NJC+ Film Club: Howard the Duck
It Really Is As Bad As They Said, But It Also has San Francisco in the 80s so....
When I came up with the idea of writing about movies and films set in San Francisco, I did so not realizing that the Vogue Theater has a monthly program of films set in San Francisco. As luck would have it, this month’s entry, “Howard the Duck” was a movie I also had a copy of (!) and figured it’d be easy enough to write a post and have it sync up with the awesome Vogue Theater’s programming.
The only thing I really remember about this movie when it came out was, to put it mildly, it sucked. I saw it 1986 and I remember the (very detailed) song one of my high school friends composed in the car after the movie about how much “Howard the Duck” sucked (get it?) more than I remember much of the film. When I sat down to rewatch it , decades later, I figured that perhaps time had been unkind to this film, and it deserved a fresh look.
Then I watched it. Wow, this was a stinker. That said, I think it fell victim to how movies were made back then, and the fact the subject matter was satirical in nature, but that got lost in the translation to the big screen, which is fairly common. Plus, there were some technical limitations, relating to the fact that the main character is basically a giant puppet that has weird looking eyes, and the many mistakes add up fast.
However, this isn’t a review of the movie per se (and you should totally pay to go see it at the Vogue and support local theaters!). Instead, let’s look at the movie, which was filmed here in San Francisco, but is set in Cleveland. So first question, as always is - did they really film here in town?
On this, for some scenes, the answer is yes. Not as much as you’d think, but what did make it in is a time capsule from the mid 1980s. Here’s a scene where Lea Thompson and Howard the Duck take a cab to The Big Science Institute of Cleveland and you’ll see good ol’ Irving and 9th make a cameo:
This trip down Irving Street continues and we see a little more of the Inner Sunset:
And finally, they arrive at the old Science Academy (the geographic consistency here is pretty good, much better than, say, Basic Instinct):
Aside from these scenes, most of the film takes place on soundstages and so on, with a few scenes of a zany madcap car/airplane chase that look like they might have been filmed either around the Bay Area, or maybe Southern California.
The mid 1980s were a booming time for movies set in San Francisco. The James Bond movie “A View to a Kill” was filmed around the same time, and “Star Trek IV: The One With the Whales In It”. to name just a few. I think either one of these would have more scenes of our city in the 80s, and I will write about both soon enough.
I’m not sure a rewatch of “Howard the Duck” is worth it just for the San Francisco cameos alone, but as a cinematic artifact, it is kind of interesting to watch. After a while the film’s inability to decide if it’s a sci-fi movie, a zany comic book flick, or something satirical gets to be a bit much, but some of the 80s era jokes are kinda funny, to those of a certain age.
However, sitting in a theater with a crowd would make this a lot more fun, so despite my critiques, I would urge you to consider buying a ticket to see it this week at the Vogue. If you can’t make it to the Vogue this week, but still want to support our local cinemas, then I would suggest contributing to CinemaSF, whose mission is to keep indie theaters alive here in town.
What movies from the 80s do you remember being set in San Francisco? Do you remember seeing “Howard the Duck,” or any other film/tv production while it was being made here in town? Discuss in the comments!