Never Seen It #263: Howard the Duck

A quote from a movie in an alternate universe where the blog is about ducks and is run by a duck and there is a duck watching 400 movies he's never seen before and one of them is a shitty movie called Howard the Human.

Howard the Duck

1986

Willard Huyck

The magnetic pull has forced this blog out of its own universe and into ours. Find Group F in the comments to talk about it some more.

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Sunny

What a weird, weird movie. I am reminded of the George Lucas quote anytime something from Lucasfilm/arts comes past my desk. I'm sure this had little to do with him but the executive producer credit, but then again I could be wrong.

So what the hell was that? I was unaware of the Marvel property Howard the Duck, which maybe is required to get the true depth of this movie. Ex ante, I didn't expect it to be a person in a duck-suit playing the duck, a harkening back to the era it was made. The fact there is minimal CGI in this movie, a movie that would be all CGI if god-forbid it was remade today, was refreshing. Refreshing like how water is refreshing after you've had a week of nothing but Diet Coke. I also appreciate that Cherry Bomb is a band-for-the-movie and not, like, some producer's kid's outfit (e.g., M. Night). I sort of enjoy Tim Robbins' acting, sometimes, and his weird goofy face works next to the duck's face.

Simultaneously, it's unclear what exactly the plot is, what Tim Robbins' character is all about, or why a movie about an andromorphic duck is so sexually suggestive. This isn't billed as a kids' movie, right? Is it an adults' movie? It's not so-bad-it's-good, it's just sort-of-bad. And bizarre throughout pacing, character, and setting, though maybe it should have leaned more into bizarre. It also could have been ~20 minutes shorter, but keeping scenes like the lawnmower-glider chase were essential to Howard's character development. I wonder if I'll ever think or talk about this movie again after tomorrow.

2/5 pukes

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Catherine

I'd like to begin with an apology—or a duck-ology as our titular character would probably say. An a-duck-ogy. Apolo-duck. I should've been a screenwriter. 

Howard the Duck was my suggestion, and I'll forever carry the guilt of robbing you of 111 minutes of your lives. It was July! I was young and carefree back then. Not like now. Not anymore.

In my defense, all I knew was this was one of the greatest flops in all of cinema and that seemed fun. There was a macabre excitement luring me toward this legendary dud, and I couldn't resist the temptation.

Sadly, Howard wasn't at all what I was expecting. I was expecting a flimsy plot and some wacky hijinks, but I was not expecting DUCK TITS. Maybe in the third act, sure, but not five minutes in. I was so unprepared. Young and carefree, remember?

Now that we've gotten that out of the way, I think the biggest disappointment for me was how oddly boring this movie is in spite of the occasional anthropomorphized bird breasts. It's a directionless hodgepodge of duck puns taking mad swings between family-friendly and hacky adult raunch that couldn't decide what it is and doesn't seem to care. Really brazen moves coming from a group of people playing fast and loose with their careers.

I do think Jeffrey Jones does a surprisingly good job acting in such an insanely dumb role DO NOT GOOGLE HIM I'm trying to find a positive spin here!

If I can find an actual positive, I'm glad that Frank can now sleep soundly knowing that Donald still holds the crown as the horniest-for-humans duck after Howard showed restraint in that bedroom scene with Lea Thompson. A very normal scene that certainly did not make me nervous for my precarious psyche.

After watching, I stumbled across an interview where Lea Thompson addresses the career hit she took after making Howard the Duck. She remarked that if it weren't for this film, she never would've made her next one where she met and fell in love with her husband. His name is Howard.

1 out of 5 Quack Fu moves

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Kait

I enjoyed this movie from start to finish. Truly. I laughed out loud at some of the one-liners, loved the '80s fashion, the Cherry Bomb all-women pop-rock band playing behind that chain link fence (I want to be there!), the transformation of Dr. Jenning into a dark alien overlord, the fact it's set in Cleveland, Ohio, the very Purple Rain-esque ending concert scene where Howard and Beverly shred on the guitar... 

It's one of those films that you delight in the fact that it totally flopped when released in 1986. Of COURSE this is a bad movie. What did you expect when reading the premise: beer-drinking, crass humanoid alien duck saves Earth from other aliens, bad ones.

I do not have a cohesive thesis about this film. So, let's take a moment to point out some scenes/dialogue that stood out to me, in no particular order, and other musings:

• Dr. Jenning walked so that cockroach alien guy from Men in Black could run. 
• Lol to when Tim Robbins' character called the cops fascists before he slid out the open front window.
• How old is Howard? 
• This exchange killed me: Beverly is oddly falling in love with a talking, alien duck and says to Jenning at the diner (who is now the dark alien overlord) "he's my favorite duck" and Jenning responds with "you hardly know him." That's hilarious. And TRUE. 
• How about the range of human reactions to this alien duck?! Beverly: in love. People at the diner: ready to kill and eat him. Kids outside the science lab: gawking/fascinated. Others: scared, angry, exploitative. I'm not sure the film was going for this, but here's a look at the ways in which we respond to those who are different from us. Topical! 
• I love when movies show condoms, especially ones about to be used, because safe sex is important. Howard carries one in his wallet! It was kind of the butt of a joke, but I'm still glad it was there. 
• Beverly's apartment was dope. 
• Did we all catch when the cops were trying to find a crime to charge Howard with and chose "illegal alien." Boy, that (and other interactions with the cops that they jokingly deemed police brutality but actually were) is again pretttyyyyy topical! 
• That scene where Jenning needs more power and his alien tentacle comes out of his mouth and plugs into like an old lighter outlet in that semi? Incredible. All of his charged up scenes were such fun to watch.
• I loved the few moments where Howard acted like an actual duck. Like quacked instead of talked. I wish there was more of that.
• I did not love the repetitive harassment of Beverly—in alleys, by her manager, at the diner... Jesus Christ, leave this woman alone. 
• And I know I already mentioned this, but the ending musical number was so, so good. 

