With a massive financial investment and top notch production team including one George Lucas, Howard the Duck was destined to be the biggest blockbuster of the hot summer of 1986. You guessed it: It bombed bad. The movie barely covered its production cost, got panned by the critics and earned the dubious honor of winning the Razzie Award for the worst picture of the year.

The biggest problem here is the title character who can barely carry through a trailer, much less a full length feature film. Howard, the extra terrestrial talking duck is one of the biggest misses in character design in the recorded cinema history; a visually off-putting anthropomorphistic freak of the nature who is constantly sarcastic, but never actually witty, always a bit of a jerk, but very rarely a loveable one.

If you can overlook the minute detail of the main character sucking some hairy balls, the rest of the movie is not actually that bad. Production quality is top of the line and the stop-motion special effects in the film’s final sequences are pretty amazingly well executed.

It’s hard to make drastic changes when a huge production is already underway – but this is surely a case where they should’ve cut their losses at some point, ditched the duck and replaced him with something else.

80s-o-meter: 95%

Total: 58%