August 1, 1986 | Howard the Duck isn’t kid stuff. It’s a wack!-wack!-wacky comedy-adventure, but much of its humor has a sarcastic, satirical edge best appreciated by teen-agers and adults.
Parents expecting some Disneyesque cartoon will be rudely shocked when the hero of the piece, an extraterrestrial fowl, gets a job as towel boy (towel duck?) at a sex club. And small children likely will be frightened by some of the bogeymen Howard encounters during his travails on Earth.
But if you’re a fan of Howard’s illustrated adventures in Marvel Comics magazines, or a moviegoer with a taste for the weirdly hip and the excitingly inventive, you should flock to Howard the Duck. True, the final third gets a bit top-heavy with car crashes, fiery explosions and assorted other pyrotechnics. (Can anyone in Hollywood make a comedy these days without wrecking a car or blowing something up?) But most of the film is delightfully droll and daffy, reminiscent of Ghostbusters in its fanciful blend of comic-book apocalypse and off-the-wall lunacy.
Howard, a cigar-chomping duck from another world, is accidentally drawn from his planet to ours by an experimental Laser-Spectrascope. Back home, he’s just one of the drakes, a fine-feathered fellow who works as an advertising copywriter. But after he crash lands in Cleveland, he must become a hero — to save the human woman he loves (Lea Thompson), and to protect Earth from a far more fearsome creature brought down by the laser machine.
Director Willard Huyck and producer Gloria Katz, the husband-and-wife team who co-wrote American Graffiti, have collaborated on a witty script that, naturally, gives Howard all the best lines. He’s quite a wise-quacker, this Howard, quick to dismiss humans as “hairless apes” and merciless in his vengeance against duck hunters. But he can be sweetly vulnerable, especially when, as a human character notes, he’s waddling in self-pity.
Huyck and Katz have a lot of laughs with Howard, but they treat him with the utmost respect. As loony as things get, Howard’s plight as a stranger in a strange land is presented in a very sympathetic manner. And while some humans are frightened by Howard, most people react to his presence with remarkable equanimity. This deft commingling of the utterly fantastic and the rationally casual is a large part of the movie’s unique charm.
Even so, Howard the Duck wouldn’t work at all if the film couldn’t sustain the illusion of a 3-foot-tall, living and breathing and feathered creature. Fortunately, designer Nikki Rodis-Jamero and a team of special effects wizards from Industrial Light and Magic make the sardonic drake look surprisingly realistic. (This is probably the only movie you’ll ever see that lists “Featherers” and “Duck Coach” in the closing credits.)
Eight different actors and actresses take turns inside the duck suit to make Howard’s movements, if not graceful, then at least lifelike. Whoever provides Howard’s voice isn’t credited, but he or she is just perfect.
Lea Thompson makes a resourceful heroine as Beverly Switzler, a rock band musician who gives aid and comfort to Howard. And newcomer Tim Robbins, a Dan Aykroyd lookalike, is amusingly buffoonish as a geeky scientist. Jorli McLain makes the most of a small role as a dippy waitress in a roadside diner.
But the only human in the cast capable of upstaging Howard is Jeffrey Jones (Amadeus, Ferris Bueller’s Day Off ), who plays Dr. Walter Jennings, inventor of the Laser Spectrascope. When Jennings’ body is invaded by an unfriendly alien called the Dark Overlord of the Universe, Jones is transformed into something that looks like a cross between the fire-scarred Freddy of Nightmare on Elm Street and Dr. Lizardo of The Adventures of Buckaroo Banzai. (His growling voice, evoking memories of The Exorcist, belongs to actor Richard Kiley.) Jones looks like he’s having a great time playing a superhuman villain, and his high spirits are contagious.
The dialogue abounds in clever references to classic movies. (“Great Duck in heaven!” cries our hero, sounding much like Edward G. Robinson in Little Caesar. “Is this the end of Howard?”) Even funnier, though, are the throwaway sight gags, and the oddball touches visible in Peter Jamison’s production design.
