DIRECTOR
Willard Huyck
SCREENWRITERS
Willard Huyck
Gloria Katz
based
on characters created by
Steve Gerber
PRODUCER
Gloria Katz
CINEMATOGRAPHER
Richard H. Kline
MUSIC
John Barry
Thomas Dolby
EDITORS
Michael Chandler
Sidney Wolinsky
CAST
Lea Thompson (Beverly Switzler)
Jeffrey Jones (Doctor Jenning)
Tim Robbins (Phil Blumburtt)
Chip Zien (Howard T. Duck) (voice)
Paul Guilfoyle (Lieutenant Welker)
Liz Sagal (Ronette)
Holly Robinson (K.C.)
Richard Edson (Ritchie)
Miguel Sandoval (Cab Driver)
David Paymer (Larry Scientist)
Thomas Dolby (Bartender in Rock Club)
John Fleck (Pimples)
Richard Kiley (Voice of the Cosmos)
MPAA rating: PG
Running
time: 110m
U.S. release: August 1, 1986
Video availability: VHS
|
First
of all, let's get one thing straight. Howard the Duck,
in its peak years from 1975-1978, was the best newsstand Big
Two comic book of the '70s (the Big Two being Marvel and DC).
To read this deconstruction of superhero clichés at an
impressionable age was to have your eyes peeled to the falsehood
of socially defined "heroism" forever. As scripted
by Marvel madman Steve Gerber, Howard was a satirical vehicle
with which to puncture the excesses of an excessive era. That
he was a talking duck in a comic book made him that much more
subversive; the best satire doesn't always come shrink-wrapped
and labelled "Serious Satire for Adult Intellectuals"
-- sometimes it comes in an innocuous, even ludicrous guise,
and then sucker-punches you. Gerber used Howard as his Gulliver,
his indictment of the madness of the '70s and the emptiness of
his own profession.
One of the comic's best bits was its take-off of Star Wars,
so it was ironic that George Lucas produced 1986's $35 million
Howard the Duck movie, which has the dubious distinction
of being the worst movie of a particularly bad decade for movies
(adapted from the best comic of a particularly good decade for
comics). Whatever made George think that Howard the Duck
could have worked as a live-action film remains a mystery. Seven
actors in plastic-looking duck suits expend a lot of energy failing
to achieve the suspension of disbelief that an animated feature
(Ralph Bakshi would've been ideal) could have managed easily.
The movie's plot departs from the comic in so many ways that
I won't even bother to enumerate them; none of the changes are
improvements. It begins with Howard on his own world, where talking
ducks are the norm. His apartment is festooned with movie posters
and magazines (Rolling Egg, Breeders of the Lost Stork)
that are meant to be funny alternate-universe puns but are just
lame. He is whisked away to Earth, lands in an alley, and is
attacked by a gang of dated-looking punkers who drag him into
a club. Though he's helpless in this scene, he somehow is able
to use "quak-fu" one scene later when defending a woman
from two punks.
That woman is Lea Thompson (with huge crimped hair) as
Beverly Switzler, lead singer for an all-female band called Cherry
Bomb, who play generic mid-'80s pop in what looks like a New
Wave punk dive circa 1981. Thompson is one of two actors in the
movie who actually come off well. She looks like the Bev of the
comics (who was not a pop singer) and sounds like I imagine
Bev sounding; she also does her own singing and isn't half bad.
Even when she has to wear a skimpy shirt and panties and mock-seduce
a plastic duck head, she gives it as much conviction as she can
muster. She's such a lightweight comedian anyway that she escapes
this mess without being tarnished; you can imagine her laughing
it off.
Bev takes Howard to see her friend Phil, who works as a janitor
in a laboratory and is played by Tim Robbins in his goofy Hudsucker
Proxy mode. The movie got several genuine good laughs
out of me (as opposed to bad laughs at the film's expense), and
Robbins can take credit for them all. His parodic performance
is closer in spirit to Gerber's wigged-out characters than anything
in the movie. Robbins' presence also started me off on a mental
tangent in which I envisioned Howard the Duck becoming
a campy bad audience-participation movie the way his s.o. Susan
Sarandon's Rocky Horror did. Maybe to lighten up while
making Dead
Man Walking, they got stoned and watched Rocky Horror
and Howard together.
But for the most part, this is an unspeakably bad film. I can't
decide whether Lucas intended to outdo E.T. or to parody
it (there's some manufactured poignance when Howard wants to
go back to his world and Bev gets teary-eyed). Lucas' cronies,
the husband-and-wife team Willard Huyck and Gloria Katz (who
wrote American Graffiti and Indiana Jones and the Temple
of Doom), wrote the script together; Huyck directed it and
Katz produced it. Obviously they read the original comics, because
some of the dialogue is either directly quoted from the books
or a dumbed-down variation. (When Howard is served fried eggs,
he recoils and says "Do I look like a cannibal?" In
the comic, he says "Do I give the impression that I'm into
infanticide?" Big difference.) But they just as obviously
missed the comic's satirical flavor, opting for cheap puns, sophomoric
touches like Bev finding a condom in Howard's wallet (a detail
reportedly cut from the British print), and the kind of empty
pop fantasy that Gerber skewered.
The last third of Howard the Duck is an orgy of ILM effects,
some of them halfway decent (Phil Tippett designed a fairly cool
monster for the climax), some as cheesy as the duck suits. Jeffrey
Jones (the principal in Ferris Bueller's Day Off ) turns
up as a scientist who is possessed by a "Dark Overlord"
after a botched experiment with a laser that was responsible
for bringing Howard to Earth in the first place .... As you can
see, the script gets sidetracked into routine pulp "thrills,"
the effects take over, and the whole embarrassment ends with
Howard joining Bev onstage for a rousing rendition of the movie's
title song -- one of several cringe-worthy tunes written for
the film by Thomas Dolby, of all people. Perhaps a Dark Overlord
possessed him. |
