Howard The Duck

Cast: Lea Thompson, Tim Robbins, and Jeffrey Jones

Director: Willard Huyck   

122 minutes (12) 1986

101 Films Blu-ray region B

Rating: 7/10

Review by Christopher Geary  

Originally created by Steve Gerber for Marvel comics, the live-action adaptation Howard The Duck introduced cinema-goers to a bizarre comic-book visitor from a parallel world, in a USA-styled ‘small universe’, who gets mysteriously stranded on Earth, in Cleveland, Ohio. Rock-starlet hopeful and sympathetic heroine Beverly (Lea Thompson, Back To The Future, TV sitcom Caroline In The City), takes Howard home, where she puts him up and puts up with all of his cranky misbehaviour. 

A museum lab assistant, Phil (Tim Robbins) tries to help the main plot along, and although Robbins quite sincerely gets into the spirit of this movie’s SF farce, it often seems as if he completely failed to understand that any bumbling comic-relief characterisation was quite unnecessary in a movie about a talking duck. In the routine skiffy twist, astro-physicist Dr Jenning (Jeffrey Jones) realises that flightless exemplar Howard is the accidental result of science academy experiments with a laser spectrometer.

Charged with being an ‘illegal alien’ by local police, Howard’s escape from official custody prompts a flurry of duck-hunt jokes. Social misunderstandings explore satirical aspects of migrant cultural shock with various humans in confrontation with this Other, and Howard soon gives up trying to assimilate, opting to acclimate instead. “I get this feeling there’s some kind of special destiny waiting for me.” Howard’s fortune and fate is determined by chance, but he appears like a guided missile launched by a spectacularly obtrusive multi-verse.

Slapstick fighting in a ‘cajun sushi’ diner eventually gives way for the arrival of Dark Overlords, quasi-Lovecraftian monsters noisily intent on global destruction. The somewhat artless direction by Willard Huyck actually serves this comedy movie well for most of its madcap japes and chase frenzy, including a micro-light aircraft pursued by cop cars, because the basic premise is bizarre and thoroughly absurd enough. HTD is not strictly a space opera, but could fit into the adjacent subgenre or alien-flipside sub-set of ‘planetary romances’, much like Nicolas Roeg’s Man Who Fell To Earth (1976), John Carpenter’s Starman, and John Sayles’ Brother From Another Planet (both 1984), or (and perhaps a more accurate comparison?) Spielberg’s E.T. (1982).

An almost-unique blockbuster fantasy about Gerber’s cigar-chomping, beer-guzzling alien with a sarcastic attitude (obviously, Daffy Duck pioneered the mind-set), Huyck’s quirky quackers movie was a memorable box-office failure, but has since acquired a strong cult following (pledge allegiance to your new feathered-friend now!). Prudes might have balked at the latent bestiality (does heroine Bev really bed a fowl?), while arty cinema purists clearly discriminated against a movie catalogue of gross absurdity masquerading as surrealism. And yet, in its own peculiar way, this ‘first contact’ sci-fi adventure belongs in the same era's myth-riddled cine-category as Superman: The Movie (1978), and Superman II (1980).

Mortal Engines

Cast: Hugo Weaving, Hera Hilmar, and Robert Sheehan

Director: Christian Rivers

123 minutes 12 2018

Universal DVD Region 2

[Released 22nd April]

Rating: 7/10

Review by Christopher Geary

In a post-apocalypse landscape, centuries after WW3, cities on wheels hunt and consume runabout towns in a steampunk fairy-tale version of Mad Max with epic visuals. ‘London’ rolls across Europe, a pirate metro juggernaut scavenging resources from mega-tractors, while following the doctrines of ‘Municipal Darwinism’. A lowly museum apprentice, young hero Tom (Robert Sheehan), is clearly fated to team-up with failed assassin Hester (Hera Hilmar), after she stabs the London’s elite but corrupt leader Valentine (Hugo Weaving), whose quite sympathetic but rather sheltered daughter Kate (Leila George), eventually uncovers a sinister conspiracy.

