Howard The Duck [1986]

[Cross-posted on the Bad Movie Night Facebook page.]

More than half of the movies we watch at Bad Movie Night have not been seen before by any of the members which certainly poses a level of risk and a variance in the quality of the films we watch. Mostly everything we can be sure will be bad on the basis of notoriety or just a plot description (and occasionally on the DVD cover) but what we can't be sure of is whether the level of bad will change thoughout the film in unexpected ways and that is always a dubious delight.

And here we find ourselves at "Howard The Duck", a bad movie classic we have been putting off for no particular reason other than we've had movies we wanted to watch more. At first the premise is pretty straightforwardly bad: an anthrpomorphic duck from a universe exactly like ours but with ducks as the dominent species is transported to our world and found by a startlingly open-minded 80s girl named Bodacious Beverly who is in a rock band named Cherry Bomb which they unfortunatley did not cover in the film. In spite of the fact that Howard is a jerk who doesn't appreciate her hospitality and seems weirdly unconcerned with finding a way home, she falls in love with him and again we must watch scenes that would make anyone who is not a furry cover their eyes (see also: WolfCop). At the point when they have met up with awkward scientist Tim Robbins and real scientist Jeffery Jones to try to send Howard back home, we realize with creeping horror that the movie is only half way done and wonder how much more of this duck out of water premise we can handle. Thankfully for us(?), they turn the crazy up to eleven when the experiment goes wrong and Jeff Jones gets possessed by an extraterrestrial demon who wants to take over the world. Bodacious Beverly gets kidnapped by demon!JeffJones to be used as a vessel for another demon and Howard and TimRob chase them in a personal helicopter thing for what feels like four hours before the saving-the-day thing finally happens. The movie ends with Howard being forced to stay on Earth and becoming the new manager of Cherry Bomb. No one finds this weird.

I think the only reasons this movie made money were because people are fans of the comic and because George Lucas funded it and he does all he can to not let you forget it with tons of shameless advertising for Lucas films throughout. In terms of the technical aspects of the film, it blatantly ripped off other famous directors including Kubrick and Scorsce with references to "2001" and "Taxi Driver". We think they were trying to be clever but the sheer amount of pathetic puns in the movie makes us doubt that clever is something the movie's creators are capable of.

Quotes:
Everything said by the waitress at the Cajun Sushi restaurant. She was the best character in the movie by far.

"I bite your face. You're a dead man, Ginger!" (N.B.: The man's name was Ginger. I don't think he was a ginger.)

"Where's my baseball cap?"
"Shut up."
"Fascist!"

Adam's Grandma's Review: "Zzzzzz."