Cohen began his career in
television, writing for many genre-based series - westerns, detective/cop
shows, thrillers, sci-fi, courtroom dramas - often creating episodes or entire
series from eccentric blends of genres that undercut generic conventions. And
though well-paid as a writer, he wanted to direct features. But feature films
are expensive, and his eccentricity made it difficult to slot his concepts into
niches that would be easy to advertise and to sell. Take his first feature, Bone,
in which Yaphet Kotto plays a man who insinuates himself into the home of a
Beverly Hills couple who are falling apart already partly due to the fallout of
their Vietnam vet son who’s become an addict. Kotto demands that the husband
retrieve money (that he believes they have but they don’t because the husband
has squandered it unbeknownst to the wife) while he holds the wife hostage. The
husband sees an opportunity to get out of his marriage and life, the wife waits
at home with her kidnapper while her husband is off attempting retrieve money
they don’t have (little knowing that he may not return), and she talks to and
gets to know and perhaps even fall for Kotto’s kidnapper. What kind of film is
that? It’s a drama, but can hardly be put into the more exaggerated superhero
types of the then-new “Blaxploitation” genre; it’s comically satirical, but not
laugh-out-loud funny; it comments side-wise on Vietnam but isn’t a Vietnam film.
As the studio marketing person, how do you sell this film to audiences?
And so it is with the rest of his
work - he puts so many different things in them that they never fit neatly into
a niche, they’re hard to pin down, and they don’t often satisfy those coming to
them looking for the simple, straightforward genre pieces they appear to be.
However, those who appreciate the way he confounds category, mixes up genres,
elicits great performances from actors, and generally works intelligence and
humor into every frame find much to enjoy in his films. And that’s where Q:
The Winged Serpent comes in. On the surface, this is a simple monster movie
– the artwork shows a sinister flying serpent hovering over the Chrysler
Building holding a bikini-clad beauty – but it’s so much more than that. Taking
off from ideas of 50s/early 60s horror films like It Conquered the World, The
Amazing Colossal Man, Monster of
Terror and the like, Cohen interjects a story of
would-be-lounge-singer-turned-petty-criminal Jimmy Quinn (played beautifully by
Michael Moriarty) into the mix.
The film opens with an Empire State Building window washer (played
by an actual window washer on the Empire State Building, naturally) getting his
head chomped off by the flying lizard. Quinn then sits down with mobsters to
plan a jewelry store robbery. We get more chomping action from the lizard (which
rains blood down on to unsuspecting NYC pedestrians) then we see perhaps why
Quinn isn’t working as a singer as he bombs an audition (with a jazzy number
improvised by Moriarty himself) that Captain Shepard (David Carradine) happens
to catch. Next, Quinn is off with his mob acquaintances for the robbery, which of
course goes disastrously wrong, and he flees the pursuing police, running into
the Chrysler Building where he discovers a giant nest at the top of the
building. Shepard and his partner Powell (Richard Roundtree) meanwhile, are
investigating a murder committed in what appears to be a ritualistic style
reminiscent of ancient Aztec sacrifices in which the victim gives himself
willingly to bring forth Quetzalcoatl, a flying serpent god. Is it possible
that the ritualistic murders are connected to the flying lizard plucking
victims off of New York City’s rooftops? If so, can Captain Shepard convince
his superiors that an ancient Aztec serpent god has been raised and is wreaking
havoc on 1980s New York City? Can Jimmy Quinn extricate himself from the
mobsters who are looking for the stolen diamonds? Will there be a half dozen
more absurd questions like these that raise themselves when you actually watch
the film? The answer is a resounding YES for the last one, but I don’t wanna
spoil any of the others for you! Watching the plot unfold in many directions at
once is part of the fun of the film, but the real fun is watching the actors
play it deadpan serious.
According to writer/director Larry Cohen’s hugely entertaining
(and highly recommended) commentary, Moriarty got more interested in the film after
learning Cohen’s way of working on the fly – only a few notes would be written
about a scene to shoot, with dialogue often laid down on the spot and allowing
for maximum improvisation; finding a location, showing up with cast and crew at
the ready and knocking on the door to ask if it was available to shoot at – in ten
minutes – and blocking out the action as soon as the location was secured, and
so forth. It’s the exact opposite of every-shot-planned-out-to-the-last-detail
directors like Kubrick and Hitchcock and gives Cohen the room to change things,
improvise (and improve) scenes, dialogue, and ideas as the film is being
created. Everywhere Moriarty seems smaller than his 6’4” frame as he inhabits
this slouchy, hunched-over loser who’s very much an echo of the can’t-win characters
Richard Widmark played in Night in the City
and Pickup on South Street. David Carradine
agreed to work with Cohen again (they’d worked together in Cohen’s TV days)
sight unseen, and arrived direct from the airport for his first day of shooting
knowing nothing about his character or the film he was about to make, only
having been told by Cohen “Wear a suit.” And this film, with its special
effects, many interlocking story threads, was put together in about a week, and
shot in less than three – after Cohen was fired from a bigger budget production
of I, The Jury he turned around,
knocked out this script he’d been holding on to and made Q. Cohen found an ideal producer in Samuel Z. Arkoff, producer of
all three of the 50’s horror/sci-fi “classics” above, and for whom the idea of
a flying lizard god over Manhattan was right up his alley (upon meeting Rex
Reed after a screening at Cannes and hearing him gush: “All that dreck--and
right in the middle of it, a great Method performance by Michael Moriarty!”
Arkoff deadpanned “The dreck was my idea.”). And the New York of 1981 is as
much a character in the film as any actor – it’s as much a New York piece as
any Lou Reed album.
Films like this just aren’t made any more – it’s simply not
possible to get together a film for just over a million bucks and get it into
mainstream theaters anymore. It’s a continuation of the B movies of the 30s –
50s –cheaper, shorter films meant to support a big budget “A” film on a double
feature – that were largely given over to the “exploitation film” boom of the
50s and 60s. By the 1970s, producers like Arkoff and Roger Corman had brought
these films to mainstream theaters – manufactured at a fraction of a mainstream
film’s cost – but by the 80s this style of film was already being pushed out
following the blockbuster successes of Jaws
and Star Wars with studios’ eyes
firmly set on massive money, not modest, well-crafted, profit-turners like Q. And now it’s big budget, big studio
versions of films like this that seem to dominate the box office and mainstream
theaters, and in this field Cohen seems to be forgotten, not having written or
directed a film in over 8 years after a hugely productive 70s and 80s. But
these newer films almost never have the verve, love, guts, brains, or humor of
Cohen’s best work – and they *never* have the low budget!
-
Patrick
Brown
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