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Credit: Marvel<\/p>\n
Thu 28 May 2026 18:51, UK <\/p>\n
Marvel\u2019s first foray into cinema was a full-on affair. The very first flick in their roster was\u00a0Howard The Duck. <\/p>\n
The feature-length bonanza sees a sarcastic humanoid quacker sucked through time and space to end up on Earth, where he must save the day from a gruesome alien invasion, along with the help of a nerdy male scientist and a struggling female rock singer. While the franchise evidently had all of its central tenets in place, a few feathers still had to be pruned and fluffed in the Marvel<\/a> bower before they could conquer commercial cinema.\u00a0<\/p>\n There are oddities aplenty in this bizarro bill \u2013 including Robin Williams rage quitting the duck role during production, George Lucas inexplicably betting his fortune on it being a smash hit, and the odd seedy segment where Howard gets a gig working at a bathhouse and finds himself thrust into a pool with a cavorting couple \u2013 but the\u00a0pi\u00e8ce de resistance of peculiarity is perhaps the most obscene sex scene in Hollywood history.\u00a0<\/p>\n What makes the sequence especially bizarre is how casually the film presents it. Rather than treating the moment as shocking or transgressive, Howard the Duck leans into the absurdity with a kind of misplaced confidence that only deepens the discomfort.<\/p>\n The Shape of Water\u00a0might have been strange, but at least nobody tried to force themselves onto a spiralling corkscrew cock, unlike Lea Thompson\u2019s character, Beverley Switzler, in this old-school, odious oddity. \u201cWell, sex appeal: some guys got it,\u201d the three-foot duck flippantly muses, \u201cand some guys don\u2019t.\u201d The strange thing is, poor old Howard is strangely sexualised right throughout the film. The feathery fiend is even strip-searched and thumbs through some duck-based one-handed literature in an early scene.\u00a0<\/p>\n \u201cFor all its faults, Howard the Duck remains strangely unforgettable\u201d<\/p>\n The film repeatedly blurs the line between parody and genuine erotic tension, never fully deciding whether audiences are supposed to laugh at the innuendo or take it at face value. That uncertainty has helped cement the movie\u2019s reputation as one of Hollywood\u2019s strangest mainstream releases.<\/p>\n It seems like a large part of the film is geared towards this fateful section of the script: Howard T. Duck: \u201cI\u2019ve given up trying to assimilate. I\u2019ve got to get back to my own kind! [notices Beverly\u2019s behind as he watches her crawl across the top of her bed in her underwear] Although, I have developed a greater appreciation for the female version of the human anatomy. Arooooo!\u201d<\/p>\n What plays out thereafter is Hollywood at its \u2018I can\u2019t believe my eyes\u2019 finest. And this must be stressed, it isn\u2019t that I\u2019m some sheltered pup unfamiliar with the surrealist obscenity of El Topo or whatever, but this is, essentially, a kid\u2019s film. And now, suddenly, we have the implication that a duck\u2019s rearing spam javelin is spiralling the bed sheet towards the ceiling while the scantily clad rock singer, Beverley Switzler, tries to force herself onto the avian alien to spare her from lonely night woes, refusing to heed his hesitant objections as though the duck doth protest too much. Lord knows what this obscenity says about the male gaze of Hollywood<\/a>. <\/p>\n The perfect proof for the odd placement of this would-be PG bestiality comes from Thompson\u2019s own daughter, Zoey Deutch, who later became an actress herself and when she appeared on Conan<\/a>, she told the host: \u201cThere is a particular scene in the film in which my mother makes love to a duck, and I saw it. So, what\u2019s the next step: I go to my father, and I go to my mother, and I\u2019m like, \u2018Oh my God, I know the duck\u2019s name is Howard, dad your name is Howard\u2014this is complicated.\u2019 [They say] \u2018Dad will love you more than this duck will\u2019. I was making a case for [my dad]. I thought my mother was going to leave my dad for a duck.\u201d<\/p>\n Comically adding: \u201cEventually, they were like, \u2018Oh this is for grown-ups. You weren\u2019t supposed to watch that. It\u2019s for adults.\u2019 So at school when people would ask me what my mother does for a living I would say, \u2018She\u2019s an actress\u2026 in adult films\u2019.\u201d In many ways, when it comes to Howard The Duck, she wasn\u2019t all that wrong. <\/p>\n Weirdly, this scene has also created somewhat of a creative legacy. Once again, duck f\u2013king hit the headlines as Larry the quack ruffled a few feathers when he got intimate with a lady in the rom-com satire episode, \u2018The Woman Who Was Fed By A Duck\u2019. You\u2018d do well to come out of that affair with a clean bill of health. <\/p>\n For all its faults, Howard the Duck remains strangely unforgettable. Few comic-book movies have embraced such unapologetic weirdness, and even fewer have produced scenes so baffling that they continue to be discussed nearly four decades later.<\/p>\n<\/p>\n
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