Single-Letter Cinema

M

Q

Salutations, my fellow cinephiles, and happy Spring. I type this with the grimmest expression on my face, as I experience Spring through a filter of the most disgusting blend of allergens, trying my best to ignore the dangling worms outside and the consistently-inconsistent weather. Spring is my least favorite season of the year but even if I didn’t rain on Spring’s parade, it would still probably be raining. But nothing puts a spring in my step like a fresh set of intriguing films and a brand new, hyper-specific lens through which to view them. I recently had the pleasure of guesting on a podcast (that will be coming out soon) where we discussed iconic movie monsters, and I was introduced to one of the films we’ll be discussing tonight—Q (or Q the Winged Serpent)—and it got me thinking. There can’t be that many films with titles that consist of only one letter, but then I really got thinking. There are many films named X: one that came out in 2022, and one that came out in 2011. There’s also XX: a horror anthology from 2017. There are a couple films named W: the George Bush biopic, and the thriller from 1974 starring Twiggy. There’s Z, a dark political drama from the 1960s that was nominated for both Best Foreign Language Film and Best Picture, though the creator’s protested the awards. There’s the 2001 teen Shakespearean adaptation of Othello (randomly directed by Tim Blake Nelson) called O, a television show called V, and a horror film set in a parking garage that I’ve yet to see because it sounds so terrifying called P2. And to say nothing of the films where the emphasis and anchor of its title is on a single letter like X: the Man with X-Ray Eyes, V for Vendetta, Easy A, and G-Force. These are all just off the top of my head and there are likely many, many more films that fit this criteria that you nor I have ever heard of, and I love that you can never truly run out of new movies to watch. So let’s begin with one of the most classic and acclaimed members of the single-letter film title club, a Fritz Lang film from 1931 called M. Fritz Lang wrote M with his wife Thea von Harbou and it was his first sound film. There was a remake in 1951 that changes its location to Los Angeles, but the original M takes us to Depression-era Berlin—where the people refer to the “Depression” in the past tense, just as people nowadays refer to the pandemic. It opens on an ominous gathering of young children, who are singing a haunting tune about a murderous man in black as they play. As I learned a couple Halloween double features ago, German horror is deeply macabre and full of cynicism, but also imagination. A mother calls from the near-distance and begs these spooky kids to stop singing their scary song, but another mother points out that “As long as we can hear them singing we know they’re still there.” Their chilling chant informs us of this town’s local child kidnapper and serial killer, who is still at large. We see missing children signs posted around a cluster of parents who are anxiously-perched outside the school, waiting for their kids. Then, suddenly, an intimidating shadow crawls across the pole where a missing kid sign hangs, and a little girl is nearby, bouncing a ball. He is a dark presence who appears friendly and unthreatening to this little girl, whom he takes to get balloon. He whistles an extra-eerie rendition of In the Hall of the Mountain King by Edvard Grieg, which frightens even the blind balloon-salesman. We see an empty but prepared place setting at her mother’s kitchen table as the mother paces and checks the clock. She hears children approaching, but none of them are her daughter Elsie. The ball rolls into the grass. The balloon floats up into the sky. Elsie never comes home. Elsie is the ninth child in this town to go missing, and, as the killer writes to the press in a very Zodiac-like fashion, there will be more. The entire town becomes suspicious of one another and the police are overwhelmed by countless false accusations and leads that lead them nowhere. Fingerprinting technology had just been invented, and it was far from efficient. Inspector Karl Lohmann, head of the homicide squad, tells his men to intensify their search by checking the records of recently-released psychiatric patients, scouring the town’s bars to arrest harmless drunkards and sex workers and low-level criminals—all of which makes the police even less popular with the populace. The police only stoke the flames of this town’s paranoia and chaos, so a group of criminals who’s businesses have been affected by this madness decide to band together to catch this killer themselves. When the iconic Peter Lorre was revealed to be the killer (early on in the film, so not a spoiler) I nearly gasped—not out of shock but pure, classic terror for how frightening he appears here. His famously mysterious aura and his recognizably-bulging eyes are disturbingly-transfixing and make him an excellent choice as a child murderer. Still, M does an excellent job of inflicting confusion and conflicting vibes onto its audience, you may feel some sympathy for this brutal beast and certainly some outrage for its increasingly angry and desperate townsfolk. M is one of the first crime thrillers / police procedurals / murder movies that really twists and turns its formula inside out, and I can see why it is known as a classic. I