Q This

I’ve wanted to watch Q The Winged Serpent for a ridiculous amount of years. Then I forgot about it. Rinse, repeat. Thankfully, I had lunch at a Thai restaurant last week and what poster should they have hanging on their lobby wall? 

Oh yeah. Q-ueue it! 

Quick Plot: Random New Yorkers are being grabbed by a gigantic stop animation winged creature, their blood and limbs that don’t make the diet dropped down upon unsuspecting and horrified pedestrians. Only Michael Moriarty--here playing an ex-con, ex-addict wannabe jazz pianist--and cool detective David Carradine can save the city.

The best thing I can say for Q is that in the first ten minutes, the following events transpire:

-A man is skinned

-Blood rains down upon Manhattan

-Michael Moriarty scats

I’ll bet you a Metrocard swipe you guess how I feel about this film.

Slowly, but surely, I’m coming to realize how very much I adore the canon of Larry Cohen. From the haunting monologues of God Told Me To to the giddy insanity of The Stuff, he’s a filmmaker that never fails to be interesting. Like The Stuff, Q is never actually scary, instead tapping into the grimy spirit of ‘80s Manhattan, the utter oddness of Michael Moriarty, and the glorious then-modernization of old school giant urban monster mashing. It’s kind of a joy in all possible directions

High Points

Enough can’t be said about Michael Moriarity in a Larry Cohen film. The man seems batshit insane in real life, but when working with a Cohen script, his bizarre approach is simply fascinating.

Low Points

Between the adorably dated stop motion and quirky script, there’s nothing actually scary about Q, but isn’t that okay when we have lines like “Maybe his head just got loose and fell off?”

Lessons Learned

The Chrysler is a great place to hide things

Even the toughest gangster can lose some street cred when he sports a vibrant velour track suit

Mimes can make surprisingly effective--and silent--spies

The more PC way of saying ‘flayed’ is ‘skinning’

Rent/Bury/Buy

I will eventually add Q to my collection because much like just about every Cohen film I’ve ever seen, I get the feeling it will benefit from repeat viewings when the surprise factor can be replaced with relaxed enjoyment. The DVD includes a typically fun Cohen/Bill Lustig commentary, a great discussion that reveals some hilarious tips for directing Moriarty (hint: it involves songwriting). 

Everybody's Doing It...

For no reason whatsoever, America’s youth (ranging in age between three and seventeen, by my accounts) have become insanely obsessed with collecting colorful bracelets vaguely shaped like random nouns. Bandz, as they’re called, are simply the latest commercial product in a long line of short-lived trends that serve to annoy teachers, rob parents, divide schoolyard friends and generally make the world a worse place.

Need further proof? Examine, if you will, today’s genre-centric list of films that capture the horror of materialism gone wild:

Gremlins

Joe Dante’s seminal Cabbage Patch Kids-inspired Christmas classic is the educational gift that keeps on giving, riffing on the dangers of irresponsible materialism with the cutest metaphor to ever squeak. As parents mowed each other down in shopping malls to deliver chubby faced baby dolls to their greedy kids, Dante captured the overly ambitious gifting craze with Gizmo, and adorable living teddy bear with a rule book even Santa couldn’t follow. Predicting--or possibly, inspiring--future toy fads like Tickle-Me-Elmo and, in an odd twist, the clearly Mogwai-based Furbies.

Child’s Play

It’s hard to be the fatherless poor kid at daycare in downtown Chicago, but even harder when mom’s idea of an appropriate birthday gift is a box of pants. Between delicious breakfast cereal and Saturday morning cartoons, it’s no wonder that young Andy Barclay becomes so fixated on obtaining a Good Guy Doll, a promised ‘friend to the end’ with a $50+ price tag. Misguidedly believing such a My Buddy knockoff will bring him peace, Andy guilts his mom into using her bonus in the back alley to purchase the toy. How to punish a child for his greed? Soul snatching, naturally.

The Stuff

Remember when your teachers, friends, neighbors, cousins, and kittens were shedding belly fat with the Atkins Diet? Didn’t it sound like the best idea since WOW Doritos? Then, just as you were about to declare jihad on bagels, you remembered that WOW Doritos were officially declared an agent of the devil (via your toilet). That’s the lesson you should remember watching Larry Cohen’s The Stuff, a gleeful satire that uses a delicious fat-free frozen treat to explore America’s obsession with lo-cal commercialism.

