Q
Dammit, now my site needs an overhaul!
That's a big stack of pages now that need links to a "Q" page, since I've never before reviewed a movie starting with that letter.
Wannabe Canadian Michael Moriarty stars as a bumbling New York lowlife who stumbles upon a nest with giant eggs in it in the roof structure of the Chrysler Building, which was destroyed about a hundred times last summer. He decides to use this knowledge to extort money out of the city which is desperately looking for the next of Quetzalcoatl, the giant winged serpent-god of the Aztecs, which has recently been summoned up by some skin-flayin' ritual sacrifices. David Carradine plays the cop investigating both the sacrifices and the killings perpetrated by ol' Q.
I wanted to like this one a lot more than I did, mostly because I'd heard that it was a lot funnier than it really was, and Moriarty's character was just a loser. Not a compelling loser, like William H. Macy in Fargo, or even that drunk guy in A Simple Plan, but just a loser who you pretty much wish would hurry up and die. Oh, he plays him well, no doubt about that; acting circles around a typically wooden Carradine; but this isn't a guy I'd care to watch for more than a minute and a half.
The creature effects are quite good (stop-motion), and the story moves at a good clip, but things really aren't up to the film's reputation. Moriarty's character is too pathetic and useless to be sympathetic or much fun; and since the movie centers on him more than anybody else, the movie comes across as being nowhere near as fun as it could, or should, be.
Written and directed by Larry Cohen; as many reservations as I have about this movie, he hasn't made a movie half this good in a long, long time.