Q: The Winged Serpent

Oh, it hurts.

1982

Review: June 16, 2006

Director: Larry Cohen

Starring: Michael Moriarty, Candy Clark, David Carradine, Richard Roundtree

Don’t even bother.

THE SETUP:

A dragon is terrorizing New York City.

DISCUSSION:

Okay, so I watched God Told Me To and was super into it. Then I watched The Stuff, and liked it a lot, too. So of course I’m thinking “I need to watch everything by Larry Cohen!” until I came to this one, which totally fucking blows.

The movie opens with a woman in the Empire State Building being leered at by a window-washer who thinks she’s hot. This necessitates shots of the guy way up on the outside of the ESB, which is always cool. Then suddenly he’s completely decapitated by this threat from above! So far: thumbs way up!

We are then introduced to Michael Moriarty [who was ‘Mo’ in The Stuff, and will be referred to as ‘Mo’ here], as this getaway driver for this band of crooks who are going to knock over this jewelry store. Now, one of the things I loved about The Stuff is the way it featured real, eccentic characters, and had interesting sub-stories that went along with the main story. The very same thing that was a strength in that movie becomes the primary weakness here, as we will discuss.

But first, urban terror. One of the things I though was really strong about God Told Me To was its opening scene of random urban terror, and I was looking forward to more of that here. There’s a little bit [in which the dragon attacks and drops of blood and severed limbs drop onto the budy city streets below, but it’s over soon and that’s pretty much all you get.

Anyway, part of the surplus of unrelated story that I started to warn you about occurs when Mo [who has been in prison and is trying to avoid a life of crime] makes another effort to get a legitimate job, as a piano player at a bar. Now, Mo is doing such a terrible, horrible job at playing the piano and delivering this completely ludicrous “A scooby-doo, bah, bah-bah, bowww!” scatting that you’re thinking okay, he’s obviously faking this whole audition thing so he can gather information or meet with this girlfriend, or some such. It was only toward the end of the scene that I realized that he was REALLY supposed to be auditioning. You’d think he should be able to play the piano—like, AT ALL—if he’s going to audition, but… And then, Mo and David Carradine play it off like Mo’s sounds are the hip music of today and may in fact be too advanced for the common rabble who run bars. This entire sequence is SO OFF it nearly loses the entire audience—and the next sequence finishes it off.

His piano-playing career unfairly hampered by the fact that he cannot play the piano, Mo goes through with the diamond robbery. They are going to knock over a diamond store seriously called “Neil Diamonds.” Mo is the getaway man, and he takes the bag of jewels out to the car, and finds that he has FORGOTTEN THE CAR KEYS. Then he is so dazed, apparently, that he wanders aimlessly out into traffic, where he is hit by a car. This causes the briefcase with the diamonds to go flying out into traffic, though apparently just a few lanes away. BUT, rather than go get the tens of thousands of dollars in diamonds that are sitting at most 50 feet away in the street, Mo walks blocks away to find a pay phone. From this point on it is impossible to play along with this movie because it is abundantly obvious that our hero is A GODDAMNED FUCKING IDIOT.

It then gets worse. Through the most improbable series of events, Mo ends up in the tower of the Chrysler Building. I’m sure it’s easy to see how any average person might inadvertently end up there. Anyway, he discovers the nest of the giant dragon and sees a big egg there.

We then cut to a construction site where a guy has had his lunch stolen. Some may query the degree of sublimated homosexuality that might result in a statement such as: “If any of you ate that sandwich I’m going to shove my Thermos up your asses one by one.” …Oh? Then we see some more limbs fall, and a man who allows himself to be flayed in order to satisfy this Mexican ritual [we’ll get to this later], and David Carradine in bed with his girlfriend, to whom I believe he says “Gimmie some bird-love.” Soon after we return to Mo, as he has a breakdown about what a collossal fuck-up he is [at least he’s somewhat aware of that fact], and he would like to cry, but he feels he can’t because he “has to be a man.” I say go ahead and cry, Mo. No one would ever mistake you for a man.

