Chicanonautica: Quetzalcoatl Attacks

by Ernest Hogan

I was recovering between cataract surgeries, going through movies on my YouTube list. There was Q: The Winged Serpent (1982). Beloved by some -- someone once compared it to my novel Smoking Mirror Blues. I had heard that it gets everything about Aztec culture and mythology wrong. 

On the other hand, it was written and directed by Larry Cohen, a master of schlocky movies.  I also love schlocky movies and the John Waters meme goes: “Get more out of life. See a fucked up movie.” 

And it turns out, it ain’t that bad.

Yeah, Cohen spent no time researching the Aztecs and Quetzalcoatl—he doesn’t know Aztec from Maya, from Huastec from Olmec from Kwakiutl. At one point the plot about a winged serpent being worshiped as a god by the Aztecs and used by a killer is explained in an actual museum using Pacific Northwest First Nations artifacts as a backdrop.

 

That sort of thing makes me grumble, but this ain’t no big deal high culture Academy Awards statement of Hollywood’s collective self-consciousness, it’s a low budget horror flick cooked up to wrangle quick cash from the Great American Public. They don’t know about PreColumbian civilizations, and don’t care. And those of us who do care are a, if you pardon the expression, “minority.”

Maybe someday my sense of humor will become so warped that I’ll find that sort of thing funny.

As it is, Q delivers the goods of the classic monster movie formula. There’s a monster flying around NYC, swooping down between the skyscrapers, killing people. The pre-digital special effects are charming, but we don’t see a lot of them, because they were expensive, so we get a lot of gritty cops and robber action on crowded Big Apple streets. 

The cops are David Carradine, who starred in the original Kung Fu TV show, and Richard Roundtree, the first blaxploitation hero in the Shaft movies. In keeping with the genre’s traditions, the black guy is killed, and the white guy gets the girl. 

There is one brown character. They must have cleared the Puerto Ricans off the streets for the filming. He’s the bad guy sacrificing New Yorkers and gets less screen time than the monster and comes off more like a raging psychopath than a religious/political fanatic. His motivations are glossed over.

 

Old school monster movie stuff.

I was reminded of another movie, 1946’s The Flying Serpent. I wouldn’t be surprised if Larry Cohen was “inspired” by it.  In this Producers Releasing Corporation, PRC for short, AKA Poverty Row production, second string horror star, George Zucco, plays a mad scientist who sends a serpentine feathered creature that looks like a cheap souvenir from a border tourist trap to kill people. The twist is he’s an archaeologist, and his victims are getting in the way of proving his theory that the Aztec came from New Mexico. Yes, the Aztlán theory!

The story features Azteca, New Mexico. Matte paintings show ruins the villain thinks prove his theory. There is no such town. There is an Aztec, NM, that does have ruins, but they don’t seem to be Aztec. There are places all over the Southwest/Aztlán named after the Aztecs and Montezuma, because the folks doing the naming couldn’t imagine the local tribes building them.

 

To give the mad archaeologist credit, a people named the Sinagua by the Spanish left Arizona after the eruption of Sunset Crater in Arizona about a thousand years ago. A couple of centuries later–after all they were on foot–the Nahua/Mexica/Aztecs arrived in the Valley of Mexico. I wonder if they were the same people . . .

Also, it’s been a few decades, so maybe there should be a 21st century version of this story. A Chicano archaeologist with Aztlán nationalist sympathies finds a winged serpent and offers its services to the cause. Of course, there will Latinx law enforcement agents to save the day. 

Or maybe the archaeologist could be the hero . . .

Ernest Hogan is a Chicano science fiction writer who dabbles in guerrilla archaeology/anthropology.