muses, "We could probably have done this
bird better, but what can you say? For the million bucks we had, I
think we did
pretty well. If we had more money, I don't think we could have made as
good a
picture." Indeed.

Shout's Blu-ray was apparently assembled in
the same spirit, with an average video bit budget of just 27.9 Mbps,
keeping
the disc firmly in single-layer BD-25 territory. A
two-and-a-half-minute trailer was sourced, shamelessly, from a crappy YouTube encode
(the clip was cropped on the bottom edge to keep the user's watermark out of frame) and then, hilariously, upres'd to 1080p, chewing up nearly half
a GB (!). At least the 30-second teaser, also in HD, is
presented in
marginally higher quality, if not anything approaching true 1080p.
Finally, if
you care about such things, there are no subtitles, which rankles. Q
has
already been around the digital block a couple of times, on DVDs from Anchor Bay and Blue Underground, and that easy availability likely
figures into
Shout! Factory’s obvious decision to spend as little on Q
as possible.

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