Welcome to an exciting year-long project here at The Nerdy. 1982 was an exciting year for films giving us a lot of films that would go on to be beloved favorites and cult classics. It was also the start to a major shift in cultural and societal norms, and some of those still reverberate to this day.
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We’re going to pick and choose which movies we hit, but right now the list stands at nearly four dozen.
Yes, we’re insane, but 1982 was that great of a year for film.
The articles will come out – in most cases – on the same day the films hit theaters in 1982 so that it is their true 40th anniversary. All films are also watched again for the purposes of these reviews and are not being done from memory. In some cases, it truly will be the first time we’ve seen them.
This time around, it’s October 29, 1982, and we’re off to see Q: The Winged Serpent!
Quick side note: Since we launched this series this year, we’ve discovered that Vintage Video Podcast is doing the exact same project with two differences: First, it’s audio (naturally), and second, they are doing every major film. We’ve listened to numerous episodes and it’s fun checking off their thoughts against my own. Check them out over at Vintage Video Podcast.
Q: The Winged Serpent
I really should hate Q: The Winged Serpent. Extremely campy. Some poor acting choices. A completely non-sensical running plot point of no one seeing this giant winged monster approaching them. And no one knows where it goes to nest? (The top of the Chrysler Building. You know, only one of the most photographed buildings in New York City.)
But then we get to Jimmy Quinn (Michael Moriarty), a two-bit gangster wanna-be stumbling on Q and using it as his pet to eat other gangsters and try to blackmail the city, and I thought, “I’m all in now.”
Q operates on a couple of levels as a throwback to the horror movies of yesteryear, a commentary on city politics of the early 1980s, and even some commentary on policing.
There’s a sub-plot of this monster being the Aztec god Quetzalcoatl, and some people trying to summon it back to life. It’s truly inconsequential to the outcome of the film and it would have been just as fun if it was some random monster.
Normally I hate overly self-aware ‘horror’ films, but everything about Q works. It never goes too far over the line and ends up being a very fun film that goes down pretty easy.
1982 Movie Reviews will return on Nov. 5 with The Man from Snowy River and Piranha II: The Spawning!
