Last night, I went to my local Nitehawk and watched Lucasfilm’s infamous 1986 disaster Howard the Duck on the big screen, my courage bolstered by a couple of grapefruit flavored cocktails and a soft pretzel. I figured it would pair well with the other much-ballyhooed mess of note, Madame Web, which I saw in a nearly empty theater last week. There was only one other audience member, and he was pretty clearly there to vape.
I have not seen Howard the Duck since I was a kid, so I would like to report to my fellow Lucasfilm completionists, that my suspicions were confirmed. Howard the Duck is a far superior shitshow than Madame Web.
For the record (who keeps this record?), I absolutely love bad movies. If one’s only measure of pleasure is excellence, one is missing out on the joy of folly. But not just every bad movie is a pleasure. Shitty movies that are truly worth your time aren’t merely incompetently made, they’re gloriously stupid. Laugh until nose comes out of your milk stupid. They don’t feel like watching someone fail, they feel like watching someone discover they’re lactose intolerant during their Oscar acceptance speech. Like Mel Brooks said: “Tragedy is when I cut my finger. Comedy is when I fall into an open sewer and die.”
My go-to example of exquisite garbage is Jennifer Lopez’s The Boy Next Door. It’s elevated by one scene in particular, although the whole thing is worth a night off with your substance of choice. JLo’s soon-to-be-murderous Lothario gives her, as a gift, a First Edition of The Illiad. I repeat, a FIRST EDITION OF THE ILLIAD, which was written in, um, 800 BC in Ancient Greek. He found it, apparently in soft cover, in a box in someone’s yard. He gives it to English Teacher Jennifer Lopez (she wears glasses to make the point), who is touched, I tell you, by his thoughtfulness!
That scene is wonderful. Just think about how many people worked on that movie, adults, who entirely failed to object to that absurd mistake. Missed it or didn’t feel empowered to point it out.
It truly takes a village.
Howard the Duck looks like it took a village too. It’s a comparable scale production to plenty of other 80s movies and features sequences in outer space, a semi-realized lead character that I’m sure was a headache to film with from start to finish, concert scenes with music produced and written by none other than Thomas Dolby, an extended (I mean endless) sequence where Tim Robbins (yes, Tim Robbins!) and Howard fly around to evade the police, lots and lots of duck puns. I mean, there’s just a lot going on here. It doesn’t really look expensive, per se, but it certainly looks like a lot of money was spent.
Howard the Duck feels like a lot of effort was put into it, to no avail. While a quick search will tell you that director Willard Huyck and his co-screenwriter Gloria Katz (who both worked with Lucas as writers on American Graffiti, Temple of Doom and Radioland Murders) believed Howard the Duck should be an animated film; they did try to bring this comic book to life with the full efforts of ILM. They were trying to do something that, at the time, was difficult. It feels like they just reached beyond their grasp.
Remember, comic-book adaptations weren’t very common when Howard the Duck came out. 1978s Superman was able to make a man fly, but strained to really put comic-book action on the big screen. It was carried by the fantastic screenplay. Tim Burton’s Batman was three years away. This movie was trying to adapt very difficult material with the limited translation-tools of the time. The movie excels when you get some great classic Phil Tippett designs and stop motion late in the film, but Howard himself looks like a first draft and barely expressive. It seems like he needed more time in the incubator. These days, Howard looks like this:
But in 1986, he looked like this:
I mean. Yeah.
So, one might say Howard the Duck was ahead of its time. One might say that, if they were being incredibly generous. One might also say that Howard the Duck was very much of its time. It’s one of the most eighties artifacts I’ve ever seen. From the hairstyles, which are incredible, to the tropes (cities are filled with homeless people and dangerous punks!), to the sexual politics (guys are nerdy losers looking for a date, women are to be ogled and won), to the references (Crazy Eddie’s), the whole thing is as 80s as cassette tapes and MTV. If you have nostalgia for the 80s (I mean, actual nostalgia, you lived through it) you’ll find a heaping pile of sense memory in this weird movie.
The biggest sin, though, of Howard the Duck is not the production values or how dated it is. It’s the tone. It’s hard to tell who this movie was made for except, you know, me? The movie veers from way-too-adult to extremely juvenile. We see bare-breasted duck-women on Duckworld in the middle of a bath. We see Howard reading Playduck and looking at the centerfold. The opening scenes will make any 80s kid feel the urge to rewind them for their spank bank (boobs, said the hormonal children of the 80s!), but then, stop, because they feature ducks. Naked ducks with exposed nipples. It’s highly questionable.
Then, we get the romance between Howard and Lea Thompson’s Beverly.
Let’s be clear: Lea Thompson was in her full-on adorable phase when this movie was shot. She’s got a crimped, hair-sprayed look that borders on parody, but she’s sexy as heck. Little Matt Freeman was certainly a fan of Lea Thompson. So, no objections to her presence on that level. She remains a fox.
But Howard, a duck, is her inter-species boyfriend in this movie. He hubba-hubbas her in her very revealing underwear. They kiss (albeit in silhouette). The characters know it’s weird, the movie knows it’s weird, but it doesn’t prevent a scene where Lea Thompson and Howard ‘joke’ about having sex as she strokes his downy feathers. His feathers rise to imply he is aroused. It’s deeply uncomfortable.
Which is, believe it or not, a lot of fun. Howard the Duck flitters from horny to wholesome, from ambitious to atrocious, but it’s never boring. It’s too strange to be boring. From the totally unhinged performance of Jeffrey Jones as the Dark Overlord, to appearances from future Oscar nominee David Paymer and Oscar winner Tim Robbins, to Muppet Movie style irreverence and then End-of-the-World stakes, the movie is crawling with stimulus. I wonder if it was fun to make. It looks like it was. The results are not good, not good at all, but they were certainly going for…something!
