Howard the Duck (1986)

You Will Believe a Duck Can Suck

I saw this movie when it first came out, and still remember the night vividly. It was August, 1986. I was living in a 4th floor walkup in New York's East Village, and desperately wanted to be somewhere that was air conditioned. That meant loitering in the freezer aisle of the Met Foods grocery store on Avenue C until the manager concluded I was a vegetable fetishist who was stalking the frozen broccoli and threw me out, or going to see a movie. Any movie. Even this movie.

Howard the Duck (1986)
Directed by Willard Huyck
Written by Willard Huyck & Gloria Katz, based on the charactered created by Steve Gerber

This motion picture opens with the three most chilling words in the English language: "George Lucas Presents".

We open on a parallel Earth, in a parallel New York, where everything is the same, except there's two moons in the sky, and their idea of jazz is a sax solo so devoid of soul it sounds like someone took the theme to Moonlighting and bleached it. Oh, and the dominant life form is a species of anthropomorphic duck.

Our hero, whose name is "Howard T. Duck" (I really ought to introduce him to my friend, Jim J. Human) comes home to his depressing apartment and listens to vaguely pornographic messages on his answering machine. So, visionary George Lucas predicted phone sex for fowl years before the Internet invented Rule 34, and yet this is never listed amongst his achievements. Pardon me for a second while I nip off to Wikipedia.

Okay, I'm back. Ah, I see Howard is watching a commercial for jock itch, and scratching his penis. Please stand by...

Sorry about that, I had to zip over to Urban Dictionary and add a quick entry for "Rakin’ the Drake." What did I miss?

Ah, Howard has opened the latest issue of Playduck magazine and is leering over the centerfold, so I guess we're about to see a duck choke his own chicken.

Instead, Howard's armchair bursts through the wall like the Kool-Aid Man, except he interrupts a woman taking a bath, so if you've ever wondered what a duck would look like with D-cup breasts and erect, prominent nipples, this is your chance. I guess the producers were able to show this and still retain their PG (not even PG-13) rating, because the sight is about as sexy as tits on a Butterball frozen turkey (imagine the fights at the dinner table every Thanksgiving:

BROTHER: I'll have white meat!
SISTER: I'll have dark meat!
JUNIOR: I'll take the lymph nodes!
DAD: Don't bug your Mom when she's cooking. Here, take this nipple to nibble on.
MOM: Honey, don't give them the nipples; they're for the nipplet gravy.

Anyway, after the peepshow, Howard gets sucked into what looks like an LED anus, and shat out on the cast of The Class of Nuke 'Em High.

Lea Thompson is the lead lip-syncher of a fake rock band in an unconvincing club. However, they're apparently bad enough that they have to perform behind a chain link fence like that blind guy in Road House, which is a little more believable. Meanwhile, Howard is having a chase scene with the "Satan's Sluts" motorcycle gang and stretching credibility like salt water taffy.

After the show, Lea and her spiral perm walk down an alley, where she receives unwanted sexual advances by two fey, lace-and-make-up-wearing neurasthenics who apparently mistook her for Boy George. Howard saves her with his mastery of "Quack-Fu", which was funnier in the comic book, but here just makes me feel bad for the little guy in the costume who clearly can't see out of his audio-animatronic face.

Lea decides to take Howard back to her apartment because it's raining, and you don't want to get a duck wet after midnight or something. Boy, I wish I was watching Gremlins. Or Gremlins 2. Or even driving somewhere in an AMC Gremlin.

Howard and Lea have a dull conversation about how he sold out his music career to become a copywriter, then he falls asleep and she goes through his wallet and scoffs at the stupid puns on his credit cards ("Mallardcharge", "Bloomingducks"), then pulls out an unwrapped condom, which tells us two things: the size indicates that Howard has a teensy tiny duck dick, while the lack of a wrapper suggests that duck condoms are reusable, or he's just a particularly gross hoarder.

The next day Lea puts Howard in a trash bag and takes him and the script to a landfill where they are left to biodegrade naturally. Okay, only half that sentence is true, and not the happy part. She hauls Howard to her friend "Bill, the scientist" (Tim Robbins), who works at some museum in the combined "Paleontology/Ichthyology" department, which suggests the museum groups its disciplines according to which ones rhyme.¹

Tim shrieks and skitters his way around the set, giving a bravura, scene-stealing, tour-de-force comic performance that makes me envious of the little person inside the Howard costume, because he can't see it. But he blames Lea for what little he can hear of it, breaks off their budding bestiality, and tells her to get out of his radio-controlled face.

