Bottom Feeders: Worst First Marvel Movie Ever.

 

Welcome back to bottom feeders.  It’s the twice monthly column where I watch a movie you never have and tell you why you made the right decision.  Today we’re going to talk about how the first ever Marvel Comic adaptation ended up being about a talking duck and why you can hate George Lucas even more for it.  He, by the way, is the man who by 1986 had made three Star Wars and two Indiana Jones films and could’ve done any fucking movie he wanted to.  He could have pitched “Hitler Was Right: An Adventure In Blackface” and got that shit green-lit in a heartbeat.

He could have, even more crazily, made X-Men, Iron Man, The Hulk…fuck, he could have made Namor I guess, and even Aquaman thinks that guy’s a pussy.  There is a huge list of characters in the Marvel pantheon who are more suited to a movie adaptation.  Howard the Duck was just a bit character they created to throw a couple funnies around.  So how did we get stuck with him?  There are two very important reasons.  The first is that someone destroyed George Lucas’ childhood.  I don’t know who did it but I applaud their efforts because they did the most thorough job of anything I’ve ever seen.  Maybe he was molested by Satan.  We’ll never know.

The second is that George Lucas loves money more than most of us will ever love our own children and he makes all that money through merchandising.  That’s because in order to make Star Wars he agreed to give up his salary in exchange for merchandising rights, a move that simultaneously created one of the best movies and worst people ever.  To this new Bizarro Lucas, movies are just big fancy toy commercials.  Let those two facts make out on your mind couch for a while and you’ll realize that you now have a grown man with no concept of childhood spending millions of dollars trying to sell toys to children.  Why would someone think that kids would want to play with toy ducks rather than the millions of real Marvel action dolls they already were?  Exactly.  Welcome to crazy.

If you’ve ever read Axe Cop, the comic book written by a seven year old, you’ll notice that there’s lots of explosions and fighting and shit just generally going down and not so many cute, bumbling characters.  That’s because kids are awesome and they want to be big adult badasses with guns.  If they were the only people who made kids’ movies they would all be amazing.  Unfortunately, this movie involves George Lucas, who I’m willing to bet doesn’t read Axe Cop and who thinks that all children want to do is hug something furry and shit money all over the place.

So as you can already imagine, the entire plot of Howard the Duck is that Howard is a Duck.  Feel like there should be more there? Fuck that shit.  All that plot stuff gets in the way of what’s really important: duck puns.  This movie is so packed full of duck jokes it’ll have you QUACKING up.  Did reading that hurt a bit?  Good.  Now just imagine an excruciating 110 minutes of that and it’s like you’ve seen the movie too.  The writers were so busy finding things that rhymed with bill or tail or wing that they forgot to even mention a villain until almost an hour into it.  It’s a classic case of someone trying to dumb a movie down for children, not realizing that they’re actually way dumber than the average child.  It’s also important to note that in the comics, Howard the Duck is a bit of a sour-puss.  That’s like his thing.  It’s not original but it’s what gives him his character.  During development, Lucas decided to play that down, wanting to make Howard more kid-friendly.  Basically he took a character with one clearly defined trait and said “Yeah, replace that with nothing.”  Here, listed in bullet points, are some other terrible decisions Lucas made, just for the fun of it:

• When told by the screenwriters (and common sense) that it should be an animated film, he opted instead to make it a live action summer blockbuster.
• During screenwriting, he specifically decided to focus on special effects rather than story or plot.  This is the exact same thing as focusing on the pots and pans you’re using to cook instead of ingredients.  It’s also the exact same thing as being stupid.
• After deciding there wasn’t enough time to shoot an extremely long, stupid scene featuring a superlight airplane, he hired an entire third unit to film it instead of just changing it to something good.

Getting back on track, George Lucas erased Howard’s personality because kids hate things being likable, but he also wanted something to draw the adults in.  Mostly adults that like to fantasize about ducks having sex.  So much so that there are no less than three references to it just within the first five minutes, one of which is just a shot of some sweet bare duck boobs.

If human women are more your thing, don’t worry – There’s plenty of ducks having sex with those too.  By the way, if you ever watched Back to the Future and wondered why you didn’t really see Lea Thompson in a lot else it’s because you just don’t come back from stripping down and climbing into bed with a midget in a duck suit while crooning “oh, Duckie!”  There are porn stars who couldn’t do that and keep being in porn, so you can definitely forget your big fancy Hollywood career.  If you think I’m over reacting, bear in mind that in order to prepare for that scene, months were spent making sure the feathers on Howard’s head rose just right to indicate his arousal.  You know who pays such close attention to a detail like that in a movie that’s marketed for children?  People who should be euthanized, that’s who.

Ok, so it’s a two hour long toy commercial full of weird interracial duck on human sex, but is it the worst movie ever?  Sadly, no…which is kind of depressing.  There’s much worse out there.   You can even squeeze a few laughs out of this one, but each time you do a little piece of your soul escapes.  It has just enough of the 80’s nostalgia factor and cornball appeal to keep it bearable.  Howard the Duck even has a bit of a cult following now, which is only rational in the sense that cults are for stupid crazy people.  Also, Lea Thompson is actually pretty badass.  If she were having sex with humans, I’d be totally into it.  She’s sexy, she’s a decent actress and even her songs (which she actually sings herself) aren’t too bad.

The real moral of Howard the Duck is one that was new back then but we’ve seen a million times since: great directors aren’t great because they’re born that way, they’re great because they give a fuck.  George Lucas risked his entire career to make Star Wars.  He wanted it that bad.  He fought with the studios over everything. It was a giant pain in the ass but he made sure that for something to make it into that movie, it had to be absolutely amazing.  This movie is the exact moment he started sucking because it’s the complete opposite of that – because it’s the first time that everyone, including himself, thought he should just be able to do whatever he wanted because he’s George Lucas.  This movie is terrible but it will never be worse than whatever movie George Lucas makes next, because he doesn’t care enough to try and create something good and nobody else will force him to.

 

 

What you should watch instead: Red Tails should be coming out before too long.  It’s a Lucasfilms production about the Tuskegee Airmen.  Nobody understands the plight of the World War II era black man better than George Lucas, who is known for never including characters based on retarded racial stereotypes in his movies.

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