Awesomely Bad Movie Review - Masters of the Universe: The Motion Picture

Title: Masters of the Universe: The Motion Picture
Copyright: 1987 by Cannon Films
Starring: Dolph Lundgren, Frank Langella, Meg Foster, Courtney Cox
Running Time: 106 min.
Score: 6/10
Buy?: Buy at Amazon for $10.49 or less. You can also view it on their On Demand channel, for rent, for $2.99. I highly recommend just renting and streaming if you just want to take a peek at it. Three bucks is more than fair.

Even most fans of the Masters of the Universe cartoon, toys, and comics are skeptical, at best, about the film adaptation of the series. The original cartoon was produced innocently enough, but due to modern pop culture trends and a lot of out-of-context animation reels that -- let's face it -- look pretty suggestive to audiences today, most who weren't fans of the show think that He-man and all things related are just one big gay joke. Because everybody has heard all of those jokes, and thanks to online critics like the Nostalgia Critic, even the live action movie, which I'll be reviewing here, has been included in the joke. Which is fine. But for that reason, this review is not going to linger on the gay jokes and just focus on the film at hand -- a film that, for all its flaws, is one that I was raised watching and therefore love.

Base Reaction: Okay, people. You've seen my score, but don't mistake this for a good movie. With the exception of films like Aliens and Willow -- which were well written and critically and financially successful, and maybe one or two other films that stand outside those standards and just managed to luck out, the standard for Sci-Fi/Fantasy movies, especially those that were made in the 80s, was for them to be gimmicky and awesomely bad, if awesome at all. I won't say there is no such thing as a good sci-fi/fantasy movie from the 80s, because as I said, there are exceptions.

However, I promise you that none of those exceptions came from a pure and unadulterated desire to capitolize on a toy line and the masses of screaming boys (and some girls) who demanded them.

That being said, I do enjoy this movie in spite of its faults. A movie can be a bad movie and still be fun to watch. Look at how many fans there are of Napoleon Dynamite. Now, I think that movie's boring, but they seem to be enjoying themselves.

Let alone that most fans I've met strongly resemble the main character, and therefore it's difficult to register an expression.

Our film today is, like the cartoons and comics, set in the world of Eternia, where the forces of good and evil, mostly in the form of sweaty muscle men in loin cloths and speedos, did battle over entry to the mythical Castle Greyskull, guarded by the now-wingless Sorceress. Contained inside is apparently untold power, granting the holder god-like abilities and mastery over the universe -- hence the title of the series. The whole point of the series was that Prince Adam was given a sword by the Sorceress that allows him to transform into He-Man (played in the film by Dolph Lundgren), the strongest man in the Universe, and with those powers he could protect Castle Greyskull from the evil forces out to conquer it -- namely Skeletor (played here by Frank Langella).

Well, the movie starts after those efforts by He-man have completely failed. Skeletor, backed by an army of Darth Vaders, has taken Castle Greyskull and imprisoned the sorceress. He achieved this through use of one of two Cosmic Keys -- musical devices that open dimensional doorways and make teleporting possible. These keys were created by master inventor Gwildor (Billy Barty), not featured in the series and invented both to replace the wizard Orko (CG was not yet advanced enough to make him look realistic anyway) and to give the toy company an excuse to cast another figurine. He-man, now leading the resistence in a war-ravaged Eternia, rescues Gwildor, and he and his allies are shown Gwildor's second key -- which Skeletor does not know exists. They use it to enter Castle Greyskull but fail to rescue the Sorceress, forced instead to open a door to an unknown world and jump through to evade capture.

And where do they end up? Earth. In the 1980s. God help them.

There are a few side plots that come out of this -- of course the typical fish-out-of-water plot with the Eternians, but then you meet Julie and Kevin, teenaged lovers who are about to be permanently separated. Julie's parents died recently in a plane crash, and she's moving away. There's also an angry never-listens-to-anybody cop who keeps making things more difficult for everybody once Skeletor starts sending his minions in search of the key. (And this guy, James Tolkan, never plays any other kind of character -- not cops, necessarily, but angry adults who serve as nothing but a buzzkill to teenaged protagonists. You'll remember him from Back to the Future as Principal Strickland.)

So it's one of those race against time plots, because the key that He-man had (it was lost upon re-entry) has been damaged, and the heroes must return to Eternia before some series-lexicon-identified event occurs, in which Skeletor will have all the powers of Grayskull bestowed upon him. Skeletor wants the other key destroyed because so long as one exists there's always the possibility of He-man returning. And rather than send people to kill He-man while the lady that gave him his powers in the first place is slowly being drained of her essence, he wants him captured because of some lame Evil Overlord List violation regarding not wanting He-Man to be a martyr. But the two teenage kids find the key (Kevin mistakes it for a synthesizer), and the heroes have to find them, but the bad guys are chasing them, and people get separated -- and it leads to about 20 minutes of "who has the damn thing now?" After that 20 minutes the storylines finally come together and we have some deus ex machina and a final battle to get to. Yippee!