Based on a book by Philip Reeve, Mortal Engines marks the directorial debut of artist and visual effects designer Christian Rivers, who worked for WETA on the LOTR trilogy, Hobbit movies, and Peter Jackson’s remake of King Kong. Comedy eccentrics populate a vast continental wasteland where the cyborg-zombie Shrike (voiced by Stephen Lang) is freed to find heroine Hester, now on a shut-up-and-run escape from auction to cannibals. Wanted terrorist Anna Fang (Korean singer Jihae, Mars) rescues Hester and Tom, leading them to become outlaws. Top-class Brits like Patrick Malahide (Minder) and Colin Salmon (Krypton) round out the supporting cast. 

As expected, this movie stands or falls because of its startling and impressive creativity in stylised super-mecha effects, and quirky human characters are rarely more than just a curious sideshow, if judged against this lavish production’s undeniably spectacular gothic sci-fi and cleverly enhanced mayhem of stunts. Dramatic SF themes with people dwarfed by mobile machinery, provides neat visual symbolism for capitalism, or even colonialism. Fringe nomadic rebels are confined to the equally mobile sanctuary in an airborne haven for aviators, blimp captains, and balloonists. Now history looks very likely to repeat itself with a new catastrophe, using the WMD of a quantum ‘Medusa’ against the gigantic walls that protect eastern realms. 

Basically, a Star Wars for Earth-bound landlubbers, Mortal Engines includes a suicidal air raid on the former British capital, where various Brexit metaphors are obviously satirical. In the movie’s predictable ending, London is burning and grinds to a halt, so the techno-future of any reformed humanity looks Asian. 

The Rage: Carrie 2

Cast: Emily Bergl, Jason London, and Amy Irving

Director: Katt Shea

104 minutes (15) 1999

88 Films Blu-ray region B

[Released 8th April]

Rating: 7/10

Review by Steven Hampton

Katt Shea brings feminist credentials and enthusiastic genre credibility to directing this belated sequel, right from the movie’s first sequence. In a prologue, the young heroine’s wacky mother slaps red paint on the house’s walls and furniture, and even symbolically daubs bloody colour over her young daughter’s face, before she’s hauled away to funny-farm residency at Arkham. Consequently, Rachel (Emily Bergl), grows up in foster care. Later, at school, her best friend Lisa (Mena Suvari) at jumps off the roof, and this tragic suicide prompts a brief storm of telekinetic energies that is overlooked by all concerned, because of the resulting furore affecting many students and teaching staff. 

In this drama where thoughts can kill, Emily Bergl makes her screen debut, and she went on to appear in Spielberg’s UFOlogy TV mini-series Taken (2002). The Rage: Carrie 2 also features Amy Irving (from The Fury), playing the school’s guidance counsellor, Sue, lone survivor of the prom night blaze and massacre in the original Carrie (1976), but this movie has a different tone, because psychic Rachel is not so much an obvious victim of destructive forces beyond her control. The weirdo religious mania of obsessive parenting in Carrie is dropped here, largely in favour of exploring a schizoid mentality. This change of tone is particularly important because it places the movie in a sci-fi mode of ‘psychic thriller’, with markedly less emphasis upon (supernatural) horror, except for the graphic slaughter during climactic scenes.

Sensitive-seeming athlete Jesse (Jason London) appears wholly sympathetic to virgin Rachel’s anxiety, while lame-brained football jocks, led by stereotyped Eric, seduce underage school girls, and then dump them to score points in their predatory games that involve a likely prosecution for statutory rape. Blindly following social conventions, the friendships and betrayals of students generate highly emotive performances for juvenile hi-jinks, in collision-course plotting of deception and social exclusions fuelled by cat-house vanity, poisonous jealousy, and rampant hormones.

Rachel’s inner worldview is usually presented in B&W scenes, as clear evidence of the simplistic morality for teenage behaviours that is lacking any shades of complex meaning beyond pretence and dishonesty. In the end, it’s really no wonder that troubled Rachel’s over-reaction to all of the lies and fickleness, based on the selfish concerns of teen characters, eventually results in a psychic rage with an all-consuming bloodbath as the party-house burns down. The finale plays out like a comicbook sequence of anti-hero super-powers. Unlike the nervous Carrie White (Sissy Spacek), who seemed possessed by a terrible evil, Rachel acts from distinctly human vengeance, and her homicidal psychic assault is directed specifically at several cruel tormentors. Ultimately, she wields this telekinetic power, that is inherited and described like a mutant X-gene, instead of simply losing any control over it. 

Disc extras: include two commentary tracks, an alternative ending (with visual effects of a supernatural snake), and some deleted scenes.