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HOWARD THE DUCK (1986)
This - cute girl - cool monster = total ass Unavailable on video for quite some time now, it's probably been a while since you've seen Howard The Duck (if at all) and the charitable blurriness of memory might have tempted you to label this famed failure with a term like "misguided" or even "quixotic". After all, a bad movie about a talking duck from another world helping out an aspiring 80's rocker-girl and battling a giant demon has to be made with more attention to quality, however thwarted, than a bad movie about...most other subjects, right? That's pretty much how I remembered it a few days ago. Today, I can confidently say that Howard The Duck is one of the most relentlessly, obsessively wrongheaded movies ever made, steered at top speed away from quality at almost every turn, stupefyingly awful in its mishmash of only the most badly conceived and executed genre staples, and it might actually have been of note as a bizarro artefact of American culture had it been a success, which it sure as shit wasn't. Based on a comic book which was, from what I've been told, fairly well-regarded at the time, Howard The Duck is attemptedly a comedy and as such has two big problems from which it never recovers for even one laugh, one chuckle, one smile, one moment of relief from the wince most viewers were still wearing long after the movie was over. These two problems are the two schools of comedy present in the movie - bad duck puns, and people screaming. There are exceptions, like the time a villain sets a kitchen on fire and says...guess what. Guess which eleven words he says after setting the kitchen on fire. Example of the first problem: the movie opens up on Duckworld, a two-mooned planet run by ducks. We see the apartment of the duck at the center of the movie, and one of the first things we see is a movie poster for something starring "Mae Nest" and "W. C. Fowls", and the camera lingers there for a looooong time to make absolutely damn sure we get the joke. We see this again many times throughout the movie, in audio form too ("No more Mr. Nice Duck!" "I am a master of quack-fu!"). As for the second one...it's basically people screaming in (hilarious! No, not really) terror during scenes where the car careens out of control, the golf cart careens out of control, the semi careens out of control, the plane careens out of control (this scene went on for, what, a half hour?), or people and/or ducks are carried along by mobs. "Whooooaaaaa!" "Stop!" "Slow down!" Seriously, these are the funny lines. I get ahead of myself. Howard is sitting in his Duckworld apartment when he's sucked out of the building through several walls (past a she-duck with...boobs?), through a hole in the sky, across the cosmos, into a hole in Earth's sky, and down into a Cleveland alley where he has almost as shitty a time as the audience, getting chased around by bouncers, biker girls, and whatever the 80's had that was halfway between punkers and new-wavers. It's sort-of explained how this happens, but I don't get why the big laser locked onto him in particular and sucked just him up, through such a series of obstacles, none of which were sucked up with him. Played by something like eight midgets, the duck suit itself isn't that bad; yes, he looks like a theme park mascot, but he also has a face that's expressive enough that if we enjoyed the dialogue and voice performance (i.e. one that doesn't amount to sarcastic duck puns served up by Chip Zien), we'd probably be willing to accept him as a living creature. But what about the characters in the movie, how do they see him? After all, characters never notice when they're observing bad special effects. Upon first seeing Howard, they mistake him for a kid in a costume and throw him out of the bar, then they scream and run, then nobody notices, then they scream again, then he gets admitted into that same bar and even gets served a drink, then someone attempts to elicit demonstrations of his superpowers, then he's laughed at and strip-searched, and somebody else assumes he's a kid in a costume. He does not, to me, look alive - and it seems like at least half the characters in this movie share that opinion. Lea Thompson plays the rocker-girl who Howard befriends. I've heard more than once that Tori Amos tried out for this role, which strikes me as kind of funny because at the time she was squeezing the same kind of 80's-pop cack out of her system that Thompson's band is playing (by Thomas Dolby!). Toriphiles everywhere must breathe thanks every night before going to bed that was spared this one. That being said, Thompson looks great (she and her underwear just light up the screen) and has a sweet appeal; she's one of the movie's only bright spots, even if her relationship with Howard is contrived and occasionally reeks of bestiality. Elsewhere is seen Tim Robbins' most embarrassing role ever (it's like he's in an awful Saturday Night Live skit...note the scene where he first meets the duck), Howard playing the keyboard and shaking his tail, and Howard playing a guitar solo and doing...guess which Chuck Berry move. Howard The Duck would easily, EASILY qualify for a place of (dis)honor on The Pile were it not for two things. Thompson is the first. The second is the Dark Overlord Of The Universe, a stop-motion monster which totally kicks ass, if only for about five minutes at the end of the movie (and inevitably, only to lose a fight to a duck on a golf cart). Actually the effects on the Dark Overlord are not as good as I remember them, but the design is bitchin'. He needs his own movie, or at least a villain role in a better one. Lucasfilm's first (and not last) big giant flop, this was directed by Willard Huyck and written by Huyck and Gloria Katz, who after this are best known for making the other big giant flop and subsequently disappearing. How did this happen? At what points from this movie's pitch through post-production did any of this seem like a good idea? Maybe there was a time when Howard really was a witty, slightly jaded man of action and romance. Maybe there was a time when the plot amounted to more than a handful of Carrot Top-esque prop gags strung together by "everybody scream!" setpieces. If there ever was, it all got hammered out beyond recognition into this final product that seems calculated to please everybody, and in practice pleased scarcely anyone. Aside from the obvious issue of the movie being so, so bad, Howard The Duck attracted some negative attention for getting a PG rating in spite of its occasionally bawdy sight gags (Howard gets a job in a bathhouse; a condom is found in his wallet). Better than no attention at all, I guess. The bathhouse bit might've been a little funnier if it were a gay bathhouse, and it might even have gotten the movie a PG-13. (c) Brian J. Wright 2005 BACK TO THE H's BACK TO THE MAIN PAGE |