Midnight Movie Madness: tentacle difficulties and uncivil serpents

This week, two films which can be broadly characterized as creature features: Mystery Science Theater 3000’s skewering of Lamberto Bava’s “Devil Fish” and Larry Cohen’s “Q: the winged serpent”.
Bava’s “Devil Fish” was ‘remade’ in 2010 for the SyFy channel as “Sharktopus”.
Interestingly, many elements of “Q: the winged serpent” were ‘borrowed’ in 1998’s “Godzilla” as well, but not credited to Cohen…
Doing a review of an MST3K is like reviewing a review, in a way, but “Devil Fish” is so bad that this “commented” version made it much, much more palatable.

“Mystery Science Theater 3000: Devil Fish” – (1998, USA, 92 minutes – NR)

Bava’s 1984 film was 90 minutes long and rated R. A half shark-half octopus creature off the Florida coast attacks unsuspecting boaters and swimmers, leaving mutilated bodies in its wake. A marine biologist, a dolphin trainer, a research scientist, and the sheriff all band together to track down and kill it.

That does sound like a joke, and “Devil Fish” is full of such material, which provided very rich ground for the MST3K writers.

Here is a compilation which is by no means all inclusive:

The cast was multinational and the actors spoke their lines in their native language, knowing they would be dubbed later. “Devil Fish” is typical of certain Italian movies, particularly horror flicks taking place in the States, in that the director and /or writers rely on distorted versions of America they know from movies, TV and commercials they were exposed to abroad.
Cliches abound, and so do the jokes. For example, the marine biologist always seems to have a Budweiser can in hand. When he has two, he offers the other to whoever’s around. Piloting the boat? Have a cold one. Tracking the monster on sonar? Drink another.

This episode of MST3K is one of the most popular and with good reason, “Devil Fish” to begin with is a kind of “Jaws” rip off, made by and acted in by Italians whose understanding of the US and devotion to the craft is… Approximate.
I laughed at the little insert they had to place over one actor’s crotch as he came down the boat’s ladder, as his nut-sac slipped out of his shorts.
From the riffs on the soft-core porn music to the comments about calamari, “that tentacle’s so big it’s an eleventacle”, “Mystery Science Theatre 3000: Devil Fish” is highly recommended entertainment worth 5 jellybeans.

“Q: the winged serpent” – (1982, USA, 93 minutes – rated R)

Mutilated bodies are being found around Manhattan as the press reports sightings of a giant lizard flying over the city.

NYPD detectives Sheperd (David Carradine) and Powell (Richard Roundtree) are also investigating bizarre murders in which the victim’s skin was completely flayed.

Meanwhile, following a botched robbery, petty crook and ex-con Jimmy Quinn (Michael Moriarty) runs to his attorney’s office at the Chrysler building. Since Jimmy was forced by the other two thieves to go with them into the jewelry store (Neil Diamonds, geddit?), he is afraid he’ll get pinched right quick.
Growing desperate, especially as he got hit by a cab on the way, Jimmy tries to force open the lawyer’s office doors and triggers an alarm. Trying to evade the armed guard, he runs up the vacant engineering floors at the very top, where he discovers the flying lizard’s nest and a giant egg.

Detective Sheperd, meanwhile, begins to see a connection between the flaying murders and the body parts strewn across Manhattan by the carnivorous lizard: the flayings are sacrifices meant to bring back the god Quetzalcoatl, the feathered winged serpent.

Watch the trailer here:

“Q: the winged serpent” is an interesting concept, one which could have been executed very poorly and provide fodder to the MST3K crew.
However, Larry Cohen is known for his original ideas and skill at putting together low budget projects, many of which are remembered with fondness.
The film’s creature, animated in stop-motion, is I think its weakest point. Stop motion pretty much always look fake and dated to me, and the creature’s design itself wasn’t scary enough. But with a budget of $1.2 million that was expected.
I could also point out the fact that Carradine and Roundtree both followed the exhausted cliché of playing cops wearing their badge and gun up front, well in evidence, something cops don’t do in real life.
The other effects, the mutilated bodies and decapitation shots with blood squirting out of the severed necks do work, however.

But while “Q: the winged serpent” may lack a social comment at its core, unlike most of Cohen’s other projects, it offers much more than a lot of horror films of any budget.
It has very good writing.
There are two very good performances partly as a result of Cohen’s writing skills, by actors who never quite made me take notice: Carradine as Sheperd and Moriarty as Quinn.

They have a particular scene in a coffee shop where Sheperd is trying to get Quinn to reveal the location of Q’s nest, while Quinn hopes to get a pardon and paid for what he knows.
I feel this was maybe the best work Carradine has ever done. Even though Moriarty’s character has a more ‘defined’ background, this particular scene made me forget I was watching Carradine, giving me a new perspective on the actor.
Other scenes, especially those between Quinn and his girlfriend Joan (Candy Clark), gave Moriarty a lot of room to show skills I frankly had not seen him exercise.
The dialogue sounded authentic, and well paced, without canned turns of phrase. Quinn’s character shouldn’t and wouldn’t be likeable at all if it weren’t for this combination of Cohen’s writing and Moriarty’s portrayal and these are strengths which make “Q: the winged serpent” vastly superior to many other films across different genres.
“Q: the winged serpent” is just one of those New York low budget flicks, with a unique perspective and flavor from 30, 40 years ago which remind me of Roy Batty’s (Rutger Hauer) remark about memories as he dangled Deckard (Harrison Ford) over a ledge: they are like tears in the rain. Some gain renewed life on DVD, some will remain lost.
All that being said, I hope you will check out this engaging example of creative skills edging out technical ones.
“Q: the winged serpent” gets 5 jellybeans.