Aah, Howard the
Duck. Easily one of the most infamous movie disasters of modern times,
it lost
over half its budget, and earned some of the
savagest reviews ever dished out to a mainstream picture along
the way. Based on Steve Gerber’s rather excellent satirical Marvel
comic of the same name, the movie adaptation – produced by George
Lucas – tried to cram the acerbic sarcasm of the subversive strip
into a family friendly action adventure, crashing and burning spectacularly
in the process.
And buried within the gruesome wreckage is an embarrassingly goofy performance
from the young Tim Robbins, then still a bit part actor in TV shows (he
played a space slave in Buck Rogers) and cheesy action flicks (such as
the gloriously gung-ho Toy Soldiers).
We open on Duck World, a distant planet much like Earth but dominated
by highly evolved humanoid ducks. Our hero is one Howard T. Duck (which
makes about as much sense as someone on our world being called Brian
T. Person) and we join him after a hard day at work. He flicks through
a copy of Rolling Egg magazine, before checking out the centrefold in
the latest issue of Playduck. On his wall hangs a poster for Breeders
of the Lost Stork. Laugh it up while you can, because this barrage of
paper thin duck puns is as good as it gets.
Suddenly a mysterious force drags Howard out of his apartment, through
several buildings (past a surprisingly busty topless female duck - with
nipples, no less) and off into outer space. Nimbly avoiding a giant Howard
the Duck logo that suddenly bursts into life in the void, he’s
finally spat back to solid ground in a back alley on Earth. After a close
encounter with some laughably unthreatening movie punk rockers, Howard
flees and crosses paths with Beverley (Back to the Future’s
Lea Thompson), whose perkily upbeat female rock group is trapped playing
toilet venues by her deadbeat manager.
She takes Howard under her wing (arf!) and promises to help him get back
home. How does she plan to do this? By begging a favour from a trainee
lab assistant at the local Natural History museum – Phil Blumburtt,
a giddy bespectacled geek played with alarming enthusiasm by the 28-year-old
Tim Robbins.
There follows an agonising hour of howlingly bad “duck out of water” situations – including
yet another inexplicable detour into smut, as Howard briefly works at
a sleazy sauna brothel – and even more mawkish attempts to squeeze
sentimentality out of the relationship between a young woman and a duck
puppet. Just as the movie seems to have run out of piss-poor duck gags,
and is teetering right on the verge of showing us a taboo-shattering
interspecies sex scene, the script finally stumbles across a plot device
and latches onto it with limpet-like tenacity. Phil learns that Howard
was pulled to Earth by a malfunctioning laser telescope, operated by
Dr. Walter Jenning (Jeffrey Jones) and designed to…you know…do
stuff. In space.
Anyway, when they fire it up a second time, rather than
sending Howard back it summons one of the Dark Overlords of the Universe,
a demonic entity which takes up residence in Dr. Jenning’s body.
That’s right, a mere sixty minutes into the film we get to the
second act, and the entire tone of the movie shifts from wacky comedy
to horror action adventure. The audience is then forced to endure a forty
minute chase as Howard and Phil try to stop the possessed Jenning from
offering up Beverley as the host for more of his Overlord kin. There’s
a lengthy pursuit involving Robbins dangling from a microlite, a diner
full of people who inexplicably try to slaughter Howard on the spot,
a convenient super-weapon, and a climactic
battle against a giant stop-motion animated anus with teeth that looks
like it lurched out of a cheap Fifties monster movie.
Howard saves the
day, and in doing so destroys the telescope, stranding himself on Earth
forever. He doesn’t mind though, as the cheesy rock concert finale
reassures us that his new job as Beverley’s manager (with poor
old Tim Robbins demoted to general backstage dogsbody) is the happy ending
we’ve all been praying for. Although, by this point, any sort of
ending would be a blessing.
Even with its notoriety, Howard the Duck is every bit as bad as you’ve
heard, and at almost two hours long the torture is stretched out to lengths
that must surely contravene some international law. If you can suffer
the rest of the movie, then the scenes in which Tim Robbins squabbles
with an animatronic duck are not without novelty value. Perhaps unsurprisingly,
it would be another four years before the dark psychological horror of
Jacob’s Ladder gave everyone a reason to take him seriously again.
Need to know: Howard the Duck was directed by Willard
Hyuck, who also co-wrote the screenplay with regular collaborator Gloria
Katz. Both were
key Lucasfilm personnel who together penned the screenplays for such
notable George Lucas ventures as American Graffiti and Indiana Jones
and the Temple of Doom. Howard himself was played by eight performers
at various points in the film including Ed Gale, who can be seen without
his duck costume in Chopper Chicks in Zombietown (see: Billy Bob Thornton).
Honourable mention: 1986 also saw Robbins appear very briefly in Tony
Scott’s lavishly pornographic feature length Navy recruitment video,
Top Gun. Not an obscure or bizarre movie by any means, but given Robbins’ outspoken
liberal views, his turn in such an enthusiastically pro-war movie is
still something of a guilty pleasure. The aforementioned Toy Soldiers
offers similar ironic amusement. It’s not the 1991 Sean Astin flick,
but a violently patriotic action movie with Robbins as one of a band
of American teens taking down evil South American terrorists like pint-sized
Rambos.
Availability: Howard the Duck is available on DVD.
