Q (also known as The Winged Serpent and as Q – The Winged Serpent) is a 1982 horror film written and directed by Larry Cohen and starring Michael Moriarty, Candy Clark, David Carradine, and Richard Roundtree.
The film’s premise is that the Aztec god Quetzalcoatl, the “winged serpent”, has been resurrected by a cult in modern New York City and is flying about, snatching people off the skyscrapers. Carradine and Roundtree are police detectives investigating the bloody, entrail-strewn (and strangely mostly-rooftop-set) path of disappearance, death, and dismemberment about whose obvious — but staggeringly aberrant — cause the NYPD, the Mayor’s Office, and the Office of the Medical Examiner, are in complete and angry denial. Meanwhile a reluctant getaway driver for an ice crew/blues piano player(Moriarty (the actor is also a Blues composer, and is actually playing his own compositions as one of his character choices) hotfooting it away from the uniformed cops after a jewel heist gone bad, happens upon the deity’s lair and tries to extort a fat wad of cash in small bills from the city’s coffers in exchange for the whereabouts of the wayward Winged God’s feathered-dragon-form’s nest and home.