I didn’t have many comics when I was kid, and I attribute that largely to the years when my Baptist upbringing was at its most conservative.  Desperate for entertainment, I was allowed Jack Chick’s The Crusaders series, which is as lousy and batshit as anybody would imagine it is.  Curiously, I also had issues of Howard the Duck, which surprises me in retrospect.  Then again, the humor is about at the level of Mad Magazine (several issues of which, inexplicably, I did have), so I guess precedence had been established.

I’m certain I saw 1986’s theatrical adaptation of the Marvel comic at the time, though I have no recollections of doing so.  Given I can vividly remember not being able to stop laughing at a particular scene of Clue around the same time, there must not have been anything worth remembering.  Still, it seems odd I at least do not recall being disappointed by it, as this is one of the most notorious flops in cinema history.

The first words on the screen are “George Lucas presents”, which should give the viewer pause, as his legacy beyond the original Star Wars trilogy and the Indiana Jones series is extremely spotty.  And the producer and director are none other than Gloria Katz and Willard Huyck, the authors of the screenplay for American Graffiti, Lucas’s second feature.  The couple also wrote and directed Messiah of Evil, and it is hard to imagine two movies with less in common than that and Howard.  Given that, this seems like an odd creative team for this picture, but Lucas is always loyal to his friends, though there is such a thing as being loyal to a fault.

And this material would be the kind of gift one should consider declining.  The picture opens on a parallel Earth where, as Tim Robinson’s scientist later explains, the most highly evolved lifeform can trace its ancestry back to ducks instead of simians.  But that is strange on its own, as humans are mammals that evolved from another mammal, but Howard’s kind are anthropomorphic ducks who evolved from birds.  In an action scene late in the runtime, the titular man-fowl defend his inability to control an airplane by saying, “If God had wanted us to fly, he wouldn’t have taken away our wings.”  This only acknowledges the weirdness of wings evolving into human-like arms over the eons. 

An issue of Playduck, where we see the centerfold’s exposed mammaries only further muddies this, and poses all manner of uncomfortable musings, such as whether the women of his kind go through live birth or whether they lay eggs.  Howard’s reaction to fried eggs in one scene suggests the latter, and yet breasts are associated with mammals (hence, again, “mammaries”).  And we also see the exposed breasts of another duck-woman as she’s bathing, to ensure the audience is as uncomfortable as possible.

It is hard to believe this is PG, given those moments, in addition to some strong innuendo.  When he is accidentally transported across space to our Earth, he is soon given a job at a massage parlor that is clearly a brothel.  Then there’s the condom Lea Thompson finds in his wallet (my wife: “I don’t know why, but I’m glad that wasn’t really large”).  Never mind the extremely uncomfortable scene where she and Howard are on the verge of committing bestiality together.  Oh, how I wish I was making up any of this.

Speaking of “making it up”, the plot is such a shambles that I suspect the filmmakers largely slapped this together almost at random.  There are touches of almost every popular genre of the 80’s, and every one of those aspects is ineptly incorporated into this mess.  There are scientists of varying degrees of madness and nerdiness.  There are action sequences where things crashing into each other is supposed to be funny in and of itself.  There is a character possessed by a being from another dimension, and that person even has a purple glow around them and can shoot energy beams from their eyes, providing another example of how Ghostbusters was not the best influence on cinema.

Jeffrey Jones is the scientist this happens to, and he was also the person who accidentally beamed Howard to our planet.  The actor will gradually go through a series of gross transformations as he prepares to transport his fellow inter-dimensional demons to take over Earth.  His slow change from normal and likeable guy to a monster seems an apt metaphor for how far the actor fell out of the public’s good graces following his sex offender conviction.

Howard’s arrival on Earth occurs in an alleyway in Cleveland, where he is harassed by a gang of the kind from 80’s films that look like their asses could be kicked by a litter of kittens.  This group hangs out at a bar where the house band plays behind a protective screen of chain-link fencing, as if they are early 90’s Ministry.  And yet, this band plays music tame in comparison to even early 80’s Ministry.

This is Thompson’s band and she and Howard’s meet-cute are when he saves her from being raped by two thugs in an alley.  So, that.  And she takes him to her ridiculously spacious apartment and band rehearsal space she’s ashamed of for reasons I’m not sure she ever gives.  Let’s see here…working appliances and shower, enough space in all dimensions to house a small prop plane…yep, this is the delusional mindset of those working in cinema and TV of the time, that they think somebody of very limited means could afford in live in such a place. If the same screenwriters are still employed in that capacity today, they probably think today’s young adults can afford to go to college and then maybe buy a little place of their own.

Anywho, Howard is desperate to return to his home world, so Thompson approaches Robbins, who knows Jones and all about the failed experiment which happened at his lab and blah blah blah.  This isn’t a plot so much as a framework upon which the various action and allegedly comic set pieces can be hung.

That “humor” consists almost entirely of lazy substitutions of popular culture with what would be the duck equivalent.  On Howard’s planet, he subscribes to Rolling Egg and his apartment is decorated with posters of Breeders of the Lost Stork and “Mae Nest” and “W..C. Fowls” in My Little Chickadee.  But why would everything be punny takes on Earth-based publications and entertainment of which they would have no knowledge?  And his planet is egg-shaped, which challenges all precepts of cosmology.  Once he’s on Earth, it is revealed his wallet includes his MallardCard and Bloomingducks charge cards.  He defends Thompson using “Quack Fu” when it isn’t like we call the equivalent martial art “Talk Fu”.

Another aspect of the production which kept me at arm’s length is the lack of consistency between how people react to Howard.  Some adults are rightly terrified but others treat him like he’s just another human being, and a rather unremarkable one.  Then there’s Thompson, who warms up to him a little too quickly and almost too strongly in that scene I mentioned earlier.  I’m surprised the film didn’t have a line like, “Once you go quack, you never go back”, because that isn’t outside the bounds of what it allows.

And now to struggle to come up with some positive things to say about the film.  I will concede the animatronic head on the Howard costume is surprisingly expressive for the time, yet it is also creepy in the same way the eyes were in early CGI-modeled humans.  The big bad which is revealed in the final step of Jones’s metamorphosis is a genuinely creepy thing straight out of Lovecraft, and rendered in nearly flawless stop-motion.  The first song performed by Thompson’s band is surprisingly good, and it is actually her singing on the tracks.  Alas, every successive track is worse than the last until we arrive at a tune in the closing credits that surely had people exiting theaters even faster than usual.  Even worse, it is a highly infectious earworm.

When Howard the Duck isn’t crashing cars into each other, making the audience squirm or relying on lazy duck-based puns, it is mired in absurdities.  The movie spends waaay too much time in a restaurant that bills itself as being of that hitherto unknown type of cuisine that is “cajun sushi”.  That is the kind of thing that isn’t funny even once, then they run the unfunny concept deep into the ground.  At one point in the scene, everybody in the diner except Thompson and Jones are ready to cook and eat Howard, somebody they have been arguing with, and chasing around the establishment, the whole time before that.  So, we have people who somehow perceive Howard as both a person and an edible duck.  At least, unlike Thompson, they weren’t going to fuck him.

Dir: Willard Huyck

Starring Lea Thompson, Jeffrey Jones, Tim Robbins

Watched on bog-standard blu-ray