Cohen is a fly-by-the-seat of his pants rebel who I wish more film brats would champion. During his commentary track Cohen astutely points out that what he once did out of necessity is now being done on purpose. I also love hearing Cohen explain that this film was born of anger. After being pulled from I, the Jury wasted no time in whipping together Q so quickly that it’s probably a good thing he never stopped to question the absurd notion of a giant Aztec bird monster nesting in the Chrysler building.
I don’t believe in guilty pleasures. I love this preposterous film and I don’t feel a lick of guilt. Larry Cohen can take outlandish plots and a shoestring budgets and crank out engaging and entertaining cinema. He routinely mixes genres often combining the supernatural with gritty realistic human stories, but his emphasis is always on the humans. Here a cop drama, mixes with a botched heist film, and a giant monster movie. Like most giant monster movies the finale involves a epic confrontation between man and monster.
We’ve seen this skyscraper battle before in King Kong, but in Q the battlefield is reversed. This time the monster is in the air and the humans are a top of the Chrysler building firing at the beast. As many times as I’ve seen this movie and various King Kong films, I’ve never once questioned what happens to all those bullets that did not make contact with their target? A volley of bullets is being fired into the sky and only a few make contact. Bullets have to land somewhere. They don’t just continue upward and onward into space. Look out NYC, a bullet rain’s a comin’.
