Director Willard Huyck
Starring Lea Thompson, Jeffrey Jones, Tim Robbins & Chip Zien as the voice of Howard T Duck
Rated PG
Score 3/6

A sarcastic humanoid duck is pulled from his homeworld to Earth where he must stop a hellish alien invasion with the help of a nerdy scientist and a cute struggling female rock singer who fancies him.

Long before the MCEU or the DCEU there where comic book movies like Howard the Duck. Now for those of you who did not know there is a lot of ill-will for this movie so much that the movie was nominated for seven Golden Raspberry Awards in 1986 and won 4 and due to the movie’s poor box office performance George Lucas who was heavily in debt at the time (having just built the $50-million Skywalker Ranch complex) and was counting on this film to get him back in the black. When it bombed, he was forced to start selling off assets to stay afloat. His friend Steve Jobs, the CEO of Apple Computer, offered to help by buying Lucasfilm’s newly-launched CGI animation division for a price well above market value, and Lucas, in desperate straits and thankful for the assistance, agreed. That division eventually become Pixar Animation Studios.

Now I suppose it would be easy to open with both barrels on Howard the Duck, even if it isn’t duck season, because the worst Visual effects Raspberry that Howard the Duck won was completely justified because you expect more from a movie in which George Lucas was involved in even though it was released in 1986 and these effects really did not age that well. Tim Robbins did come across as bit of a goofball but this is still a watchable movie just so long as you don’t take it very seriously, something that seems to be done all of the time with some of the more modern comic book movies. Lea Thompson gave a good performance her role as Beverly really couldn’t be defined as being either the ‘screamer’ or the ‘action person’ it really seemed that Beverly had a foot in either camp. I also loved how the seduction scene was played in what could only be described as a ‘be careful what you wish for’ kind of way.