Q (1982 film)
1982 film directed by Larry Cohen
Q – The Winged Serpent (also known as Q) is a 1982 American monster horror crime movie written, co-produced and directed by Larry Cohen and starring Michael Moriarty, Candy Clark, David Carradine and Richard Roundtree. The film follows a petty swindler (Moriarty) who accidentally intrudes in a case involving a winged deity monster that poses a threat to New York City. He is the only person who has information that can help the police to stop the creature.
Plot
The Aztec god Quetzalcoatl, a winged reptilian monster, takes up residence in the art-deco spire of the Chrysler Building, with frequent jaunts in the midday sun to devour various helpless New Yorkers on the rooftops. The resulting bloody mess confounds detectives, Shepard and Powell, who are already occupied with a case involving a series of bizarre ritual murders linked to a secret neo-Aztec cult.
Jimmy Quinn, a cheap, paranoid crook who wishes to be a jazz pianist, takes part in a botched diamond heist. Attempting to hide from police after the robbery, he stumbles upon the creature's lair atop the Chrysler building. Quinn abandons his attempts to settle down and leave his life of crime, deciding to extort from the city an enormous amount of money in exchange for directions to the creature's nest, which houses a colossal egg.
Quinn makes a deal with the city, $1 million for the location of the nest. He leads Shepard and a paramilitary assault team to the top of the Chrysler Building where they shoot the egg, killing the baby inside.
“Q (1982 film)” enters the record as 1982 film directed by Larry Cohen. Crown Archives preserves that source wording while asking what film, directed and Larry can confirm, complicate or overturn.
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“Q (1982 film)” is worth following because a concise public description often conceals a longer documentary argument. Here, film, directed and Larry provides the most credible route into that argument.
Object files, edition statements, performance records and contemporary criticism preserve different stages of the work’s history. The source revision retrieved here is dated Sep 21, 2026. The linked authority identifier is Q465732. 4 of 4 selected statements include explicit references; 3 carry qualifiers and 0 use preferred rank. The first chronological checks are 1982.
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This entry incorporates text from “Q (1982 film)” on English Wikipedia. Contributors are listed in the page history. Text is available under the Creative Commons Attribution-ShareAlike 4.0 License. Selected authority identifiers and statements are retrieved from Wikidata under CC0; their references and qualifiers remain part of the verification path.