The BBC’s Mark Kermode, another Howard the Duck champion, argues that it’s not a “great” movie, but remains “a really, really funny weird, subversive film.” Since it was too weird to be embraced by the mainstream, but also too entertainingly off-kilter to forget, Kermode has argued for Howard the Duck as basically the definition of a cult classic. It’s worth noting that Katz and Huyck began their creative collaboration with a legitimate cult film: the surreal horror masterpiece Messiah of Evil. I would love to see those two bonkers movies on a double bill (OK, pun intended).

For me, the real revelation of Howard the Duck was the last hour, in which the film suddenly becomes a body horror comedy. Howard and Beverley are stuck with a gnarly possessed scientist (played by Jeffrey Jones, one thing about the film that hasn’t aged well) playing host to one of the hideous “Dark Overlords of the Universe” that want to destroy this world. Sure, I had already seen Halloween and The Thing at that age. But I did so through my fingers, as they were meant to scare the daylights out of you — and succeeded. Ghostbusters, meanwhile, just seemed silly to me.

Howard the Duck managed to hit the sweet spot between gross-out tentacled latex monsters and fun adventure comedy. It was the kind of “scary” an 11-year-old could enjoy without fear and showed me that horror flicks could be more like a roller coaster ride than a grueling night in a haunted house. It set me up for teenage years spent reading Fangoria magazines, making latex masks in the basement, and laughing at every Freddy Krueger punchline, no matter how cheesy.

And now, with the MCU an established film phenomenon and Howard popping up in Guardians of the Galaxy films, maybe we’ll finally get a sequel.