Three decades later, both the Lucas Star Wars universe and the ever metastasizing gallery of Marvel superheroes flourish under the Disney corporate umbrella. And as "Guardians Of The Galaxy, Vol.2" currently downloads through multi-plex digital projectors as we speak, we decided to go Howard The Duck-hunting........especially since the first 'Guardians' teased the world with a state-of-the-art computer generated Howard......unfortunately, this technology was not yet available to George Lucas as he launched his own special effects laden Howard epic in 1986.....
Sifting through the wreckage......
Willard Huyck and Gloria Katz Their "American Graffiti" script sent George Lucas on the path to directorial stardom......but their further screenwriting efforts found no favor with anyone....a minefield of critical and financial disasters....(you could exclude "Indiana Jones and The Temple Of Doom" from the financial fiasco category, though their script for it was thoroughly ridiculed and derided) Huyck and Katz peppered their "Howard" script with more bad jokes and lame puns than you'd hear in fifty of those British "Carry On" comedies. This duo was never as clever as they thought they were.....and Huyck's tone-deaf, clumsy direction hammered the last nail....his previous film, "Best Defense" attained a dubious achievement by pairing Eddie Murphy and Dudley Moore together and never putting them in a scene together. (But we have to admire how long Huyck and Katz surfed the wave of their "American Graffiti" success, until their subsequent projects sent them crashing into the beach....)
The Duck With no CGI, they resorted to stuffing three foot tall actors into duck suits outfitted with animatronic eyes. The effect? Weird, creepy....Howard looked like one of those oversized stuffed animals you win at ring toss carnival games. They compounded the repulsive factor with the character's voice dubbing.....the duck wisecracked like a low-rated AM disc jockey......and Huyck and Katz supplied him with an astounding amount of stupid things to say.....
The music.....While we love the idea of applying a lush John Barry orchestral score to such a lunatic movie.....it still comes off as insanely odd and out of place. There's a poignant little love theme we wished Barry had saved for a more appropriate film......but by the l980's, all of his scores played at the same funeral dirge pace....only the notes changed a little. So we don't fault the filmmakers for cutting chunks of it out and concentrating on Thomas Dolby songs....
Special Effects orgy......Having already dumbed down the sharp wit of the original Steve Gerber comic book character, Huyck and Katz evidently took a siesta during the film's third act, allowing Lucas's Industrial Light and Magic platoons to overwhelm the film with explosions and monsters......
And now.....believe it or not.....some stuff we liked.....
Lea Thompson She beat out countless numbers of not only of her fellow young actresses, but every young female pop star vying for the role......and deservedly. A funny, infinitely adorable heroine, whose long, long legs became the film's most memorable special effect. No other actress of that period ever got a more telling lesson in the ups and downs of a movie career..... with Thompson going from the celebrated, much loved "Back To The Future".....to this.
Tim Robbins and Jeffrey Jones We know most people despised Robbins' strenuous cartoonish overplaying here, but come on, people.....the guy was a young, hungry actor trying to make his mark in a movie about a talking duck....not exactly "Remains Of The Day"...(although come to think of it, if Merchant-Ivory films had a talking duck and a giant scorpion monster, we might have stayed awake through some of them.....) Jones provides the movie's only genuine laughs as he sits in the Cajun-Sushi diner rapidly, transforming into an guttural-voiced, evil alien entity. His interactions with the diner's cheerfully clueless waitress (Jorli McClain).....priceless.
Phil Tippet's stop-motion 'Dark Overlord' creature.....It makes the movie even more of a mess....but who cares at this point? Raised on Ray Harryhausen movies, we adore our stop motion monsters and could watch them all day. That singular charm of their herky-jerky movements still fascinates.....
Now the big question.....like other disparaged old films, has the passage of 31 years rehabilitated "Howard The Duck" into a newly appreciated cult classic? ......
Nah....it's still dumb, noisy, and generally witless despite its mountainous amount of one liners. But so damned hysterical in its presentation and so blatantly strange, we never found it boring...(which is more than we can say for the coma we almost lapsed into suffering through the 1967 'Casino Royale') For the few laughable moments, we'll quack out 1 & 1/2 stars (* 1/2) If Disney and Marvel really do give us a CGI Howard, George Lucas already set the bar pretty low for them....
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