I give it 4/5 pukes. What fun. 

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Joe

What the fuck, man.

I'm writing this before I read anything about this film on the internet. I am assuming that people hate this film, but I want to get some thoughts down before I go back and check. I'll most likely do that mid-blog-post.

My initial reaction was thinking about the CLASSIC 1993 cinematic masterpiece Super Mario Bros. I was thinking about it at first because the aesthetics seemed, not the same, but similar. Super Mario Bros. was steampunk, and Howard the Duck is at times steampunk-adjacent, e.g. when Cherry Bomb is playing their sets in the industrial setting, inside a sort of cage. That felt similar. But THEN Richard Edson shows up, Spike fucking Koopa himself, a.k.a. the original drummer of Sonic Youth, he's there in the steampunk bar in Howard the Duck too. NOT A COINCIDENCE.

I guess mostly I was just thinking about how nostalgia can get you to forgive some artless shit. I was admitting—and I'm ashamed to say it, but I'll be brave—that maybe I wouldn't like Super Mario Bros. [1993] if I hadn't seen it a bunch of times in my youth. I was supposing that perhaps there were children out there who felt the same way about Howard the Duck, like maybe some kid or some kids watched Howard the Duck fifty times in 1987 on VHS and now when they see it all they feel is the warm blanket of nostalgia wrapping them up in a cocoon.

WAIT A MINUTE is that a DUCK CONDOM?! Never mind. There is a duck condom, there are duck titties, there is the very strong possibility that Lea Thompson is going to have full-blown p-i-v sex with a duck. Scratch everything I said about this shit so far. If you let your kid watch Howard the Duck fifty times in the late '80s, then you were a terrible parent. (Kidding, mostly, because I'm not in the business of judging parents. I let my kids watch National Lampoon's Christmas Vacation ever year, and occasionally forget to fast-forward through the pool scene and the holy-shit monologue. I would not throw stones at glass houses from the front stoop of my own glass house, I promise.)

So this is the film's first failure: who exactly is this movie for? The duck character feels like it should be for kids, but there is ample sex and violence, enough that letting kids under the age of like twelve watch it feels like bad parenting. And, like, it's totally cool if this movie was meant for adults, but if that's true, then the question becomes: why did I, as an adult, hate this shit?

It wasn't really funny. The jokes weren't there. Howard was a quip machine, but the quips were sub-Groucho. If we're somehow attempting to consider this a superhero drama, then there are significant issues with the logic of the plot. I'm attempting now to name one, but I am having trouble naming just one. My mind keeps returning to diner scene when Howard and Beverly are rolling their eyes at Dr. Jenning when clearly he's been overtaken by some evil alien creature. What, the idea that a human has been taken over by an alien is too much to believe, despite the fact that a talking duck from another dimension is sitting right here?

It's like, either the talking duck is something that everyone accepts, or it's the most radical discovery in the history of the world. It can't just be "oh my god a talking duck this is crazy" and then 24 hours later you're considering this normal. You can't have it both ways. It's either one or the other. And if it's not one or the other because this is a comedy ha ha ha who cares etc., then you gotta make this shit funny, which it wasn't. Including every trope and every cliché quip from the canon of off-beat film comedies does not make it funny. It makes it boring.

Okay, I finally looked it up. And I didn't find much interesting about the general consensus for this thing. The same ol' story—bad film that most people can agree is bad, with a small faction of weirdos believing with all their might that it is misunderstood. A "cult following," if you will. These fuckers will defend anything. Oh christ, maybe these are the former children of parents who didn't give a fuck what their children watched as long as they were out of mommy and daddy's hair for two goddamn hours it's been such a long day just let mommy drink her bourbon for christ's sake. Imagine being eight years old and getting your hormonal wires crossed in witnessing hottie Lea Thompson play bestiality chicken with a duck.

There's no accounting for taste when it comes to Marvel properties. That's really what it comes down to here. Did you know that Howard the Duck is an ongoing concern in the present-day Marvel Cinematic Universe? A few cameo appearances, a couple mid-credit sequences, a whole What If...? episode to himself. Lea Thompson has personally advocated to the MCU powers that be for a whole fucking reboot. Can't these people go away? The day they announce a new Howard the Duck movie is the day that we can all finally admit that this whole Marvel thing was a mistake, right? Can we all agree to that?

In conclusion: I hated it.

GRADE: 0.5 pukes out of 5

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GROUP AVERAGE GRADE: 1.875

Let's get a'quacking in the comments, shall we?

(NEXT TIME: Wouldn't have to hear any of Howard's dumb quips if he was in The General, since it's a silent film.)