Return of the Super Movies! The one based on a toy

 

Title: Masters Of The Universe

What Year?: 1987

Classification: Runnerup/ Mashup

Rating: For Crying Out Loud!!! (1/4)

 

Back when I came up with this technically, kind of retired feature, what I wanted was to cover movies that would surprise people, either because they were obscure or because their connections to the theme were less well-known. In its relatively short run, I definitely did plenty of both. But I still had a select list of movies I felt fit even if they weren’t technically related to comics or superheroes. Alas, I never quite got to these, mainly because the review count never went high enough to need them. After hitting yet another milestone for my reviews, I decided it was time for a rematch, and it happened I had been sitting on the one that definitely worked best. I present Masters Of The Universe, a movie based on a crass intersection of toys, television and other media that did in fact include comic books.

Our story begins in the world of Eternia, where Skeletor has actually defeated his adversary He Man and captured Castle Grayskull. With the help of a sorcerer type named Gwildor and an artifact called the Cosmic Key, He Man and a band of loyalists escape to another dimension, which naturally turns out to be mid-‘80s Earth. There, he meets a high schooler named Julie and her considerably more useful boyfriend Kevin. But Skeletor’s minions are already in pursuit, led by Evil-Lyn. He Man must prevail, or the evil overlord will become not just ruler of Eternia but the ultimate power of the multiverse!

Masters of the Universe was a 1987 film by the Cannon Group (see Superman 4, etc, etc, etc), directed by Gary Goddard from a script by David O’Dell (see… The Dark Crystal?). The film was based on the toy line He Man and Masters of the Universe by Mattel, launched in 1982, but officially not the Filmation animated series of the same name. The film starred Dolph Lundgren (see The Punisher) as He Man and Frank Langella as Skeletor, with Meg Foster (see They Live, Leviathan) as Evil-Lyn. Other cast included the late Billy Barty (see Willow) as Gwildor, an original character apparently based on Orko from the toy line and cartoon, Courtney Cox as Julie, and James Tolkan of the ongoing Back To The Future franchise as Detective Lubic. Music was composed by Bill Conti. The movie was a commercial disappointment, earning $17.3M against a $22M budget, contributing to the decline and eventual bankruptcy of the Cannon Group. The failure of the movie coincided with the decline of the toy line, which was discontinued in 1988. The film quickly achieved cult popularity on home video. It has remained available in a number of formats and platforms, including a 10-film multipack The Bombs, Babes and Blockbusters of the Cannon Group.

For my experiences, He Man/ MOTU is something that has remained in an odd blind spot. I had what must have been a fair-sized collection of the figures that I got more than a little obsessed with before they ended up broken or given away. I also can just remember the mini-comics with a certain nostalgia I never had for the show, which is my most immediate justification for including it here. My strongest recollections, however, are of the final days of the line (see my Rock Bots post), when the racks were packed with toys that even kid me considered goofy and gimmick-prone. By comparison, I can remember barely noticing the movie coming out, and the correlations of hindsight make it clear that it was hilariously doomed. Eventually, I did get to it, in part because of yet another comic, the excellent “Fragile Creatures” storyline of Concrete. Even with the most limited of attachments, I was immediately struck by just how mediocre this is.

Moving in, I have to say that the movie’s redeeming qualities come mostly from how little it owes to the toys or anything else. There’s a quite distinct visual style that captures the weird lasers-and-sorcery conceptual groundwork of the franchise while remaining very much its own thing (see Krull and the Cannon Hercules films for further comparisons). It’s of further note that most of the villains have no close counterparts elsewhere, leading to such bizarre and intriguing apparitions like the cyborg samurai Blade. By any appraisal, it’s Langella and the always hypnotic Foster who run away with the film as the lead villains. On that front, my one dissent is with those who find Skeletor (not to mention other Langella roles) to be hammy high camp. To me, this is so contrary to the senses that I feel like I could be watching a different film. This is not a gloating, posturing supervillain of cartoons, but a terrifyingly believable dictator whose subtlest gestures convey the clear expectation that others will obey or suffer the full price. The one thing I could wish for is that they had substituted the odd practical rig with an actual, Vader-style mask, which among other things would have preserved far more mystery about his nature and origin.

On the con side, the easy target is He Man himself, who has already been criticized as not doing much in his own movie. Here, the critics certainly aren’t wrong, yet haven’t gotten the whole of it. Lundgren brings genuine presence that could easily have eluded a “better” actor, and there is plenty of satisfying action in the film’s well-spaced fight sequences. More than that, there is true nobility as he defies Skeletor in the finale. Meanwhile, there’s more good vibes from Me Man’s allies and especially Tolkan as the cop. I can also put in a good word for Robert Duncan McNeill as the “comic relief” boyfriend. The one failure here is Cox, enough to drag the rating down against my original intentions, and I will admit I am at a loss to account for it. There’s nothing obviously “bad” about her performance or even her character. I simply cannot find anything interesting enough to justify her artificially inflated prominence. This shows blatantly in the saccharine “happy” ending. Even more telling are her interactions with Teela, which seem intended to show her own transformation into a self-reliant heroine, but really just demonstrate that her screentime would have been better spent on other characters that were already familiar.

That gets me to the “one scene”, and there was one more intriguing than any other. After the first big fight on Earth, we find Kevin has taken the lost Cosmic Key to a store that seems halfway between a records shop and an electronic store. He shows the artifact to the clerk, who immediately insists he has seen such things, with the amusing further claim, “It’s from Japan.” Meanwhile, we get one of our better looks at the semi-Maguffin, and it truly shows off the movie’s aesthetic. It looks like something that could be built with human or even pre-modern tech, but it’s still not quite clear what it would all do. Kevin does press a few of the controls, producing musical notes that he has the musical knowledge to identify. Finally, a light show appears from the artifact, which finally brings the clerk to admit that he has never seen its like before. Naturally, it’s going to be an important plot point that makes Kevin by far the most significant and useful character, even if it’s never admitted. One more intriguing detail is the soundtrack (a subject I’ve commented on a lot less often than I used to), uniformly good throughout the film. Here, it’s subdued enough to blend in with the tones from the artifact, a quite nice touch. It’s a good moment that shows solid world-building to boot, and one can genuinely debate how well it represents the film as a whole.

In closing, I find myself turning not to the rating but my own checkered history with the Cannon operation. When I first started doing reviews, I dealt with so many of their releases that I was literally turning them up at random. This fully reflected their influence on 1980s genre films, for good or ill, and I felt more than a little regret when I realized how long I had gone without reviewing a Cannon film before this review. But this cements exactly why I find this film so disappointing. Even beyond the issues I have already noted, the overriding feeling is diminishing returns. There are plenty of films in Cannon’s library that are certainly not “better” yet still far more entertaining, usually at a fraction of the cost. It’s as if the audacious creativity of Cannon’s loose-knit operation stalled out as soon as they got real money. (Then again, the most expensive SF/ fantasy film they ever did would have to be Lifeforce…) It all leaves this film as a sad footnote to a driving force of vintage genre films, technically decent yet disappointing. With that, I bid the film and its creators an almost fond farewell.