In between all this we’ve had some police procedural, featuring carradine and also Shaft himself, Richard Roundtree. Now, if I have to sit through this shit at least I get to feast my eyes on some Richard Roundtree, despite the fact that he never removes his shirt. Anyway, the police get clued in early that there’s this like Mexican ritual in which a guy is flayed and it brings to life this mythical dragon, etc. The thing is, the police treat this as though it is the ONLY POSSIBLE explanation for what’s been happening, and persue no other avenues. And even if it IS some Mexican magic beast… shouldn’t they try to FIND it and KILL it? No, they just fart around all day reading up on their Mexican rituals.

Anyway, in what was surely a complete surprise to moron Mo, the thugs come looking for their diamonds. I was really surprised that they wouldn’t accept his “but I LOST it” as explanation enough instead of the tens of thousands of dollars in diamonds they’re missing out on, but you know, some people are just SO inflexible. Mo is chased for a while by the thugs—while this wholly inappropriate reedy jazz music plays, thank you star composer Robert O. Ragland—and leads them to the top of the Chrysler Building, seeking to perform murder by mythical mexican dragon. He does, truly going psychotic while it happens. But nothing he could do would be surprising at this point.

So Mo is brought into the police station because of the diamond theft, and just HAPPENS to be there to overhear all this bullshit about their mythical Mexican dragon. He then thinks to BRIBE the police with the location of the dragon, asking for one million in cash, ownership of the body once it’s killed, and rights to all photographs taken of the beast. Okay, at this point this is all SO STUPID that any sort of serious consideration of this movie is a long-distant memory. He’s going to take possession of the dragon’s body? And they’re going to contain all of the pictures all of the various journalists are going to take of it, and give him the rights? At this point I was just waiting for this thing to get over with. Anyway, the homo talk continues when Mo says to the police: “I am pissing all over you and there’s nothing you can do about it.” Oh, and by the way, Mo inadvertently told the police that the building in question has a cone-shaped tower, of which would make any New Yorker only think of ONE building, but the fucking dumb police pay the fool anyway.

So the cops go in and shoot the thing with machine guns and it finally just dies, apparently dropping down onto the streets of Manhattan, but we don’t hear of anyone being injured. It’s also plenty anticlimactic. Then there’s a short coda thing where Mo gets kidnapped by the Mexican priest or whatever, but it’s not much of anything and then it’s all over.

Ugh. As I said, what was a strength of The Stuff—unusual characters and intriguing circumstances that happen to be going on against the main story—are the undoing of this film. First of all, our main character here is RETARDED, and it’s really difficult to get behind a character who is so completely active in his own undoing. WHAT a moron Mo is. Secondly, the story piles on contrivance after contrivance after contrivance… one maybe we could handle, but they just pile up so quickly one starts of feel jerked around and used. Really, insulted and made fun of. Come now, how am I supposed to go along with this? Larry Cohen, you are mocking me.

It was nice to see Michael Moriarty again, I like him and he’s good. I forgot to mention that this film features Candy Clark, SO fabulous in The Man Who Fell To Earth, but she gets pretty much nothing to do here. We have already mentioned the lickable [and nibbleable] Richard Roundtree, and composer Robert O. Ragland, who seems to specialize in the worst, most inappropriate music for really trashy, stupid movies [see: Grizzly]. This movie was produced by Samuel Arkoff, who also brought us Whoever Slew Auntie Roo?, The Abominable Dr. Phibes, Frogs, Blacula, Coffy, The Amityville Horror, Dressed To Kill and the horrid remake of The Haunting.

Well, I’m still curious about the rest of Larry Cohen’s output, but I’m afraid his free pass is permanently revoked.

SHOULD YOU WATCH IT?

I wouldn’t even bother. Watch God Told Me To or The Stuff.

RELATED MOVIES:
GOD TOLD ME TO is this awesome and very strange movie about a rash of killings, each committed by a person who says ‘God told me to’ when asked why. Stars Tony Lo Bianco of Honeymoon Killers fame.
THE STUFF also stars Michael Mortiary from this movie, and is a goofy but somewhat serious horror film.