On the Weird Scale, this 1982 flick ranks pretty high. A word of warning: you might not want to eat anything while you’re watching Q, The Winged Serpent. Within the first five minutes we have a window washer high up on the Empire State Building decapitated and see his neck splat against the glass as a woman inside looks on; a guy on a hotel room bed willingly skinned alive by a knife-wielding dude in an Aztec ceremonial mask; a topless sunbather snatched off a rooftop by some nasty-looking talons. (Actually, the latter one isn’t too hard to watch, but trust me on the first two.)

 With a tagline of “You’ll just have time to scream…before it tears you apart,” Q promises a good old-fashioned low-budget monster movie, and for the most part it pays off. Did I say low-budget? Even for 1982, $1.2 million is chintzy, and it shows in the minimalist special effect (singular): the giant flying serpent itself. Actually, you hardly see the creature, but you see a lot of New York City from its lofty point of view.

 But heck, I’m always up for seeing my original home town under siege by something large and/or creepy—and the Big Apple has certainly had its share. Dinosaurs, octopi, gorillas, mutated cockroaches—all have tried to make it there. So why not an Aztec god?

Q flies off with lunch…

Q stands for Queztalcoatl, a Mesoamerican feathered serpent deity once worshiped by a number of cultures. Seems that a deranged Aztec priest has prayed Q back into existence by performing human sacrifices, and now the creature has established a nest inside the inverted cone top of the Chrysler Building (my favorite structure in NYC). Two befuddled cops, Shepard and Powell, played by David Carradine and Richard Roundtree (yeah, Shaft!), are investigating both the ritual murders and the grisly deaths related to numerous reports of a huge creature flying above the city. Eventually, Shepard comes to believe that the murders and the monster are related, but no one else does.

Michael Moriarty as Jimmy Quinn.

 The wonderful actor Michael Moriarty plays the main character, lowlife Jimmy Quinn, an out-of-work ex-con piano player. He first auditions for a job at a bar where his girlfriend works, but the bizarre scat jazz “song” that he performs pisses the owner off. He then goes on a botched jewelry heist with some goons, who are soon after his butt for deserting them and taking the jewels, which he loses after getting hit by a car. Scared, Jimmy goes to his lawyer’s office on—of course, the top floor of the Chrysler Building. He gets spooked by a security guard, climbs up a few ladders and winds up inside the creepy cone, where he discovers a giant egg in a nest, as well as the grisly remains of the topless sunbather. He gets out of there just as the feathered serpent returns.

Confronted by two of the goons, Jimmy hatches (no pun intended) a couple of plans. First, he leads the goons to the top of the Chrysler Building and listens with glee as the serpent devours the pair. Then, knowing that NYC is in crisis mode from the serpent attacks, he offers to lead the police to the nest—for an extortive million bucks, of course.

 I won’t spill much more than that. Suffice it to say that the cops will have its confrontation with Q, and we finally get to see the beastie for more than three seconds at a time. Jimmy will also have a confrontation with—gulp!—the crazed Aztec priest with the nasty knife. All in all, buckets of blood, and a lot of fun. And, naturally, a promise of a sequel—which never happened.

 The soundtrack of Q only heightens the weirdness. It is a combination of the aforementioned scat jazz and the creepy chalk-on-a-blackboard music that you’ve heard in a gazillion horror flicks from the 1940s and ’50s. I liked the latter much better.

 I have to close with my favorite line in the film. You may wonder—I sure did—why a deity of the Aztecs, Toltecs, Olmecs, Mayans and so on would turn up in the Big Apple. David Carradine’s character wondered the same thing, and he also mused, in a chat with another cop, why the creature, which he believes has built a nest somewhere out in the more isolated boonies, would come into the busy city. The other cop replies, “Everyone knows that New York is famous for good eating.”