Howard the Duck (Willard Huyck, 1986)

I had high hopes for this. I'm a huge fan of Messiah of Evil, the 1973 horror film Willard Huyck co-wrote and directed with his wife Gloria Katz. My favorite genre is the film maudit. And, in general, I exhibit deep affection for broken, unloved films such as, to choose one example utterly at random, Some Call It Loving. But sometimes bad movies are just bad and Howard the Duck falls dead from the sky.

If that last phrase made you wince, then you now have a taste of how every single comedic line in the film, without fail, earns my all-time favorite adjective - arch, "marked by a deliberate and often forced playfulness, irony, or impudence." After one of the many travails he has to endure after crashing on Earth, Howard wisecracks nudge-nudge one-liners like or "Talk about bad breath" or "I need this like I need another tail." Did anyone on the planet ever laugh at such sub-Groucho Marxisms, "jokes" that would've tanked in the Borscht Belt of the 1950s? The only laughter I experienced was an occasional seconds-delayed guffaw over how such godawful writing made it to the screen.

Even worse, the imperative of having to adapt a Marvel comic book for a major studio drained the film of all the quirk and personality so evident in Messiah of Evil. Film maudit fans might appreciate John Barry's incongruous score (ILX user Old Lunch describes the music, in a line funnier than any of the film, as akin to "watching some heartwarming '80s family movie about two lovable scamps learning the true meaning of Arbor Day") and the inconsistent reactions to a talking duck in Cleveland. But with those potential quirks out of the way by the first quarter, Huyck and co-writer Katz proceed with a crushing anonymity through overlong chase and destruction scenes. 

So it's bad but exactly how bad? The failure is too fascinating to merit an F and it didn't enrage me like Unsane. The title song, written by Thomas Dolby and George Clinton and sung by Lea Thompson (a terrible performance but an understandable one given what she had to work with), is catchy albeit baffling: "We call him Howard the Duck/Ain't no way to conceal it...If it ain't funk, you don't feel it." Jeffrey Jones deserved the biggest check for the "Dark Overlord of the Universe" makeup he had to endure. Tim Robbins is tall and strong. And the best performance is a cameo by Jorli McLain as the waitress Crystal. Her brief moment is so raw and natural that she could've stepped off of Kelly Reichardt's Certain Women. And she utters the one remotely witty line in the entire film: "You know, hostility is, like, a psychic boomerang." McLain has only two more credits to her name but went on to invent, with her former partner Wendy Robbins, the Tingler head massager. Sadly, she died in 2010 at 49.

In short, SpaceCamp, another 1986 entry starring Lea Thompson, now feels like Citizen Kane. 

Grade: D