Go away evil dream:
Michael Moriarty and Q

Part in a series of tributes to great genre performances.

New Yorker Larry Cohen is a true author and one of the most original filmmakers of his generation, as uncompromising as any filmmaker can be, whether it's one of his own monster movies or Phone Booth (which he wrote). Abusive power, religion and paranoia are recurring favorite themes in the Cohen universe. Nobody can be trusted. You can't trust the police or the goverment because they don't work in your best interest, you can't trust your neighbour because they might turn you in for whatever obscure reason they have and you can't even trust your food because it might just as well want to eat you instead. To Larry Cohen people who are unpersecuted and unmolested should be grateful every day for the rest of their lives. In Q-The Winged Serpent (1982), however, the tables are turned. But not for long.

This summer something funny is happening in New York City. While a self-sacrifying killer cult is serving the police with a series of dead bodies ("skinned like oranges") something feathered is attacking people from the sky. Meanwhile smalltime con Jimmy Quinn (Michael Moriarty) is on the run from the police because the pathetic heist against a jewelry store he has taken part in has gone wrong. While hiding in the top of the Chrysler Building he by accident finds a huge nest and a gigantic egg. At first he don't understand what it is, but he knows it's humonguous, there aren't any normal egg that big. But soon he also learns that what he have found is the nest of an Aztec serpent, the Quetzalcoatl, worshipped by the killer cult as if it was a God. He decides to go to the police with an offer they just can't refuse.

»The City owes me one!«

Make no mistake, we're talking old-fashioned monster movie Larry Cohen style, with all the expected monster movie ingredients, including hookey effects by Dave Allen and topless girls snatched from the roofs. Though perhaps not the goofy masterpiece many has claimed it to be, the plot is so full of holes so big you can fly two Quetzalcoatls through them. But the energetic performance by Michael Moriarty as Jimmy Quinn definitely is a masterful turn. For me the film have always been about Quinn, perhaps the most pathetic character in all of Cohen's movies, yet also one of the most lovable.

In almost every scene he's in Moriarty burns a whole in the screen the size of a monster egg. His performance is mesmerizing and almost touching in all its delirious glory. Quinn is a character who has all of his miserable life been harased and pestered by everyone and by authorities especially. Whatever he does, he fails. We know that because he tells us and because the defining scene in the beginning of the film tells us the rest. Quinn walks into a bar and asks if he can play a little on the piano, trying to sound like a real jazz musician despite being drowned by the owner's jukebox. It's a classic scene. Through a few moves and an improvised song, "Go Away Evil Dream", Moriarty manage to express all the desperation of this pathetic character hopelessly trying to get something right but always falls on his back. His whole existence, to him, is like an evil dream that won't go away.

»I don't know what I'm supposed to be, everything
I touch on the outside turns to shit. Maybe I
belong in the slammer.«

But now the tables are turned. Now Quinn has something they (the city of New York) want from him. He has the fucking Quetzalcoatl! For once he has the power and he intend to bargain with it. For once he now can make demands upon them and he wants life-long pardon "Nixon-style" against all crimes of the past and all crimes he may commit in the future. And he wants lots of money. After all, they owe him one.

»Old Quinnie's gonna take care of himself.
The city needs ME now!«

Of course it all goes wrong, Quinn only manage to lead the police to the egg and the deal was for the Quetzalcoatl which the police found themselves. So Quinn is back where he started, screwed again. Only then a member of the killer cult attacks him in his appartment, accusing him for being a traitor. Actor Michael Moriarty, on the other hand, manage to move on to better times, nowdays a respected character actor on films and on TV. He more or less reprised the quirky character in three more Cohen movies (most notably The Stuff) but never came close to match his wonderful turn as Jimmy Quinn.