offered $18,000 fee. The overall production budget was over $1.1 million. The film's special effects for the flying serpent were done using stop-motion animation by Randall William Cook and David Allen. According to writer-director Larry Cohen, Michael Moriarty's character Jimmy Quinn was not a failed piano player in the script, but when Cohen discovered Moriarty wrote and played music, he used it: "I wrote the extra scene where he auditions and fails to get the job. After that we just kept building on that". Release The film was given a limited release theatrically in the United States by United Film Distribution Company beginning in New York City on October 8, 1982, the same date Twentieth Century-Fox would release I, The Jury. Q would gross approximately $255,000 at the box office. Critical response On the review aggregator website Rotten Tomatoes, Q – The Winged Serpent holds a 72% approval rating based on 29 reviews, with an average rating of 6.30/10. The consensus reads: "Q'''s campy charms may be lost on audiences who want their monsters frightening, but a game cast and lovingly retrograde visual effects give this kaiju romp some majesty." Roger Ebert gave the film two-and-a-half out of four stars in his original review, commending Moriarty's performance. Ebert relates the anecdote that, when movie reviewer Rex Reed met Q – The Winged Serpents producer, Samuel Z. Arkoff, Reed told him: "What a surprise! All that dreck—and right in the middle of it, a great Method performance by Michael Moriarty!", while Arkoff replied: "The dreck was my idea." Colin Greenland reviewed Q – The Winged Serpent for Imagine magazine, and stated that "It is not often that a film is enjoyable as a monster movie, a character study and a satire, but Q – The Winged Serpent scores on every one. As well as taking a few swipes at the police, the mass media, and big city politics, Larry Cohen cannot resist poking fun at the innumerable monsters that have gone chomping and stomping among the skyscrapers over the years." Gene Siskel awarded the film three out of four stars. Film critics and journalists James Marriott and Kim Newman featured Q on their 2006 book The Definitive Guide to the Cinema of Fear. Although they criticized the film's pacing as moving "too fast", they felt that overall was entertaining. In his retrospective review, Chuck Bowen of Slant Magazine gave The Winged