Q: The Winged Serpent

A piano playing ex-con (Michael Moriarty) helps two New York cops (David Carradine and Richard Roundtree) link a giant flying lizard to an Aztec human sacrifice cult.

Q: The Winged Serpent isn’t a great film, or even a good film, but it is an entertaining one.

Writer-director Larry Cohen realizes he doesn’t have the money to make a high-caliber monster movie, so he makes a fun one instead, wisely keeping the monster off-screen as much as possible, while cooking up fun ways to off innocent New Yorkers. The catch here is that with a bigger budget, the same story could be played straight and work.

The performers all take the script with the requisite amount of salt, and seem to be having a good time, though Cohen’s criminal underuse of David Carradine and Richard Roundtree is certainly his biggest misstep. Granted, Michael Moriarty is great as the weasely lead, but that’s Kwai Chang Caine and John Shaft. This should have been Carradine and Roundtree’s movie.

Tragic neglect of 70s icons aside, Q is a solid little b-movie that clocks in at a brief 93 minutes and never wears out its welcome.