2022 A month of Halloween movies -- October 2nd

Q – The Winged Serpent (1982) [Criterion]

Benjamin Stone from Law And Order is a small-time hoodlum who stumbles across an Aztec god and/or cryptid that's been terrorizing New York City despite the best efforts of John Shaft and Kwai Chang Caine to hunt the monster down.  Unfortunately, his attempt to cash in on his find causes Buffy's Mom to break up with him, which is a damn shame because she's been in everything.

What's not to love about this one?  It's basically what would happen if Ray Harryhausen decided to do an exploitation flick, but since that wasn't exactly Harryhausen's bag it's left up to Larry Cohen, who made a lot of exploitation flicks that somehow transcended the bin.

This one has been on my radar for decades, I mean decades.  I feel like I probably first heard of it in an issue of Starlog when I was a wee young thing, but it could have been Twilight Zone Magazine.  I'm pretty sure it was Starlog, though.

The special effects in this one haven't aged all that well, but who the hell cares?

A thing that I was talking to Shadowkat about in the recent recency is the fact that I've gotten a bit fatigued with Marvel and Star Wars for a whole variety of reasons, and part of it is that they've started to feel like homework--like, instead of just watching a movie because holy fuck, they've finally put So-And-So into live action, am I going to have to watch it so that I know what's going on if I ever eventually see Ant Man XV: Secret Invasion of the Quantum Cloniverse or whatever the hell's going on?  And I'm old (I mentioned that earlier in this series) and even an optimistic projection of where I'll fall through an actuarial table puts me at having less life ahead of me than I can look back on behind me; am I going to watch a movie that might be an excellent and well-made movie (I'm not knocking franchise films) because I have to just to keep abreast of What's Going On or am I going to finally watch something that's been on my to-see list for nearly four decades but I never checked it out from the video store but look it's now on one of the too many streaming services we're subscribed to?

Lately, the catch-up list has included things like Godard, because he's dead and that reminded me how much I liked seeing a movie of his ten years ago and meant to see more of them, and now I've watched three or four this past month and mostly loved them.  But there's no reason it can't include stuff like Q -- The Winged Serpent.  Damn movie has been buzzing around my brain almost since it came out; I can finally say I've seen it and I liked it.

This is more than I meant to write about it, though if you're paying attention I've mostly written about myself in this post; but I did want to add one more thing, which is that one of the fun things about watching stuff from this late '70s/early '80s epoch of film is that they really don't make them like they used to.  Specifically, they really knew how to make the protagonist of a movie a real asshole in those days, and they frankly didn't care because they weren't overly worried about losing the audience's interest if they made a character interesting.  Michael Moriarty's Jimmy Quinn has basically no redeeming features: he's an obnoxious, chickenshit, abusive jerk.  But he's interesting.  You become invested in seeing what happens to him, but not because you're sympathetic (if you're going to be sympathetic to anyone in this movie, it's going to have to be Candy Clark's Joan, Quinn's long-suffering girlfriend, whose character arc satisfactorily concludes with her finally DtMFAing Quinn towards the end of the movie; you're invested in seeing how things play out because you're frankly just curious how this whole thing plays out.

Before the '70s, or maybe before the '60s, Quinn would probably be made sympathetic because convention and the Hays Code would basically mandate that Jimmy Quinn be redeemed or have a suitable comeuppance demonstrating that Dickishness Does Not Pay.  And post '90s or so, you have all these writing conventions that have taken hold that insist a character has to have his moment of redemption or the audience, who are presumed to be shallow and stupid, will get bored.  He needs to have a puppy, or a mother who died of cancer when he was young, or he secretly has a heart of gold, or some other shit.  Thank goodness, Jimmy Quinn is a dick at the beginning of Q and he's a dick at the end of Q, and he's also a dick throughout the whole middle part of the movie.  He doesn't learn a lesson, he doesn't get a comeuppance, and don't read too much into his dialogue towards the end where he says he's going to find a job, because what he says about the kind of job he's looking for is that he's going to half-ass trying to find a career doing the thing he demonstrated he was completely unqualified for during the first half-hour of the movie.  Motherfucker is lame.  Praise be to lame-ass motherfucker protagonists.

"Geometria" (1987/2010) [Criterion]

Another one from this month's collection of horror shorts streaming on Criterion, and I watched it because it's an early Guillermo del Toro piece, but try to imagine my surprise when I realized during the opening credits that it's loosely based on one of my favorite Fredric Brown flashfics, "Naturally," in which a student cramming for a geometry exam finds a novel way to avoid retaking the test.

Brown wrote a lot of really short stories back in the day.  Page, page and a half; usually basically a joke or gag in narrative form.  At some point when I was a very little kid, I gave my Dad a copy of Brown's anthology Honeymoon In Hell, and somehow (cough) it ended up on my bookshelf; I can't help thinking I may have read more of the collection than my Dad, but Yog only knows.  Anyhow, the punchline of "Naturally," as predictable and telegraphed as it is, is still indelible, and del Toro has fun delivering it.

He also decides to pad it out by working in a little bit of an Exorcist parody and a bit of a riff on "The Monkey's Paw," just because the source material doesn't really even have enough plot, such as it is, for a nine-minute film.  And he shoots the entire thing with the kind of garish, comic-booky lighting and photography that Romero used on Creepshow and probably stole from, I dunno, Mario Bava or some other Italian gorehound.  It's all silly and delightful, though I'll admit that my delight at seeing Fredric Brown's name in the credits and realizing what the movie I was about to watch had to be may have delighted me all the way through it and you might not even care.  But I did.  And I was delighted.

You can find this one on YouTube if you want to test your delightification.  Actually, you can find it twice.  I'm reasonably sure the version I watched is the Director's Cut version that was fixed up in 2010 from the original 1987 version.  Both are available on YouTube, and no, I'm not going to sit down and compare them.  Didn't I just tell you life was short?