Every Letter Gets Its Own Monster

Films: Q The Winged Serpent
Format: Streaming video from Pluto TV on Fire!

What can I honestly say about Q The Winged Serpent (also known sometimes as just Q)? This very much feels like a movie where someone had a notion that it would be fun to make a movie based on an ancient Aztec deity but had no ability to actually figure out how to make it work. The basic idea of it—a neo Aztec priest commits human sacrifices around New York to cause the rise of a gigantic winged serpent that begins preying on the people of the city—is a lot of fun. The problem is that nothing about this movie actually works in any real way.

As often seems to be the case, we’re going to have multiple plots working at the same time. The first involves the police dealing with a series of weird ritual killings. Detective Shepard (David Carradine) and Sergeant Powell (Richard Roundtree) are baffled by the killings as well as a series of other deaths that seem somehow related even though there is no thread connecting them. We assume they are connected because this is a movie and red herrings like that just don’t happen in movies. They have to be connected. The flayed body found in a room in one part of the city must be connected to the headless window washer.

Ten Days of Terror!: God Told Me To

Film: God Told Me To
Format: DVD from NetFlix on laptop.

When it comes to his films, Larry Cohen was always better at coming up with really interesting ideas than he was communicating those ideas to an audience. Cohen’s films were clunky at best, frequently ham-handed, and generally amateurish. They’re plagued by poor editing, often grainy film, and acting that left a great deal to be desired. But for all of the problems with Cohen’s films, his ideas were often so astonishing that they demand to be seen. Such is the case with God Told Me To, a little-remembered film from the mid-‘70s. Cohen’s film is a weird take on religious belief and faith with a good dose of science fiction thrown in for good measure. That the whole thing doesn’t really hold together completely is less important than the ideas that attempt to hold it together.

We start with an almost literal bang. A young man (Sammy Williams), for no evident reason, has taken a rifle to the top of a water tower and started shooting people on the streets of New York. The death toll hits double digits when detective Peter Nicholas (Tony Lo Bianco) arrives on the scene. Nicholas climbs up the tower to talk to the gunman, who has evidently been picking people off at long distance with a mail-order rifle. When asked what has triggered the rampage, the gunman says, “God told me to,” and jumps to his death.

Off Script: It's Alive (1974)

Film: It’s Alive
Format: Turner Classic Movies on rockin’ flatscreen.

There are a bunch of ways that a film like It’s Alive can be explained. Any really good horror movie is about more than just the scares, of course. Just as good science fiction is about more than aliens and robots, good horror speaks to the human condition and tells us something about what frightens us. Horror is always a product of its time. It’s no surprise then that a film that concerns itself with a mutant, murderous freak of a baby came out during an era when people first became concerned about the effects of pesticides and chemicals on people and in the years following Thalidomide.

It’s Alive has a bunch of things going for it and one significant negative. First and foremost in the positive category is the basic idea for the story. One of the things that horror movies can do really well is play on our fears of what should be happy moments in our lives, like the birth of a child. There had been films that went in this direction before (Rosemary’s Baby comes to mind), but never to this extent. That this takes the basic idea as far as this does is a stroke of brilliance.