Howard the Duck is the type of movie that sits somewhere in the back your brain, just sort of resting there taking up space and you have no idea why. It came out in 1986, presented by George Lucas and you can tell that there was a lot of money spent to make this look as good as possible for the time. What that seems to indicate, as with Willow and The Radioland Murders, was that Lucas was using a lot of what he produced during this time to test new visual effects. At least that’s my impression.

Howard the Duck tells the story of Howard, a duck, who is ripped from his planet and dragged to Earth, where he meets a young woman named Beverley, played by Lea Thompson, who attempts to help him get home. Tim Robbins is also here. As is Jeffrey Jones as the bad guy.

The movie is really not very good. It’s story is not well constructed, some of the dialogue is very bad, and it is, at just under two hours, way too long. Thompson and Robbins are over acting for the most part, as is Jones.

On the good side, some of that overacting works for the show. The animatronics on Howard’s face are really good and he did have some good one liners.

That isn’t enough to save this movie though. I, for some reason, had some fun memories about it but they’re long gone now. This was hard to watch.

I can’t recommend it, at all, unless you are interested in what kind of technological stuff Lucas was working on at the time.

-all photos via IMDb.com.