This was the Christy pick for July. It's one of the few movies she's recommended that makes me feel we could one day come to an accord. Howard (Chip Ziel (voice)/Ed Gale (body)) is a med school dropout coming to the realization that his life is not going as well as he'd planned, when he is suddenly yanked from his comfortable apartment and beamed through space to crash land on an alien planet. It is filled with hairless apes who gawk and gape at him as if he were the weird one, instead of just a mild-mannered duck in a bizarre situation. He lucks into meeting Beverly (Lea Thompson), a punk singer with a heart of gold who tries to help him get back to his home planet. She contacts Phil (Tim Robbins), a lab assistant at a local museum but he can't get past the scientific "miracle" of a talking duck. It isn't until Howard and Beverly meet Dr. Walter Jenning (Jeffrey Jones) that they start to have some hope. Dr. Jenning is a physicist (I know but just go with it) who was testing a machine to help him measure dark matter in space but which accidentally beamed Howard from his home. Now, all they have to do is reverse the beam and send him back. But, of course, things are never that easy and a creature of pure evil gets beamed down as well, taking up residence in Dr. Jenning before kidnapping Beverly to serve as a host to more of his kind. It's up to Howard to evade the police, track down Evil Jenning, and rescue his interplanetary inter-species love. Sometimes, a duck's gotta do what a duck's gotta do.
Two words for you people: Cult Classic. There's really no in-between on this one. You're either okay with a 3 ft-tall, cigar-smoking duck having a relationship with a human woman or you're not. I had a minor bout of panic when I thought they were going to show the two characters having sex but, fortunately, I was spared. Everything else is just 80's shenanigans. Very much like Buckaroo Banzai but with a duck instead of RoboCop.
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