Howard goes to the state employment bureau, where a large black woman decides he's a welfare cheat and needs to work for a living, while our hero decides that baby got back and tries to lustfully bite her ass.

Cut to a...massage parlor? Bordello? Japanese style mineral baths? I have no clue, but scantily clad people are having sex in rooms, jacuzzis, and the hallway while Howard pushes a cart around, peddling "towels and lotions." I don't mind the movie taking a more adult tack—the comic certainly did—I just don't believe that after looking into Howard's dead, glassy, Uncanny Valley eyes, anyone in that place could achieve, let alone maintain an erection. Anyway, along with chlamydia, gonorrhea, and HPV, Howard's presence allows the patrons to also experience avian flu.

Having failed as an ointment dispenser in a whorehouse, Howard goes back to the bar, where he beats up and robs Lea's band manager as a peace offering, I guess because his planet never developed the FTD "I'm Sorry" Bouquet. Tim runs in, delivers a pizza and more attempted comedy, then Lea takes Howard home and crawls slowly across her bed in a thong so he can ogle her ass, making me think this whole movie started as a fetish porn video for exhibitionist birdwatchers who wish the birds would watch them sometimes.

Okay, the repeated hints of zoophilia made me put the movie on pause and look up duck mating practices. I figured it was the usual cloaca-to-cloaca contact, but no, ducks are hung. The average duck endowment is over 7 inches long—the Argentinian Lake Duck is sixteen inches long, which is like one-and-a-half John Holmeses—and they're spiral-shaped, so at least his penis matches her perm. Anyway, this family-friendly comic book movie is one open fly away from become hentai tentacle porn.²

Lea murmurs, "You think I might find love in the animal kingdom?" And starts to pull off her camisole, making Howard's head feathers become erect, but he chickens out (sorry), and then they get interrupted by Tim and astro-physicist Jeffrey Jones. Dr. Jones explains that his crappy laser exploded, bringing Howard to Earth, but he can send Howard back. So he and Lea and, unfortunately, Tim, drive out to the lab and find that again, the laser has exploded, and again, it exploded off camera, because if we started having action and spectacle in this movie it might distract from all the barnyard sodomy.

Howard gets arrested for being an "illegal alien" (ha) but escapes with Lea and Dr. Jones, who has been possessed by a "Dark Overlord of the Universe" that makes him talk in a weird voice that Michael Keaton will later borrow for Beetlejuice.  They go to a coffee shop where Jones demonstrates the might of his evil powers by using his glowing eyes to spill some condiments.

Howard gets in a fight with some rednecks who tie him to a cutting board and prepare to vivisect him in full view of the customers, which is exactly why I stopped going to Friendly's after church.

Then there's some hooey about a "code key" that will let Jones use the exploding laser to bring down the rest of the Dark Overlords before it explodes again, and he kidnaps Lea so she can be the host body for his Dark Overgirlfriend.

Jones and Lea drive off in a big rig, Howard and Tim fly off in an ultra light, and we get about twelve minutes of dangerous-looking, but somehow depressing stunts.

There's an even more depressing fight in the lab, with some sad special effects, some mournful action, and some bleak quips. But they manage to knock the Dark Overlord out of Jones, which is good because the monster itself said Dark Overlords can't exist on earth without a host body. Except they can, apparently, if they turn into big stop motion creatures with tentacle penises for tongues and vaginas for hands. Which this one does, and though that seems like it should make things better, it really doesn't.

Howard lasers it to death, then lasers the laser to prevent other Dark Overlords from arriving and driving the film over budget. Cut to a concert, where Lea and her band are playing the theme song, "Howard the Duck." Howard joins them onstage where he plays a rockin' guitar solo, and the appearance of a talking, anthropomorphic water fowl doesn't seem to freak the audience out, but I guess they've probably seen weirder shit at Bonnaroo.

The end.

1. If nothing else this gives me hope that my Anthropology/Cosmetology degree is finally going to start paying off.

2. (With Howard presumably sporting a corkscrew cock, it seems like a missed comic opportunity, making him a copywriter instead of a sommelier.)