by Matty Boy Anderson 06.06.07
A year ago, I opened up pre-orders for the John's Arm DVD because let's face it, the date was just too good to pass up on for a movie called "Armageddon". Here we are a year later, and the patience of the handful of people who actually did pre-order is about to pay off. In a couple weeks this monstrous abortion of a feature film will at last see release, unless I am killed or maimed first. Anybody who doesn't want to see this movie completed, please do not take that as a suggestion. I'd drop more hints, but isn't it more fun to look for them yourself?
As the days wind down to the actual honest-to-god premiere (not to mention MoCCA), I'm making efforts to crawl out from under this project for brief moments of air. A site update here and there, as you've likely noticed, nothing major, but at least something to keep you occupied while you wait. So here's the latest- our first movie review in two years! POW!
DIRTY DUCK (1973)
This is a movie I'd been curious about for a while. I forget where I first heard about it, but here's the skinny: Charles Swenson, the guy who animated the "Dental Hygiene Dilemma" sequence of Frank Zappa's film "200 Motels", made an "underground cartoon" in the early 70s, which was primarily voiced by Mark Volman and Howard Kaylan (aka Flo & Eddie, aka the Turtles). Because of charges of copyright infringement by cartoonist Bobby London, who drew a "Dirty Duck" character for many years in National Lampoon (among other places), the movie has juggled a number of titles. The copy I found and bid on (for a fraction of the cost on the cover) is called "Dirty Duck"; the title screen reads "A Down And Dirty Duck", and I've also seen it called "Cheap", which is a word seen and said copious times in the opening moments.
Beyond the obvious Zappa-related curiosities, I felt compelled to check this movie out because it seems that anything anyone says about it is universally bad. So I wondered if it was going to be a torture marathon akin to The Nine Lives Of Fritz The Cat, and I am happy to report that it is actually far from it. Some of it is pretty dated, some of it is outright groan-inducing, but it's still relatively consistent for what it is, and truthfully I caught myself enjoying it every now and again, despite its rather obvious flaws.
Things begin inauspiciously with a gritty black and white background of a used car lot, where a salesman (Ridgely) addresses the audience and promises a story of "rape, murder and mayhem". Ah, goody; rape. It doesn't help matters that the salesman is your basic Spiro Agnew caricature circa 1971, or that he pulls a gun and shoots his vicious dog. It doesn't go on for too long however, and soon we go into the opening credits, set to a song by Flo & Eddie (who supplied the soundtrack) that I couldn't help but like, especially as they sang "This whole movie is a great big pile of SHIT". There's a lot of self-effacing cracks like that, and it does get a bit old, though.
Now, here I feel like I have to mention that I don't think Imdb's listing of the movie is correct. Anybody who's heard the album "Waka/Jawaka" will tell you that it sounds like Janet Ferguson (who also appeared in "200 Motels" as a groupie) as the Boss Lady and several other voices, as well as singing in the one song where a woman's singing. Somebody would have to do some research to find out if I'm wrong, but Imdb's been wrong before, and dammit, it sounds like Janet Ferguson. Other voices include the late great Robert Ridgely, who many will remember as the Colonel James from "Boogie Nights", Turtles bassist Jim Pons (also a Zappa alumni), and Walker Edmiston. Why didn't I tell you who Walker Edmiston was? Because I know off the top of my head that Walker Edmiston voiced the Autobot Inferno in the Generation 1 Transformers cartoon, and that he passed away this past February. And you DAMN STRAIGHT OUTTA KNOW THAT OFF THE TOP OF YOUR HEAD TOO.
So with a lot of weird imagery, we meet Willard (Kaylan), a "mild-mannered insurance adjuster". Willard is jarred awake by his horrible alarm clock, then imagines a woman in a flowerpot before basically humping it. Again, the animation is traditional and frame-by-frame, so although it's crude in style, there does seem to be a lot of effort put into it. Willard is so timid he can't even tell his old landlady that he plans to propose to a woman he just met without hiding his face. The old bitch's cat yowls incessantly over all the dialogue, which really does become irritating. Finally he flees out the door and the cat escapes as well, presumably to be irritating in another cartoon.
Willard starts his car, which causes a lot of visual fucking metaphors, like the key becoming a dick and the lock a pussy. A lot of things in this movie turn into dicks, because it was the 70s and that's how it was. Despite his furious masturbation gestures, Willard cannot start his car and is forced to take the bus, where a "suave guy" (Ridgely again) seduces and fucks a woman on the steps, blocking the entrance.
Eventually Willard arrives at work, which is some sort of symbolic hive of worker drones or whatever. We see the object of Willard's creepy desire, a boobulous redhead, typing away with frenetic froglike fingers in the steno pool. This is where I swear to god it's Janet Ferguson as the Boss, but Imdb says different. In any case, I thought the boss was pretty funny, particularly when she flashes her snatch at Willard. Willard spills coffee all over the redhead, which leads her to emasculate him in a downright embarrassing Jew-shrew stereotype.
Taking the repeating-background subway home from work, Willard is accosted by a black dude selling drugs who's like something rejected from a Ralph Bakshi film. No shit- he actually says "Where you gwine anyway?" He molests Willard for a bit in a really awkward sequence, then leaves him with "Say hello to the duck."
