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).