will say, perhaps annoyingly, that the pacing of M was at times slow in a way that built suspense and tension and fear, and at other times slow in a way that could be frustratingly draggy. The ruthlessness of the way this story unfolds, combined with the odd humor that is sprinkled throughout, felt very German and kept me thoroughly compelled—even in its somewhat slow, silly moments. But what I really enjoyed, what will linger in my worm-filled mind for quite awhile is tonight’s next film: Q. No, I am not referring to the fictional leader of the all-too-real cult of Qanon, nor am I referring to the less nefarious but still obnoxious contestant on this season of Ru Paul’s Drag Race named Q, I am speaking of the creature feature horror film by Larry Cohen titled Q: the Winged Serpent. There is still much more of this legendary horror writer-director’s filmography I need to see, but I was super into his 1985 film The Stuff, and extremely into Q. Q follows Michael Moriarty, Candy Clark, David Carradine, and Richard Roundtree as they face a fearsome flying monster named Quetzalcoatl, Q for short, that has been terrorizing New York City. We open on a bright, shining day during bustlingly-busy New York minute where a chic fashion lady of some kind rolls her eyes at the creepy window washer who incessantly insists upon cleaning and over-cleaning the window of her high-rise office. His squeegee makes a horrendous screech that is only matched by the unnerving screeching of a dragon-like creature that suddenly appears and decapitates this man. This is just one bizarre, mysterious death that the New York City police department is currently investigating—they’re already preoccupied with a rash of odd, seemingly-ritualistic murders that may or may not be caused by a secret neo-Aztec cult. Detectives David Carradine and Richard Roundtree already have their hands full when a squirrely, shady, low-rung freelancer of the mob named Jimmy Quinn (Michael Moriarty) approaches them, and reveals that he knows where this mysterious murderer resides. You see, on one of the many occasions where Quinn botched a job for the mob and must flee from some cronies, he climbs up and up in the ceiling of the Chrysler building and stumbled upon a large, bone-filled nest where a gargantuan egg sits. The details of this nest are repulsive and distressing, as a skeleton of a recent victim—a woman who was sunbathing on the roof of her apartment’s building—lands on Quinn and he observes every morsel has been picked from the bones except for a charm bracelet. We do witness this woman’s demise, and her prominently-featured 1980s titties of course, as we witness many creative fatalities caused by this ancient serpent. There’s the poor construction worker who gets yanked off a roof, a bored man who is snatched from his rooftop pool, and a number of other unsuspecting victims who are randomly and brutally grabbed and devoured by Q. There are some incredible moments where limbs and body parts and blood would rain from the sky, leaving the many bystanders on the city streets disoriented and deeply frightened—causing the police to finally realize that this isn’t a city-wide hoax or a bout of random mass hysteria. This is actually happening, in broad daylight, over and over again. David Carradine educates himself on the topic of Aztec blood rituals and their willing and consenting sacrifices from an expert at a museum, one of the only characters in this film who doesn’t speak with a caricature-esque New York accent, but instead with a pretentious, vaguely-British accent, as all fictional (and some real) academics do. The police are hoping that this is just a run-of-the-mill every-day monster and not, in fact, a god or deity, but regardless of how it identifies, Q is a deadly threat with nothing to fear. This film has the perfect blend of preposterous stakes and ridiculous humor, which is no surprise coming from Larry Cohen, and there were several surprisingly scary moments—mostly those that involved aerial shots of New York, and shots where the camera would be from Q’s perspective, and we’d follow his prey just above their heads. (And given that drones didn’t exist yet, I am very curious as to how these shots were achieved.) This film inspired the likes of Bong Joon-ho, specifically with his film The Host that also utilizes humor with its scaly serpent-like monster, and likely several other creature features that have come since. Allegedly, Larry Cohen spawned the idea for this film while staring up at the Chrysler building one time and remarking, “That’d be the coolest place to have a nest” and I’m so glad this weirdo followed that random, specific thought and gave us this beautifully bizarre and frenetically fun movie. I’m not sure what it says about me that I enjoyed the silly serpent monster movie more than the critically-acclaimed crime thriller other than I have a short attention span and an unquenchable thirst for monsters, but I’ll take any judgement in stride and recommend both Q and M because they were both really good. It takes a lot of courage to release a movie that is only one letter-long, and it takes a lot of patience to read my blog every week so thank you to these creators and thank you to you, dear reader, for joining me on another cinematic excursion through the weird and the niche angles that weird and niche mind cooks up. C u around!