Q: The Winged Serpent

This flick is like watching an extended episode of the old Night Stalker series, minus Darren McGavin's Kolchak. The whole vibe is that of a monster movie from the 70s, except this one was hatched in the early 80s. That doesn’t just come through in production values, either. Several movies that I watched before this one featured New York City in the '60s, which was all spiffy and glamorous and, well, clean. This outing, however, showcases the Apple in its gritty, grimy 1980s incarnation—mostly in aerial shots, though there’s street level looks, too—where things were rotting and falling apart and you were as likely to see someone on the streets lying in their filth as you were someone in a mink coat. That vibe works well with the story’s monster angle; you can sort of believe that a monster was living atop the Chrysler Building while Ed Koch was the mayor. Speaking of monsters, of a different sort, the film features one of the better career performances from one of the screen's true chameleons, David Carradine, as the cop who is on the case and looking up the Aztecs for insight. Meanwhile, Michael Moriarty chews up the scenery—almost as much as the titular beastie—as the small timer who tries to make it big with his knowledge of the critter. The special effects aren’t all that special, which is glaring from a movie contemporaneous with E.T. and Poltergeist and especially the New York-based Ghostbusters—but that actually gives the film a certain amount of charm, like the old Ray Harryhausen stop-motion classics of a previous era. It would be overselling the thing to declare this a good movie, in an overall sense, but for a willfully cheesy monster movie, it’s not all that bad for killing an hour and a half. Feel free to kick back in your nest and chew on this one when you have an evening to kill.