Howard the Duck

1986 box office sensation

Rating: n/r (I couldn't finish it.)

Plot: A duck named Howard and his recliner is yanked from his planet and ends up in an alley somewhere in Cleveland. He meets a punk rock girl who takes him to a janitor to help him get back home. There's probably a bad guy later on, and I'm sure Howard has to try to phone home with a mouth full of Reece's. It's just another one of those cases where somebody has ripped off the plot of E.T. and managed to make an even more disagreeable movie.

The only movie I can think of that might be worse than a trip to Cleveland, Ohio. I watched this for three reasons:

1) I didn't think it could possibly be as bad as I remembered or as everybody seems to think.

2) If it is as bad as I remember or as everybody seems to think, it might fall into "good-bad" territory, and I could point and laugh at it.

3) I wanted to use a "quacking up" pun on the blog.

Unfortunately, it's not either of the first two. It's a terrible movie--poor writing, embarrassing effects, a main character who is impossible to like, auxiliary characters who aren't any better, an incoherent plot, dozens of details that date it--but it's nowhere near entertaining. It's excruciating, so excruciating that I gave up on it after Tim Robbins' second appearance. Like the majority of decisions in my life, the decision to watch Howard the Duck was a bad one, leaving me depressed and very unlikely to quack up any time soon.