Here's Where it Fails: In multiple places -- but I promise you I've actually got more things to praise about it than to criticize.

To get to the smaller points, the production values aren't the best (maybe okay for the time, but don't expect to be blown away by the special effects -- sometimes they don't even fully synch up with what's happening on screen). The dialogue is dreadful in places (but spectacular in others -- I'll get to that in my Gush), and Dolph Lundgren is nigh impossible to understand because his accent is so thick. They overplay Gwildor's exposure to earth-culture and spend WAY too much time at the chicken place (these points are all better addressed in the Nostalgia Critic's review, so I won't touch them here).

More importantly, what turns a lot of original fans off to the movie is that it's viewed as too different from the original cartoon series. I'll address a number of these points here:
-He-man is shown as having superhuman strength perhaps once, and is more often seen fighting with a gun than a sword.
-There's no Orko, but I'm kind of glad they left him out because I could have done without the muppet on strings.
-You never see Prince Adam, and the "transformation" sequences in both the He-man and She-ra cartoons were considered highlights of the series, to children.
-The story doesn't take place in Eternia -- a landscape that fans would have liked to see in greater detail. To be fair about the latter, though, this probably saved a buttload on production values, and for a film that budgetted an estimated $17 million, that was probably a good thing.
-I don't hear this often from fans of the series, but wonder about it myself -- Teela has implied romantic feelings for He-man in the series, or at least I'm almost certain she does, and this never gets addressed or even hinted at onscreen. (Most fans complain that Teela's not a redhead, and I think that's inconsequential.) Seeing some character development for the main heroes, and not the villains (you get an interesting moment between Skeletor and Evil-Lyn in the middle of the movie) nor two earthlings who are carried through the entire movie by means of inertia, would have really grounded the film a bit more.
-I think it's a bit of a plot hole that He-man can muster the strength to fight Skeletor at the end of the film, while Skeletor has absorbed the powers of Greyskull, if the power in He-man's sword comes from the castle, or the Sorceress. Bear in mind here that Skeletor has both, and should therefore have had the power to deny him the added strength that the sword provides him. Anything for a happy ending, right guys?
-Most of Skeletor's usual Rogues Gallery has changed. The only returners are Evil-Lyn and Beast Man -- the latter of which never speaks and does not interact with animals, as the cartoon version does. Instead he's more used a like a poor man's Sabretooth. The other villains were invented for the film, so that again, there would be an excuse to release some new figurines.

Something tells me this has nothing to do with him not knowing it's not real bacon.

That Being Said: I never had a problem with the movie being too different from the series as a child. Never. Now, you might say "But DVD Fairy, that's because you're a girl!", and I therefore might not have been as into the series, but I am also a girl who had two big brothers. So a lot of things I watched were things directed at boys. When I was a kid, I noticed differences, sure, but I didn't care because unlike the cartoon, the movie, to me (aged 4 at least), was real. And it's okay if things are a little different when it's real. People say it's okay that the first Ninja Turtles movie was nothing like the cartoon because it more closely resembled the comics. But if you were born around 1984 and were a turtles fan, then it's very likely that you didn't READ the comics at the time and only knew the cartoon. So to make concessions for one fandom and not the other is kind of pointless.

The choice to set most of the film on Earth, I thought, was a smart move to make, not only from a budget standpoint, but also because it would allow newcomers a familiar entry point. Julie and Kevin are there so that kids who have never seen the movie have somebody normal to identify with (and as a child I met more kids who were interested in MEETING their heroes and not being them, so having people project onto them instead of He-man makes sense to me).

The backstory about Julie's parents seems kind of dark and out of nowhere, but I think it was handled well enough within the film, and every now and again produced some interesting scenes. There's a moment where Julie is tricked into thinking her mother is alive, which genuinely disturbed me when I was little, because I could not imagine anyone being so mean as to do that to a person, and the ending, I'll admit, always makes me really happy, even if it's kind of deus ex machina (spoiler: She and Kevin are sent home to a time just before her parents died, so she is able to prevent them getting on the flight that would have led to it).

