10 Movies That Completely Missed The Point
3. Howard The Duck (1986)
One of the most infamous what-the-hell flops in cinema history, the what-the-hell doesn’t come from trying to figure out how Howard The Duck wasn’t a hit. It’s a goofball adult sci-fi fantasy about a wisecracking duck facing down evil. There’s no built in audience for that.
No, what’s amazing is that this bad, listless soup was greenlit to be adapted from the cult favourite Marvel comic book in the first place, never mind that it was shot, finished and released for real live people to look at.
Sure, plenty of people have pulled the ‘so bad it’s good’ card here (it's not), including the screenwriter, one Gloria Katz, who expressed her frustration with poor reviews by saying,
"It's a film about a duck from outer space... It's not supposed to be an existential experience... We're supposed to have fun with this concept, but for some reason reviewers weren't able to get over that problem."
Well, unfortunately for Katz, that’s exactly what the source material was: an existential experience. Howard The Duck creator, the late Steve Gerber,
“Howard the Duck was never a "humor" comic in the traditional sense. Howard wasn't even a comedic character. He was frequently depressed, congenitally rude, and had a bad tendency to waddle all over other people's feelings. The humor in the series derived from the absurdity of his situation – a sentient duck from another dimension, trapped in a world of what he called "talking hairless apes" – and from Howard's mordant observations on the world around him…”
The comic book was bitingly sharp satire; the film recast the premise as a crappy sitcom. One paints with a fine brush; the other with a roller, and in the wrong colour. There may be no other adaptation of a comic book in history that’s this wilfully tone deaf.