#70a Howard the Duck (Wes)

Howard The Duck

It happened again. Like Danes Without a Clue we failed to track down a single copy of our next movie, the Tamil action movie Sura. So we’ve had to go back to the back up list again and this time round our first of two movies is Howard the Duck (aka Howard: A New Breed of Hero). Back in 1973 Howard the Duck made his first appearance in the Marvel comic Adventure Into Fear #19 and soon was to star in his own series, which ran for 31 issues. Fast forward to 1986 and someone seemed to think it was a good idea to make a movie about the anthropomorphic duck. That person was George Lucas (although the directing was handed over to Willard Huyck, and Lucas just took on a producing role). Visions of terrible Star Wars prequels flashed before my eyes and my anger rose before even pressing play on this movie.

Howard (voiced by Ed Gale, played by six different actors) is a duck happily living his life on Duckworld when he is accidentally sucked into a portal which transports him to Earth. Landing in Cleveland he soon meets Beverly (Lea Thompson), the singer and guitarist in the band Cherry Bomb, after rescuing her from two local sleazebags. Beverly takes him to her scientist friend, Phil Blumburtt (Tim Robbins) who she hopes can return him home. However Blumburtt is only a lab assistant, and Howard resigns himself to being stuck on Earth and after working in a crappy spa eventually he becomes Cherry Bombs manager. Blumburtt and his colleagues Dr Walter Jenning (Jeffery Jones) and Dr Carter (Miles Chapin) soon turn up and say they may be able to send Howard back by reversing the experiment that brought him to Earth, but during the attempt Jenning gets possessed by an alien called The Dark Overlord of the Universe, who slowly takes over his body. Can Howard and Beverly defeat this evil? Will Howard get home? Are we going to witness an act of inter-species erotica between woman and duck? Is this really appropriate for a family movie?

  

Firstly I have to say how brilliant Howard actually looks. Nowadays he’d be just be added onscreen via the magic of CGI, but the fact that he’s a man in a duck suit makes him look so much better. Thankfully the costume designers made an effort to make Howard seem relatively lifelike, and his face at least looks great (his hands are just white gloves and his feet are basically orange shoes, but they still look ok, and don’t detract from the costume at all). They could have easily have gone down the same route that produced the monstrosities in The Garbage Pail Kids movie, but perhaps this is where a pre-CGI obsessed Lucas being involved really played off.

Unfortunately that’s where the brilliance ends. If you’ve ever read the original comics then you’d know that they were part of Marvels mis-judged “funny books”. Aimed more for the readers of MAD Magazine they featured parodies of movies and strangely the first comic book appearance of the band KISS. Plot wise there was never anything worth mentioning, and after a few years Howard disappeared as a character only for him to resurface every now and then, mainly as a cameo role. Essentially the idea for a character was good, but in a universe populated by some of the greatest superheroes ever created, people just weren’t that interested in him.

The film falls into the same problems. It tries to be funny, and it has some nice little touches (the posters on Howard’s walls of the Duckworld movies, whilst about as funny as a Wayan Brothers movie marathon, were nicely designed. I particularly liked Breeders of the Lost Stork and Splashdance), but ultimately it’s a one joke movie, that being an out of place hero, struggling to get by. Some movies have the power to carry this off, be it through great writing or just good acting (for example Blazing Saddles or The Three Amigos), but this movie has neither. After some tired, predictable attempts at humour, you just want Will Smith and Tommy Lee Jones to turn up and arrest Howard for being an illegal alien, but then again even the Men In Black probably wouldn’t want to go to Cleveland…

The plot itself really doesn’t work very well. Losing the parody aspect of the original comic and trying to play it straight really doesn’t help. The plotline featuring The Dark Overlord of the Universe just seems a little desperate, although it does allow Jeffery Jones to put in the best performance of the movie. Actually the acting in general isn't really that bad (at least compared to some of the movies we've watched so far), which is quite an achievement for a script that seems to have been written quickly by somebody who's never heard any real people speaking, or witnessed anybody doing anything ever.

This is a very eighties movie in both it’s feel and look. After meeting Howard, Beverly says that she “must obviously be in some terrible nightmare”. I’m not sure if she’s alluding to the film itself or her crimped hair, which seems to sum up a decade of bad fashion choices better than shoulder pads, scrunchies, neon everything and sweaters tied around your neck ever could. In fact the only way this movie could be more eighties is if Beverley’s band had a saxophone player in it.

That make me sound like I hate the eighties (and its movies), and that’s wrong. I grew up in the eighties and loved it. But I can look back on it with both nostalgia and incomprehension. Sure it was an amazing time to be a kid, but we really got the short end of the stick when it came to fashion. As for movies, many of my favourite films are from the era (Back to the Future, The Goonies, Monster Squad, The Breakfast Club etc.), but unfortunately the advent of home video also seemed to encourage studios to make so many more awful movies knowing that they could always send them straight to video if it was necessary.

Originally this was supposed to be an animated movie, which I feel would have worked so much better. Whilst it’s not the worst movie I’ve seen on this list, this is a very confused movie. It’s neither an adult comedy, nor is it very family friendly (there’s duck boobs and suggested inter-species sex for a start). It just floats aimlessly between the two and fails on both levels. I wouldn’t say to avoid it totally, but it’s not worth seeking out either. I just hope that Marvel decide to include Howard in on of their future movies so this isn’t his only cinematic legacy. He deserves better than this.