The most obscene sex scene in Hollywood history is a 1986 disaster
Marvel’s first foray into cinema was a full-on affair. The very first flick in their roster was Howard The Duck.
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 bower before they could conquer commercial cinema.
There are oddities aplenty in this bizarro bill – 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 – but the pièce de resistance of peculiarity is perhaps the most obscene sex scene in Hollywood history.
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.
The Shape of Water might have been strange, but at least nobody tried to force themselves onto a spiralling corkscrew cock, unlike Lea Thompson’s character, Beverley Switzler, in this old-school, odious oddity. “Well, sex appeal: some guys got it,” the three-foot duck flippantly muses, “and some guys don’t.” 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.
“For all its faults, Howard the Duck remains strangely unforgettable”
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’s reputation as one of Hollywood’s strangest mainstream releases.
It seems like a large part of the film is geared towards this fateful section of the script: Howard T. Duck: “I’ve given up trying to assimilate. I’ve got to get back to my own kind! [notices Beverly’s 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!”
What plays out thereafter is Hollywood at its ‘I can’t believe my eyes’ finest. And this must be stressed, it isn’t that I’m some sheltered pup unfamiliar with the surrealist obscenity of El Topo or whatever, but this is, essentially, a kid’s film. And now, suddenly, we have the implication that a duck’s 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.
The perfect proof for the odd placement of this would-be PG bestiality comes from Thompson’s own daughter, Zoey Deutch, who later became an actress herself and when she appeared on Conan, she told the host: “There is a particular scene in the film in which my mother makes love to a duck, and I saw it. So, what’s the next step: I go to my father, and I go to my mother, and I’m like, ‘Oh my God, I know the duck’s name is Howard, dad your name is Howard—this is complicated.’ [They say] ‘Dad will love you more than this duck will’. I was making a case for [my dad]. I thought my mother was going to leave my dad for a duck.”
Comically adding: “Eventually, they were like, ‘Oh this is for grown-ups. You weren’t supposed to watch that. It’s for adults.’ So at school when people would ask me what my mother does for a living I would say, ‘She’s an actress… in adult films’.” In many ways, when it comes to Howard The Duck, she wasn’t all that wrong.
Weirdly, this scene has also created somewhat of a creative legacy. Once again, duck f–king hit the headlines as Larry the quack ruffled a few feathers when he got intimate with a lady in the rom-com satire episode, ‘The Woman Who Was Fed By A Duck’. You‘d do well to come out of that affair with a clean bill of health.
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.