Another thing that I really, REALLY enjoy about the movie is its score, composed by Bill Conti, who also composed the famous Rocky theme. Skeletor's entrance music at the beginning of the movie is my ringtone, in fact. I absolutely love this soundtrack, and my only regret is that the album doesn't include the Cosmic Key music, which I find rather pretty.

Dolph Lundgren might be hard to understand, but he looks perfect for the part, and I won't say he's the best of actors, but then you don't see a lot of facial expressions in the old cartoon, either.


Except for when it's completely inappropriate.
Of the new villains, Blade is probably one of the most interesting, because his dialogue in the movie suggests there is some assumed continuity with his character, that he's faced off with He-man before (and is excited to have another chance to). It's a shame the cartoon never took advantage of this, and is probably one of the reasons that the redesign for TriClops (one of the original rogues) in the 2002 MOTU Cartoon Series was kind of an amalgamation of the original and this new character. OR, conversely, it might be possible that Blade was developed as a version of TriClops without the eye gimmick, which would have been hard to envision on the screen back then.

Note the similarities.

Everything else that's nice I have to say about this movie belongs in its own section, so without further ado...

Here's My Main Gush: Skeletor. Holy crap do I enjoy the film version of Skeletor. Now, let me explain to you a few things about myself before I continue, because I want the level of my enthusiasm, even from an early age, to be perfectly clear: As I said before, I have two older brothers, and am the baby in the family. There was a lot of boy stuff in my house growing up, but that doesn't mean girly stuff was completely absent from my upbringing. In fact, anything that was "for girls" was special, to me, because it was just for me. Any token girl character in a series for boys was almost always automatically my favorite character, because it gave me something to identify with. However, with Masters of the Universe, I've always been more interested in Skeletor -- largely because while my brothers got to see something of the series and toys before they saw the movie, I myself started with the movie, and Skeletor is arguably the most noticeable and engaging character onscreen. He's the only one who either doesn't suffer from terrible dialogue, or is played by a good enough actor to deliver it well, and despite suffering from bad makeup (which was really the best they could do back then), his overall design was so awesome that parts of it influenced his 2002 redesign.

Pictured: Skeletor's entrance into Castle Greyskull, and the DVD Fairy's ringtone music.
My first review on this site featured Frank Langella, too, and I promise that my choosing this as the second full review was entirely coincidental, but I have to stop and mark his performance in this. I have always been impressed by the work he put into this -- largely because this wasn't the most ambitious of productions, and most of the time all he got to do was stand around, monologue and act menacing. He was playing a movie version of a cartoon villain, who -- let's face it -- looks and sounds pretty damn corny when measured up to most others. From that whiny voice to the groan-worthy one-liners, he was a bad guy in what was clearly a kid's show, and Langella had the balls to take the role he was given and try to play him totally straight. He studied the role, and he worked with Meg Foster (Evil-Lynn) to develop some on their background to work out body language, and once shooting started up, he stormed in, full regalia, and played Skeletor like a fantasy villain would be played by today's standards. (And fair enough that Nostalgia Critic didn't like his "becoming a god" speech, but I think that the dialogue was bad and Langella made it his bitch, end of story.)

Not pictured: The DVD fairy getting happy chills.
I still openly acknowledge that this Skeletor breaks all the Evil Overlord rules. He would rather his enemy be broken than killed. He doesn't heed the sound advice of his advisors. He conveniently looks away from avenues of escape (or entry), and almost always shows a greater willingness to bump off one of his own followers for screwing up where even he has failed multiple times than somebody who is actually doing him real damage.

But man, he's fun to watch.

In Conclusion: Masters of the Universe is not a good movie, but for the right people, and when you're in the right mood, it makes for an afternoon of nostalgic fun.

Cutthroat Island (Originally posted to IGN)

I wrote an earlier draft of this as a user review at IGN.com, so the posting can also be viewed in a less polished form here, under the title "A better female pirate than Elizabeth Swann, weighed down by a bad 90s script."

Title: Cutthroat Island
Copyright: 1995 by MGM, DVD distributed by Lionsgate, through Studio Canal
Starring: Geena Davis, Matthew Modine, and Frank Langella
Running Time: 119 minutes
Score: 6/10
Buy?: Buy at Amazon.com for $9.98 or less.

Let's get one thing straight, here: Cutthroat Island is hardly cinema gold. It wasn't a sleeper film. It wasn't even that much of a cult film. The fact of the matter is that Lionsgate tried to make a Pirate movie at a point in time when there was no market for one, and there wouldn't be one until the surprise success of Pirates of the Caribbean in the next decade. Compared to other action/adventure films of the time that were not adult enough to garner an R rating, though, the many flaws this movie had (poor 90s dialogue, inexplicable explosions worthy of a Troma film, and less-than-okay creature effects in places, for instance) were pretty much par for the course for movies of the time -- most of which were better received critically and financially than this movie.

