Oh my.
It's no secret that I like George Lucas. I think he's a brilliant filmmaker with a tremendous imagination. THX 1138 was inspired and original. American Grafitti and The Radioland Murders were heartfelt nostalgia. Willow and Labyrinth were fabulous additions to the fantasy genre. All 5 Star Wars movies are spectacular. And who can forget the Indiana Jones series which teams up Lucas and Spielberg for some of the most exciting adventure flicks of all time.
Then there's Howard.
Howard the Duck is an embarrassing grease stain on the flannel shirt of George Lucas's career. It's a typical fish-out-of-water story involving an evolved alien duck who falls in love with the heart-of-gold, just-trying-to-make-it rock star (played by Lea Thompson). The whole movie is peppered with bad duck puns (and by "peppered" I mean "saturated") and horrible dialogue that makes Star Wars look witty and natural, and because one of the main characters is a musician, we're treated to horrible mid-80's hair-pop.
The basic story goes like this: Howard is an evolved alien duck wwho lives on an earth-like planet which is populated with evolved alien ducks (whose evolutionary history has traded their wings in for mammary glands). One day, Howard is mysteriously sucked from his apartment, through space, into an alley in Cleveland where he is promptly beaten up by street thugs. He saves Lea Thompson's life, and they become friends. Lea Thompson has a scientist friend, Tim Robbins, who knows some guys, and they figure out how he got there. It was some big space laser. That's all you need to know. So, they all go back to the space laser place to send him back, when they realize that they're only 45 minutes into the movie, and they need to stretch it out quite a bit.
So, the laser malfuntions again, and an evil dark overlord comes to earth and takes over the body of one of the scientists. It's up to Howard and Friends to stop him from bringing the rest of the dark overlords to earth and destroying it. (They never explain why they would want to do a thing like that, but that's ok, since they're evil.) The overlord captures Lea Thompson, and Howard and Tim Robbins have to save her (and stop the overlords). They go back to where the laser is and blow it up with some hi-tech neutron distuptor thingy that just happened to be there. They also kill the overlords. Howard gets a job managing Lea Thompson's band, and Lea Thompson writes a song about how much she loves him. There's a big concert at the end with Howard jamming on a guitar. It really really hurt.