After what seems like a freaking eternity, we are at last introduced to the Duck (Volman), a humanised duck with a sailor hat, who strolls through a montage of flowers and tits to a peppy tune. Seriously- I found a lot of the music in this movie to be pretty enjoyable, especially if you like Flo & Eddie's vocal harmonies, which are all over the place. Duck walks through prison hallways (?!) to get to a tattoo parlor where a lump is reading a "Weegee" board intently. The lump is apparently an old woman the Duck calls "Mom", though she prefers to be called Martha, and the Duck is a nuisance to her. Duck's bugging her about getting a new tattoo when her board-tapping reveals that she "will die of a bomb delivered by a wizard on a Tuesday". Cue Willard.
As Duck tries to cheer the moribund Mom, Willard appears to question Mom's insurance claim. See, she filed the claim based on that wizard prediction. Duck thinks Willard is there to get a tattoo, and pulls Willard's clothes off while suggesting all the places he should get one. Willard does the only assertive thing he does in the entire movie; he denies Mom's claim, causing her to have a heart attack and die for several minutes. Willard's wang is out for pretty much the rest of the scene, which is not all that fun to begin with. Willard receives the Duck in Mom's will, and he becomes distraught, goes to Boss Lady, and wears her as a hat.
Around here is where I started to lose track. Duck dresses Willard as a wizard, which causes the both of them to be grabbed by oppressive giant hands. The Duck begins to rant about knowing John Lennon and Yoko Ono before the hands squeeze them into nothingness, and they reappear in what I think is supposed to be a prison, surrounded by giant pictures of eyes that blink. Black Dude appears again, and Duck is tight enough with him that he asks him for "grass" in front of a WALL OF EYES. Willard is morose and listless, even when the prison is stormed by the worst depiction of gay men this side of a Cho Aniki game, complete with mincing muscleman ("You pulled my earrings off! Get your fingernails off my nipples!"). Even offscreen manrape does nothing to rouse Willard from his foul humor.
Then suddenly the walls and ceiling are a miasma of female genitals, and Duck is trying to coerce a headless tits-n-pussy thing that talks like Mae West to fuck Willard. Folks, it's really late right now and I'm trying to talk sense as best I can. Anyway, a terrible song starts up that I swear Janet Ferguson is singing that details numerous sexual positions. This is accompanied by animation of prostitutes combining with Victorian-era machinery and other uncomfortable stuff. It goes on a bit too long and it feels very uninspired, like there had to be a certain "smutty" quotient or it wouldn't be acceptable. This is also where the infamous "A Negro! A Jew! For you to screw!" line comes in, and it all leads up to Willard describing a preposterous act of foreplay, much like "200 Motels".
After a lengthy "trip" scene of phantasmagoric penises and vaginas that seemed to exist only to swing for an X rating, Willard and the Duck are suddenly stranded on a highway in the middle of nowhere. This act of the movie seemed to go on FOREVER. It is, however, notable for the most overt Zappa reference in the film; a typically vandalized picture of Zappa rises like a sun on the horizon when the Duck says "Frankly", then disappears when Willard says "Oh, Eddie, you have GOT to be kidding me." The most enjoyable aspect of the desert sequence is how good it is to hear Flo & Eddie as the Duck and Willard. Then there's a small marathon of awful stereotypes. I don't mean awful in that they're offensive, I mean awful like a psycho "fascist cop" who talks like John Wayne and morphs from a dragster-thing into a white blob with boots, or a Mexican "bandolero" who makes Speedy Gonzalez look like Cesar Chavez. There's even bulldykes who mistake Willard for a woman in all their sinful boobery, reminding one of a time when there wasn't an internet for people to flame on.
Finally the Duck and Willard find themselves back at Willard's place after a bad hitchhiking experience with Bluto the truck-driver where Willard morphed into a gun, and the Duck straight-up name-drops "200 Motels" in another rant. The Duck tries in vain to cheer up Willard, and again Volman's voice is a riot coming out of the Duck's mouth ("Huh? Huh?"). Finally the Duck makes Willard's special foreplay concoction (using the same animation from before), and Willard turns into a fuck berserker. He creates some kind of Yeti woman out of household things, like an alarm clock for a head and the landlady's cat for a pussy (haha), and he is about to fuck it or something when the Duck stops him. Willard again morphs into a weapon and "kills" Duck, who fades away scolding him. Then the used car guy comes back, shoots the place up, and Willard pulls Duck's clothes off, revealing a pussy and tits. Willard fucks the Duck like there's no tomorrow, then he goes to work, turns into a giant cock and fucks his boss.
Yeah, you read that right. The Duck was some sort of shemale, I don't know. All in all the movie isn't bad, it just drags terribly in the middle and doesn't have a reasonable plot to speak of. I'm glad I got it, but then, I collect weird-ass animation stuff. Plus I'm a hardcore Zappa fan. I can't quite say how much any of that affected my judgment of the movie. The music was good, and the animation isn't nearly as bad as some of the junk out there. And I'd take this over "Nine Lives Of Fritz The Cat" any day. Strangely, it's just a touch more linear and coherent than "200 Motels" (not that that's a difficult thing). "Dirty Duck" is not available on DVD so far as I know, but you can find a tape on eBay if you're still curious after reading this.
