11 · 07 · 25

Q: Quetzalcoatl’s Revenge

Rafael Aviña

On the 47th floor of the Chrysler Building in New York, a woman answers the phone and flirts with a man who is washing the windows from outside. Within seconds, the guy is attacked by some sort of gigantic bird and his head and blood fall on the horrified and surprised pedestrians who were passing through that area of Manhattan. This is the beginning of a disturbing and sarcastic horror thriller, sometimes comical as its dialogues and situations, most of them ridiculous, but effective, whose “monster” protagonist is none other than Quetzalcoatl, “the Feathered Serpent”. It is Q: The Winged Serpent (1982), a low-budget American production made by the respectable craftsman of the genre, Larry Cohen, responsible for such iconic “cult” titles as: It's Alive (1974) or The Ambulance (1990).

Although it was never released on the silver screen in our country, it was released in video format in the eighties by the now dissolved Videomax company, which distributed and discontinued it very quickly. In this film we do not have Mexican scenarios; hs; however, the monstrous deity worshipped by a sort of fanatic priest wearing a tunic with Aztec attire, is a fantastic representation of Quetzalcoatl - hence the original title of Q -, from the Hollywood imagery and its vision of the barbarism of foreign “culture

This is a curious return to the horror films of the thirties and forties, where the American nation was threatened by foreign and “exotic” dangers. In this case, an immemorial god that feeds on the blood of human sacrifices and has hatched an egg in the famous New York building, thus creating an unusual climate of paranoia and xenophobia as an allegory of a silent and terribly brutal invasion. Beyond any ideological metaphor, Cohen's film is an entertaining suspenseful amusement with several bloody scenes along the lines of the gore horror of those years, which uses a series of distorted images and notions of Aztec culture to justify the violence and rapacity of the “Feathered Serpent”.

Several grotesque deaths and disappearances of people (some skinned alive and others are young people sunbathing on the roof garden of high-rise buildings) coincide with a series of ritual murders in Manhattan. Detective Shepard (David Carradine) will gradually discover that everything is connected: the rites have served to invoke a giant prehistoric monster, a mixture of bird and reptile that commits the bloody crimes to feed itself. In his investigation, he will cross paths with Jimmy Quinn (Michael Moriarty), a petty criminal sick of his bad luck; a nervous and clumsy guy, involved in a jewelry store robbery, who, in a random way, will find the monster's lair and, against his will, will be the only one who can help the police in the investigation of such a delirious case.

There are moments of enormous skill, such as that camera gliding and simulating Quetzalcoatl's flying and attacks, and Carradine acts as a sort of B-movie clone of Dirty Harry, the San Francisco detective starring Clint Eastwood in the film of the same name. Moriarty, on the other hand, is a sort of Hitchcock-like “naive hero” who steals the movie. The special effects are rudimentary and somewhat crude, as is the black humor, but they are effective (the rotisserie chicken scene or the restaurant scene).

There is also a confusing subplot involving a sort of museum on foreign cultures, in which a “specialist” tells Shepard that the Aztecs performed human sacrifices and used the flayed skins of the victims as clothing.

Of course the ending is as bizarre as it is delirious - machine guns included - and the question that Q: The Winged Serpent never answers is: how did our Feathered Serpent get pregnant to hatch a new dynasty?

Translated by Adrik Díaz