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This may be a guilty pleasure, but I also think it inherited an unfair reputation, too.  George Lucas wanted to produce a comic film noir.  No matter how well it was done, it would never be a huge hit.  His name proved cancerous to the movie, unintentionally promising universal appeal for what is really a niche movie. The critics took their best shots and Howard the Duck went down as one of the most famous flops in movie history.

Directed by Willard Huyck, a longtime friend of Lucas’ (who co-wrote American Graffiti and Indiana Jones and the Temple of Doom), Howard is a silly goofball of a movie that I first saw in the theater when I was 12 years old  — perhaps the target audience.  But even now I’m still entertained by it.  It’s definitely got problems.  The main ones are in it’s first hour.  It starts off on Duck World, without any attempt to ease the audience into the lunacy of the core concept.  At that very moment, the film probably loses about half the audience who aren’t willing to suspend their disbelief.  Then, for about the first hour, the story is very unfocused. There is no antagonistic force driving the plot — there’s just Howard’s relationship to Beverly (Back to the Future‘s Lea Thompson), another alienating element for many viewers.  The relationship treads a fine line:  is it comic, or is it serious?  Howard has a little duck condom in his wallet.  Should we laugh or throw up? I find the confusing tone intriguing.  I mean, the movie’s so fricking weird already, why not screw a duck?

For me, the movie pulls together in the middle to deliver a fun final hour.  I love the scene at the sushi diner where Jeffrey Jones (Ferris Bueller’s Day Off) goes wacky and blows shit up while transforming into a monstrous ‘Dark Overlord of the Universe’. I also love Howard and Tim Robbins’ (Shawshank Redemption) astrolight airplane escape from the authorities (a masterfully edited sequence), and the final confrontation in which Howard has to rescue Thompson and Robbins and stop the fully-transformed Dark Overlord from bringing more of its kind to Earth. Phil Tippet’s stop-motion animation of the monster is old-school cool. Adding unexpected luster to the mix is a James Bond-like musical score from John Barry, with action cues by Sylvester Levay. With it’s costumes, big hair, and rock tunes by Thomas Dolby, Howard the Duck is steeped in `80s, which ups the nostalgia factor substantially.

What can I say? It’s an odd, odd movie that probably should never have been made.  But that’s all part of its charm.