Our ongoing series looking at movies that took the blockbuster genre to the extreme and perhaps to excess. Note that these reviews may contain spoilers.
By John J. Joex
Rating: 1 ½ out of 5 Stars
Back in the mid-80’s, Hollywood had not quite figured out comic book movies. While the first two entries in the Superman franchise starring Christopher Reeves had scored big, the movie industry was still a few years away from realizing the full potential of the genre. Batman would kick off that trend in 1989, but in the years prior to that Hollywood would look on comic books with contempt and show little interest in bringing relatively faithful adaptations of the four color creations to the big screen.
And there is no better example of this than 1986’s Howard the Duck. This movie was based on the 70’s comic book created by Steve Gerber and Val Mayerik that offered a witty, winking satire on comics and American society in general. The comic had developed a cult following that had even spawned a newspaper strip and one of the character’s early fans was George Lucas who had expressed interest in bringing the character to the big screen as early as the mid-70s after he wrapped production on American Graffiti (and before he made some other small film named Star Wars or something). It would be another ten years before the Howard the Duck film actually happened, and by that time Lucas only appeared in the credits as the producer. But still, his name would be permanently attached to what has infamously become one of the biggest Hollywood disasters of the past few decades.
Howard the Duck went wrong early in the production stages when the creative team decided to de-emphasize the satire elements of the comic book and turn this into a special effects blockbuster. This resulted in them changing the basic personality of Howard from the sarcastic, crotchety curmudgeon that Steve Gerber had brought to life in the comic book into essentially a whiny, kid-friendly pale imitation of his original incarnation. It seems somewhat ironic to call the movie Howard cartoonish, but the film completely eviscerated the earthy, “human” qualities that made him such an interesting character on the four color page. Worse yet, they also completely flubbed the characterization of Howard’s human companion Beverly. Whereas in the comic she provided a strong, if sultry, female co-lead, in the film she was reduced to little more than a ditzy side-kick who even fell short of delivering much in the way of eye candy.
And the story did little to redeem this incredibly misguided production either. It’s really pointless to spend much time recapping the muddled, convoluted mess of the plot that involves a dimension-jumping device that accidentally brings Howard to our world and that also brings the “Dark Overlord of the Universe” to our realm which Howard must do battle with (H.P. Lovecraft this is not). There are miniscule traces of the satire that made the Howard the Duck comic such a pop culture hit, but they quickly get buried beneath the bloated mess that acts like a plot and behind the only passable special effects (that still cost a pretty penny). In every way this film demonstrated the hollow thinking of Hollywood as they took a concept with great spunk and plenty of potential (though not necessarily a good fit for the big screen) and turned it into an overblown production elevating the visual look (which ultimately fell short) over the substance.
The Howard character himself was brought to life through a combination of animatronic puppets and an actor wearing a suit, and this was actually not as bad as people have claimed over the years. For the time, the duck looked okay, if not spectacular. But so much else about this production went wrong that no matter how good Howard looked, he could not save it. Production costs, in a large part focused on bringing title character to life, sky-rocketed out of control, boiling the budget up to an unprecedented $36 million. The movie quickly sunk at the Box Office, though, making only $10 million on its theatrical release and securing its place as one of Hollywood’s biggest failures.
Many of the actors had trouble finding other parts in the years following Howard the Duck’s release because of their involvement with the film. However one actor, a young Tim Robbins in one of his earliest roles, would later see much better days, starring in films such as Bull Durham, The Shawshank Redemption, and Mystic River.
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