Now that that's out of the way, let's talk about what's good about the movie. After the success of the PotC franchise, Cutthroat Island received a slight spike in sales when the DVD was released and banished to the bargain bins in Wal-Marts. No one should be surprised by this. When Pirates fans were in the stores, a DVD selling for five bucks with the right kind of plotline for pirate-enthusiasts was just appealing enough to be bought on impulse, which is actually how I found it. (We'll talk about my unhealthy tolerance for the Pirates movies in later entries.)

Base reaction? For a five-dollar DVD, the story actually wasn't that bad, and don't let the summary fool you. But since this movie has only seen sales recently because of the popularity of certain Johnny Depp populated movies, it seems only fair to compare it to Pirates of the Caribbean in places, since this is obviously the audience that will buy the most copies.

The first thing I'll hand to the makers of Cutthroat Island is that historically it's a little easier to place -- maybe not historically accurate, but if you're watching a campy 90s adventure flick, you're out of your mind for looking for accuracy to begin with. You're seeing Port Royale and the Caribbean Isles during the reign of King Charles II -- a time period only briefly glimpsed in the PotC franchise at the start of the first film. (How can you tell in PotC? Their wigs are all brown at the start, and when it flashes forward, they're all gray and white. It's the only nod you get to the time period in all three movies.) But, if you're obsessive enough to try and tie Cutthroat Island to the franchise, (and don't listen to Wikipedia when it says CI is referenced in the first Pirates movie; this is inaccurate) you can just go ahead and lie to yourself, saying that the adventures of Morgan Adams took place when Jack Sparrow was still in diapers. (Okay, maybe not diapers. But he's probably at an age where bugs are more interesting than girls.)

None of the mysticism of the PotC franchise is present in this film, so there'll be no sea monsters or cursed treasures -- in fact superstition in general is severely underplayed here. The story focuses upon Morgan Adams (Geena Davis), the daughter of pirate Captain Black Harry Adams, who appears to have been raised aboard her daddy's ship -- at most times. At the start of the film she's on land somewhere enjoying herself at the mutual expense of some pompous French soldier. Considered a pirate in her own right (with a hefty sum on her head, too, but you wouldn't blame government officials for wanting to bring her in; she apparently causes a lot of property damage wherever she goes), she starts out seemingly a lot more attracted to the "let's get drunk and laid" aspect of being an outlaw and a little less about staying on her father's ship and getting work done.

When her uncle, Dawg Brown (Frank Langella -- surprisingly fit and imposing as a villain in this film), goes seeking parts of a treasure map that each of the other men in their family possess, her father is fatally wounded just as she is called back to the ship to help him. They escape before Dawg can claim Harry's piece of the map, which incidentally is tattooed onto his scalp. Before he dies, he tells Morgan to take the map piece and his ship, and get the treasure before her uncle does. This scene is not overplayed -- Morgan is initially angry and emotional, but Harry talks her down. This is important, and they're pirates. There's no crying in piracy. I was worried that I would be seeing the cliche "father-slaying" scene from Dragonheart all over again, and was pleasantly surprised that the filmmakers didn't lazily decide to make Morgan's entire quest about revenge against her uncle. It's not. It's a race to her grandfather's treasure trove, and she's been given a job to do.

She accepts her task and her father's ship, but only a choice few members of the crew are willing to trust her with leadership (with good reason -- chain of command is being upset, for one, and for another, she has a reputation even among other pirates for racking up damage and being a pain in the ass). Among those willing to trust her are the quartermaster, Blair, the cabin boy, Bowen -- an object of fierce protectiveness among the crew, and Morgan's bodyguard, Glasspoole (played by Stan Shaw -- who you'll be surprised to learn, in spite of racial stereotyping common in some films of the time, is not the "slave" mentioned in the summary on the IGN website and the DVD cover).

Unable to read the Latin passages on their piece of the map, they travel to Port Royale to find someone who can. Enter William Shaw (Matthew Modine), a petty thief with some learning, who has been imprisoned for being, well, a petty thief. And for assuming that he's charming. If this character doesn't annoy you, then you yourself may be annoying. Like all area criminals at this time (including captured pirates), he is to be auctioned off as a slave (and if no one buys him, he hangs) -- which is fairly accurate for the time. We come to learn, as does Morgan (disguised as a shopping noble), that he also reads and speaks Latin, and claims to be a doctor. Unfortunately for Morgan later, the latter is only a claim.

