Cohen's scripts are normally a little smarter, a little weirder than they would ever need to be. There's also usually a satiric edge and a whole lot of his personality showing through. I saw this movie and a bunch of other Cohen films when I was a kid and I've always had a soft spot for them, even though I thought they were a bit cheesy. Screw that. They're awesome, and this one might be my favorite.
In any case: there's a monster haunting the New York skyline, taking and killing victims from high rises. You don't get a clear view of it for a while - just point of view shots (there's a lot of great aerial photography in this movie): a flash of beak, a quick shot of a giant chicken leg snatching someone, some great (very fake-looking) scenes where the beast's animated shadow falls on buildings or a bridge. The monster duly makes a full appearance for the climax, and it's a beaut - a winged, beaked, claymation brontosaur, making diving runs at the Chrysler tower while a ton of policemen fire from within (with tracer fire, no less!). It's all great.
Until that point the film goes mostly monsterless. It spends some time on the police investigation - David Carradine as a detective going around and figuring out that the monster is actually the ancient god Quetzalcoatl, and that a separate series of grisly murders might somehow be related. And that'd be enough for a normal movie to chew on, but here most of the runtime actually follows a petty criminal (Michael Moriarty) around until he accidentally stumbles onto the monster movie plot.
Moriarty is the heart and soul of the film, a fully fleshed-out oddball for an oddity of a movie. He's constantly surprising, and his actions seem to hijack the script for a while. He starts out agreeing to be the wheelman for a jewelry store robbery, botches a piano playing audition because he scats while he plays, then botches the robbery when he loses the loot while trying to escape on foot. He's an ex-junkie with loose morals and a huge chip on his shoulder, and the script doesn't shy away from making him a scumbag ('At least you're not hitting me any more,' his girlfriend says at one point.)
His douchebaggery comes to the forefront when he realizes he can leverage some knowledge to blackmail the whole city. You see, while he was running away from the scene of the crime, he stumbled upon the Winged Serpent's nest high up on the crown of the Chrysler Building. So when he's arrested for the robbery, he realizes he can use that information as a get out of jail card, and maybe extort some money on the side.
Moriarty's character making his demands to a room full of incredulous city officials makes for a great scene (Richard Roundtree, who plays one of the detectives, is taken out of the room before he can bash his face in.) It's also nothing like that you'd ever expect from a movie like this coming in, which is the beauty of the Larry Cohen filmography. Anyhow, once there's an agreement then the movie is free to go into full carnage mode, with the previously mentioned attack on the flying monster.
It's not a perfect movie, but it's imperfect by design. It has a nervous, restless energy that I find irresistible. It's a bit rough, overstuffed and the pace is irregular as hell, but the jokes - all of them delivered deadpan - are so good. I especially like when a cop on a stakeout poses as a mime/juggler, with makeup, a hat for donations and everything; when they need to run and get into a car to chase a subject, he pointedly grabs the hat. "How much did you make?" - the other cop asks - "Not much... the bird must be bad for business."
But that's just one in so many memorable exchanges. Moriarty has tons of them, and so does Carradine. So many counts of cool weirdness; As with so many of the better B-movie out there, the filler here is as good as the mayhem.
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