Howard the Duck

On Thursday my family watched that towering cinematic masterpiece, the George Lucas-produced Howard the Duck (1986). Why has it taken me three days to get around to reviewing it (besides my general laziness)? I'm glad you asked...



Any more questions?

I've reviewed many terrible movies for this blog before, and after sitting through the Billy Jack films and Batman and Robin you would think there's nowhere for me to go but up. However, the Universe always finds a way to prove me wrong, and it seems every month or so I'm able to find a new standard of bad by which to judge movies.

Howard (voice of Chip Zien, played by innumerable little people) is a duck living on a duck planet where ducks are like people (get it?). Then he's blasted across time and space to a truly hellish new world - Cleveland, Ohio. He meets up with scatter-brained, friz-haired rocker Beverly (Lea Thompson), who seems to fall for Howard (no kidding unfortunately) and is determined to send him back to his home planet, enlisting her impossibly geeky, chillingly Eddie Deezen-esque lab assistant friend (Tim Robbins) to "help". Things grow more complicated when scientist Dr. Jenning (Jeffrey Jones) becomes possessed by an alien calling itself the Dark Overlord, who has plans to take over the world (MWAHAHAHAHA!). Ultimately, Howard is forced to decide whether he should go back to his home planet or save the Earth - and the audience is left with an even bigger question: Why should we care?

There's always something particularly obnoxious about utterly awful, big-budget stink bombs. Low-budget flicks like Ed Wood films or direct-to-video slasher sequels can be excused to an extent by their format and budget. It's certainly fun to pick on something like Bride of the Monster, but in a sense it's like kicking a crippled kid who's fallen out of a wheelchair. Stuff like Howard and the aforementioned Batman flick is a whole other level of bad. There's no excuse of a miniscule budget or lack of access to good actors and crew or even lack of ideas; the fact that it's failure wrought on a huge scale makes it even more obnoxious, and the idea that a major studio and hugely successful producer thought this material was filmable in the first place. The only response is a big, incredulous, Troy Steele-inspired What.

It's not a question of talent either. I'm not the biggest Star Wars or Indiana Jones fan in the world, but George Lucas showed in those films he knows (or knew) how to make entertaining movies. The film was written by Gloria Katz and directed by William Huyck, who worked on Lucas's pretty good American Graffiti. So what the hell convinced George Lucas that making a movie about a wiseass talking alien duck was a good idea? Did he happen to read the comic book while high and thought it would be a bitching film? Or was he just walking through the park one day, saw a duck, and got an idea for a film? (This would also explain how Willow came to be - he was walking through Hollywood and ran into Warwick Davis.) Either way, this movie is, if nothing, ample evidence that there is a danger inherent in a studio giving a successful director or producer carte blanche. Because that day they have an inexplicable brain fart or do drugs can end up sinking $100 million of your studio's money into a ridiculous project doomed to failure.

It's really hard to see how this film is meant to appeal to anyone. Howard is an obnoxious, anthropomorphic duck who spouts off lame puns ("No more Mr. Nice Duck!") that not even a four year old would find amusing, along with a lot of painfully obvious fish (duck?) out of water humor that was old in the Three Stooges' era. His frequent swearing and sexual innuendos would (theoretically at least) rule out a younger audience, but it's doubtful that a mean, cranky midget in a duck costume would appeal to any adults either. The action scenes are just plain pathetic, lacking in inventiveness, tension, suspense or quality. The movie really stops cold, however, when Beverly mock-seduces Howard. It's surely one of the most repulsive, disgusting scenes in film history; the fact that it's meant as humorous only makes it that much more obnoxious and disgusting. Any chance of audience enjoyment goes out the door with that scene - though the film nearly tops it with a climactic rock number almost as bad as the end of Leprechaun in the Hood.

I don't see much point in analyzing the film's technical aspects. The direction is perfectly adequate given the atrocious material. The special effects (particularly the stop-motion on the Dark Overlord) are done reasonably well, but as the saying goes, one is upset to find it done at all. Lea Thompson seems completely unable to account for her presence in the film, Jeffrey Jones (Amadeus) chews scenery with reckless abandon, and Tim Robbins gives a singularly annoying performance, almost on the level of the theater douchebag in Silent Night Deadly Night 2.

In the end, Howard the Duck is just a huge question mark of a movie. There's no reason at all for it to exist, least of all as a mega-budget would-be blockbuster. I can't even think of much fun to poke at it; it's just bad. Stay away, or if you must watch it, let the film speak for itself.

Rating: Goose egg out of 10