Once he has been absorbed into the main plot, the rest of the film revolves around finding the last piece of the map (and getting it from Morgan's other, less scary uncle), finding the treasure, and eventually the final battle between Morgan's ship and Dawg Brown's, which is by itself pretty impressive.

Here's Where it Fails: The place where this film fails is chiefly the dialogue. As with most adventure films of the time, it's fairly cheesy and unrealistic. I cringe when the characters of Morgan and Shaw are hinted at being "in love" when the two actors clearly read their characters as being physically attracted to one another and little more beyond that. Some of the most tense moments lose their edge because of a horrid one liner or two. Morgan's dialogue, in particular, can be pretty bad, even unrealistic, and you can't tell if it's a fault of the writing or because she quite clearly assumes a different persona depending upon who she is with. Around her men, she's more business like. Around strangers, she's less formal. When she's trying to impress somebody? She's too formal. Failure in writing? Maybe, but at least it makes her look like a legitimately flawed character.

That being said: The action is surprisingly good. Like I said before, there are one or two explosions that defy physics, but that's the only complaint I have. It will not have the same level of random ninja stunts and swashbuckling as PotC did, but this is not a flaw. There is a good deal of brawling to be had, especially in the last 30 minutes of the film, but it's done a tad more realistically than PotC managed, simply because the filmmakers acknowledge that it's hard to depict two full crews, sporting 30+ armed men each, fencing on deck when there simply is no room for that kind of mass swordplay. The fights have a few little flashy stunts here and there, but overall, the weapons are heavy and are handled like they're heavy. (For instance, you don't see anything like Kiera Knightley's karate moves with a solid gold bo staff in hand that should weigh more than she does, as in PotC 1.) The battles on deck are chaotic, one battle bumping into another as the crewmen fight just as much for elbow room as victory.

Here's my main gush: While we're on the subject of choreography, I want to say, here, that this is where Geena Davis as Morgan Adams absolutely shined as a female action hero. Because of the way she fights with men, I would argue that she's a better feminist example of a girl pirate than Kiera Knightley ever was, and a better feminist action hero than any figure you could mention in current films -- superhero films included. Elizabeth Swann, in the course of three movies, became comparably one of the better fighters in the series for no reason, and as a pirate, a lot of unnecessary attention was drawn to the fact that she was a woman. She also never seemed to take a single blow. It makes her a horrible role model and action hero because she doesn't ever overcome adversity; she is just suddenly and inexplicably a million times better than any man or monster that opposes her. Take the most hardcore female action character today, and I guarantee that if she's faced off with a man, she will never take a punch to the face, for instance, and that's a sexist double standard. If the scene requires the fight to be brutal and tear-out, then she will inflict more pain and brutal injury on her opponent than she will ever receive, herself. This is almost a rule. A man can't hit a woman in the face even if they're in a no holds barred fight with each other. A man cannot be seen to do serious physical damage to a woman unless it's meant to instill horror (and is typically reserved for R rated movies), but a woman can beat the stupid out of a man and in as graphic detail as the director desires, and it will never hurt his rating. We see this repeated in Pirates of the Caribbean, in Watchmen, even in episodes of South Park ('Breast Cancer Show Ever' is a notable episode for this). This is not empowering. It's just saying that a woman being violent is more socially acceptable than a man being violent.

Morgan Adams defies these rules. Her fights are not overly flourished or stylized; she'll jump right in and have a good old fashioned scrap with anyone. (I noted though that she goes for the family jewels a lot -- considering she was raised on a shipful of pirates, this shouldn't surprise anyone from a characterization standpoint; she wasn't always a fully grown Geena Davis.) Her weapons are heavy in her hands. She takes numerous on-camera blows, punches to the face, slices, gunshots, and she gets up and keeps fighting -- not as though they don't phase her, but more like she's accustomed to pain and knows how to soldier through it when her life is on the line. You will not see this from a female character in many other action films, save for the best ones. She also never falls into the 'tough heroine' cliche, where you see all her guts and bravery and gusto for most of the film, only to find her helpless and in need of rescuing during the final fight. No one saves Morgan Adams besides Morgan Adams, herself, even in the face of Dawg Brown, of whom she is clearly quite afraid.

In Conclusion: This review has carried on a bit. For a couple hours of fun, five to ten bucks isn't a whole lot to pay. As I said, this movie is legitimately flawed in places, but it never claims to be Oscar-worthy material, either. For the price, and for its better qualities, putting up with the crappy dialogue is well worth it. Don't miss it if you have the spare time. Despite the scoring only being slightly above average (my rating on IGN was higher, but that was based on their scoring and not mine), the DVD fairy highly recommends this film.