On the contrary, no one in front of or behind the camera of Madame Web appears to have gone for, well, anything. The movie looks and feels like no one involved particularly wanted to make it. It feels as if you’re watching IP in action. You can hear the Sony Executives say: “Spider-Man is popular, this could appeal to women, let’s put some product placement in it, and shoot this puppy!” (If they had shot a puppy, it might have elicited some actual emotion.)
There are actors that audiences like in this movie, and they are not good. Did you like Adam Scott in Severance or Parks and Rec? He’s not as good in Madame Web. Did you like Sydney Sweeney in White Lotus or Anyone But You? I’ve heard people do! You wouldn’t have a clue why from watching her bland performance in this. Expect great things from SJ Clarkson after a distinguished career directing great television? Prepare for disappointment!
And then there’s Dakota Johnson herself. She’s famously bored of all this, which is what I guess happens when nepotism meets a green screen. She gives a performance that I could call disconnected but feels more…is entitled too strong a word?
Look, everyone is bad in this movie, but she’s the lead. Her face is on the poster. I know a lot of actors out there doing self-tapes and scraping by, begging to be cast as Woman Who Orders A Hot Dog. Dakota Johnson was born into the business, effectively born on third base. Here, she doesn’t even try to trot half-heartedly to home plate for the team. If you’re a famous winner of the Hollywood Genetic Lottery, I actually think it’s not terribly funny when you phone it in. I think it’s kind of gross.
To be fair, that’s me being a little too serious about something deeply unserious. Madame Web’s line-readings are disinterested and out of sync, meme-worthy for being lackadaisical on every level, but it’s not as if this story could have been saved by better performances. It’s a movie that makes absolutely (checks watch) no sense.
First of all, if you asked me what this story was saying about Spider-Man, I would have to phone a friend. This appears to be some sort of Peter Parker origin-story about mystical spider people from Peru who happen to have passed their powers onto a work-friend of Ben Parker (?) but what does that have to do with the radioactive spider that bites Peter Parker later on? I mean, search me, I’m at a loss.
The movie lazily operates on the idea that Madame Web (never called Madame Web in the film) is fated by the … I dunno, Great Web of Peru?… to protect three future Spider Women, who will someday have powers, that they never actually have in the movie we’re watching. That’s right folks, we have three young actors in the movie who only appear as superheros in dream sequences. Most of the movie, they complain, embody exhausting teens who don’t listen, and run away sometimes.
Did I laugh as I watched this debacle. Sure, I did, a couple of times. I’ve never seen a movie so obsessed with CPR and Pepsi. I mean, there’s a lot of Pepsi in this movie. And a lot of CPR. That’s a rare combination. The final scene of Madame Web is also a hoot. Dakota Johnson’s final form, smug about being able to see the future, wearing silly sunglasses, rolling around in a motorized wheelchair, is something I would pay real money to see cosplayed. I’ve also never seen a movie that ends by showing you the movie you could have been watching if anyone could have been bothered to make it. It’s comic, and no mistake.
But unlike Howard the Duck, and other truly bad movies before it, Madame Web just doesn’t seem to be putting in the effort. It’s perfunctorily performed, sure, but it’s also not very interesting to look at. For a movie with a premise as crazy as “I was born in a Peru in the cave of the Las Arañas tribe of Spider People and now I have cosmic deja vu,” it primarily looks like, well, Queens. Movies like Howard the Duck had to make due with practical effects, puppets, and stop motion. Movies like Madame Web can create just about anything they can imagine in the computer. It make the failure to bring something interesting to see is even more egregious. Usually a bad script is made up for by at least a little CGI smoke and mirrors. Madame Web doesn’t even muster the energy to give us that.
Both movies are also period pieces: one by accident, the other on purpose. Howard the Duck, as I said, embodies the excesses of the 80s. Madam Web is supposed to (for some reason) take place in New York City, 2003.
As someone who lived in New York City in 2003? I can say that it was just post 9/11, and there was a crazy blackout that summer. It was a tense, strange time in the city. None of that is even touched on in Madame Web, which begs the question, why exactly is it set in that era? The only thing Madame Web seems to conjure from that era the existence of Britney Spears. Seems like the bare minimum.
The bare minimum could be the subtitle for Madame Web. Howard the Duck is excessively messy and dumb. It’s inappropriately horny and ill-advised and totally absurd. Madame Web doesn’t even must up the energy to be flirty, let alone horny. It’s neither loud enough to annoy or subdued enough to be a choice. Things happen and then it’s over.
Just as movies can be good for different reasons, there are types of terrible. Lucasfilm is one of the most successful studios in history, but it’s produced some real flops. (Anyone remember Strange Magic? More American Grafitti? Radioland Murders?) Even some of its box office successes have been viewed with a public side-eye (Crystal Skull, The Phantom Menace, to name just two.) That’s because it was driven by the peculiarities of its leadership, who put real effort into stubbornly seeing even the most unusual vision through.
Madame Web fails because it seems like no one cared enough to actually make it. It’s a release date of a picture. It feels like contractual obligations, an opportunity to sell soda. It’s a movie that’s more fun to describe than witness, to pick on than see. Talking about it is a blast. Watching it? Is not.
But Howard the Duck?
Has to be seen to be believed.
Loved this Matt. I am genuinely jazzed to see MW when it eventually meanders onto streaming.
Thanks for sharing!