Halloween III: Season of the Witch

Perhaps the holiday’s best lesson at teaching kids to make their own costumes and avoid the temptations of everybody’s-doing-it store bought digs. What happens when your child wears the same rubber mask as 75% of the buying public? He or she turns into a rotten pumpkin. Serves you right for not thinking outside the box.

Suicide Club

Peer pressure has led to many a minor tragedy: feathered hair, bullying, Phish. But few lapses of individual judgement are quite as unfortunate as the events that occur in this 2002 surrealist genre glob, wherein offing oneself becomes way cooler than XBox, ‘N Sync, or talking to the hand. As usual, pop music is the main offender, with the sweet siren songs of girl group Dessert (or Desert) calling teens, comedians, housewives, and policemen to hurl their bodies in front of racing subway trains, chop off their appendages while slicing sandwiches, and leap to their deaths at the urging of their peers. Though the exact nature of the suicidal craze isn’t quite explained and the cure comes off as questionable, Suicide Club remains the thinking gorehound’s philosophical bible for exploring mass societal behavior with macabre humor and scraped off earlobes.

Fido

Sometiems it’s not just the kids that get hooked by ubiquitous marketing. Take Carrie Anne Moss’s June Cleaver-esque homemaker in 2006’s zombedy Fido. All this stay-at-home mom wants is to have the same merchant goods as the neighbors. In this case, that good is an undead servant to call her family’s own. Though most of the films on this list demonstrate the negative aspect of trends (and Fido’s premise basically equates to modern slavery), this quirky black comedy ironically results in the most positive outcome of all. Sometimes, true love truly does start with a price tag. 

Unhealthy Horror

At a recent Shadow Box performance of Repo! The Genetic Opera (chalk it up to research/ my addiction to seeing Anthony Stuart Head in leather on the big screen) I noticed the general unhealth of the genre fans around me. Perhaps it’s the unflattering fit of pleather, fishnets, and pre-shrunk t-shirts, but glance at any midnight movie or convention line and it’s hard to feel confident in the event of a surprise field day (though conversely, it does give you quite the edge in a surprise Battle Royale tournament). 

For a genre whose fanbase is often less than athletic (not to make any sweeping generalizations; I’m basing this on the unexplainable fact that nachos, beer, and chocolate covered anything tastes better when watching people eat or kill each other), you’d think that a few filmmakers would have tried their hands at addressing this issue. But despite their insatiable appetites and reluctance to exercise with any enthusiasm, zombies are generally reserved to symbolize human cruelty, apathy, societal breakdown, and stupidity, while slashers focus their lessons on premarital sex participants and users of illegal substances. Onscreen, such a definition has yet to include trans fats.

In any genre, the overweight are generally cast as comfortable furniture. In horror, they can be used to showcase creative killing (like the gluttonous spaghetti massacre of Se7en), comic relief (Dawn of the Dead’s Big & Tall swim trunks model), or to emphasize the grotesque in villains (the latest round of Texas Chainsaw Massacres). Even that perennial holiday favorite, Silent Night Deadly Night features a trim psycho killer, and that’s a film about Santa Clause, a character who has himself been accused of setting a bad example when it comes to eating habits.

I accept the whole escapist fantasy of film and television and wouldn’t expect to see a Lane Bryant model playing Friday the 13th’s next final girl. What surprises me is that, to my knowledge, there are few films that delve into obesity or the culture of weight with the same intellectual and/or horrific energy as, say, Cronenberg’s studies of the sexual body or even Ginger Snaps’ lycanthropic menstrual analogy. We like our struggles with religion, suburban psychology, and alcoholism metaphors just fine, but an ubiquitous health crisis, not so much. 

Perhaps the most obvious example of “fat horror” is Stephen King’s little loved Thinner. Sure, that film gave us a donut devouring stereotype of an antihero, but for all its incredible shrinking waistline, the horror was more focused on the diabolical power of Gypsies than the potential fright of diabetes. The recent Drag Me to Hell gave heroine Allison Lohman an interesting character history as a formerly chubby farm girl (because apparently Gypsies have some sort of vendetta against the overweight). While one message board posting I read insisted the entire demonic hunt was a representation of Lohman’s discomfort with her past, you’d have to find some pretty incredible spandex to stretch that metaphor over the whole story. 

