Film / Movie Review: Howard the Duck
- July 10th, 2010
- Posted in Film Reviews
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Howard the Duck
Lea Thompson Seduces A Duck!
A duck called Howard is pulled across space by a scientfic experiment that went wrong. He’s all alone on an alien planent and wants to go home. This is the original duck out of water movie. Yada, yada, yada. Let’s face it, it’s tripe. For whatever reason, on Howard’s planet evolution has given ducks the upper hand/bigger brain etc. It’s almost as if life in the universe is like Bingo. Every inhabitable planet has the same numbers it just depends what ball is pulled out of the bag. This suggests that somewhere in the universe Koala bears are the predominant species on the planet. This seems more appealing than a planet inhabited by annoying ducks the size of ten year olds.
Anyway the duck has some sassiness to him. All he wants to do is get home. So he hooks up with whatsherface out of back to the future – Lea Thompson and they go on a mission to get Howard home. Does Howard make it back home? Will he ever have sex with a human woman? How would that work? These are the active questions going through your head whilst watching the movie. About a talking duck. From another planet.
The relationship between Lea Thompson’s character and the Duck is not entirely facile but its not exactly Casablanca stuff either. It’s not even Harrison Ford, Kate Allen. The primary joke of the film is “it’s a duck that talks.” This can wear thin. Especially if you didn’t find the joke funny in the first place which is unlikely because stating the obvious is rarely funny unless done in a sarcastic way. Without giving too much away (you might not have seen it!), the baddies at the end are pretty good, they obviously look well dated now but at the time it was genuinely scary.
It’s true that the emphasis of the film is on the special effects. What do you expect, George Lucas was involved. It’s shallow, it has all the sensibilties of a McDonalds birthday party which means it is all about fun. And it is fantastic fun. It’s incredibly difficult to dislike a film the sheds the tethers of reality so completely as Howard the Duck. I mean come on, its a film about a Duck that speaks. It’s ludicrous. It’s fantastic.
We love you Howard, we do, we love you Howard we do… I have a different opinion of the impression of this film, but happily we both come to the same conclusion of loving it.
This was the second film I ever saw at the cinema, it has the edge over the first (which was E.T.) as I actually remember watching all of this and it being brilliant.
I remember there being adverts on the tele for it and bugging my parents to go see it, then magically at the end of Nursery School (ages 4 to 6) one summers evening my Dad appeared to pick me up… not my Mum, he took me to wash my hands and face and packed me into the back of our old brown Mini Cooper with my Brother. And we went to see “HOWARD A NEW BREED OF SUPER HERO” that’s the films real title by the way, its not “Howard The Duck”. Calling it anything less really losses the perspective this film tried to give itself.
But credit were credit is due, this film might make a 30 something of today watching it for the first time cringe, but in its own time it made a 5 year old boy very happy.
And even though the film showed a lot of shots of Lea “Back To The Future” Thompsons bottom, it also had Jeff “Ferris” Jones and Tim “Shawshank” Robbins in it; two top notch actors doing top notch jobs with a plot so silly it could have been a comic book… Oh wait… it was, thank you Marvel!