One of the best genre pictures about dieting--and America’s obsession with making it look cook, in particular--is Larry Cohen’s quirkily genius 1985 The Stuff. Pre-dating the Atkins Diet popularity explosion by a good 18 years, this satirical riot of a horror-comedy targets American consumerism with a product eerily packaged with a logo similar to Target. Once again, the real subject is corporate advertising and our inability to resist it, but it does a decent--and thoroughly entertaining--job of considering one sector of the weight issue on camera.

So does cinema need to pork up, or am I missing a few delicious treats that explore or exploit the rotundity of the modern age? 

The White Stuff

The Stuff does to corporate food products what Gremlins did to Cabbage Patch Kids. In the same way Joe Dante’s wicked little Christmas carol was a cautionary tale of the dangerous nature of "must have" product pushing --an unheeded warning, as seen by the Tickle-Me-Elmo mania ten years later--Larry Cohen’s 1985 horror comedy satirizes the evil of corporate greed and the impressionable consumers it destroys.


Quick Plot: When a bubbling white substance begins to ooze upwards from the earth, a passerby naturally dips his finger in it, takes a lick, and declares it delicious. Soon after, the stuff is dubbedThe Stuff and packaged in half pints, advertised with catchy 80s theme songs that highlight its zero calorie content, and devoured by supermarket shoppers across the country. The ice cream industry, facing bankruptcy, hires former FBI investigator (and Cohen compadre) Michael Moriarity (playing a man whose friends call him Mo, “Because no matter how much I get, I always want mo’’) to dig up the dirt on The Stuff. Meanwhile, a spunky boy with a dangerous craving for midnight snacks comes to despise the gooey dieter’s dream dish as his family--and, we assume, most of the world--becomes more and more addicted to its guilt-free sweetness. Toss in Garret Morris as a kung foo enhanced cookie maven, Danny Aiello as a retired FDA operator with dog training problems, and an unrestrained Paul Sorvino as a militia maniac with a hatred of communism and you have a bouncy, surprisingly intelligent, and ultimately over ambitious good time.

I won’t lie. If a dessert with no calories or fat and loads of sweet taste was put out on a grocery shelf, I’d be one of the first to try it (witness some bad times with the Olestra-poisoned Wow! Doritos). There. I've said it.

The Stuff is not a scary movie, nor is it meant to be. It’s probably impossible to make a frightfest out of a killer ice creamish substance akin to Carvel’s Thinny Thin or Yoplait’s Whips. Cohen doesn’t try. Instead, the auteur goes for sharp humor with a game cast, all of whom take their quirks and run with them. Like a lot of satires, The Stuff's lack of discipline feels fun for a while, but finally gets a little too messy for the film to completely work. Still, despite some fairly weak special effects and the 1980sness of the look, Cohen's work holds up today. We're all too eager to believe something that's too good to be true and those with the power to tell us are usually all too eager to rip us off in the process.


High Points
He may be a loopy right winged bird in real life, but Michael Moriority sure can liven up a role

Spotting playwright/actor Eric Bogosian as a put-upon supermarket clerk is a minor thrill


Any theme song must be catchy, and I’ve been singing “Can’t get enough...of The Stuff!” for two days straight

Low Points
While the entire last third goes a little haywire, the very last five minutes make no sense.
SPOILER: Why would Mo and little Jason keep any tubs knowing the danger its hazard? Yes, the corporate jerks deserve their punishment, but isn't force feeding them The Stuff recipe for an unwanted (by the characters) sequel?


Dog attacks aren’t scary when the only vicous thing seems to be saliva


Lessons Learned
Children of Long Island are the future resistance


In the 80s, models were allowed to eat

Work jumpsuits are one size fits all, which is convenient when you’re 6’4


Everybody has to eat shaving cream once in a while


Rent/Bury/Buy
Much like Moriority’s Mo, The Stuff is far smarter than you would think. Yes, the bottom half is rather nonsensical, but the rest is an imaginative little piece of 80s satire completely applicable to the age of Atkins Diets and Obama t-shirts (and note how The Stuff’s logo is eerily similar to Target's marketing art). The DVD's extras are disappointingly scant, but there is a director commentary sure to entertain. Unless you're frightened by the life matter inside the Staypuff Marshmallow Man, The Stuff won't give you nightmares. It will, on the other hand, make you laugh, think, and read ingredient labels with more care.