Masters Of The Universe [1987]

[Cross-posted on the Bad Movie Night Facebook page.]

So, it's no secret that Dolph Lundgren is very well liked among the members of the Bad Movie Night crew. We ended one night by watching this video of him and if you don't happen to think he is awesome, I advise you to read through his IMDb biography or his Wikipedia page and then report back to me. Because of this, it made a lot of sense for us to watch "Masters Of The Universe", one of his earlier films and a live action adaption of "He-Man" which sounds like a terrible enough idea without even knowing any of the details. "He-Man", for those who don't know, is a totally ridiculous superhero/fantasy cartoon where the main character wears barely any clothes and that is mostly known now for its homosexual undertones. Our expectations were high.

Unfortunately, this movie, while kind of campy, was really bogged down by one of the worst scripts we've encountered in a while. The movie pretty much starts with no introduction. Things start happening right away with no reason as if you are already thirty minutes into. Skeletor, the bad guy, has kidnapped Sorceress, a good guy, to steal her power and He-Man and his two friends need to save her. Instead, for some reason, they instead end up meeting this dwarf whose name changes depending on who's saying it (Squirldor? Grimdor? Mordor?) who has made a magic key that can get you into anywhere. Skeletor wants that key but they end up using it to transport them to the modern world for some contrived reason. In the real world, the four of them meet Courtney Cox and her boyfriend, not-Benedict Cumberbatch, and the humans essentially make things difficult for the heroes when Skeletor comes to town. At one point Skeletor captures He-Man and whips him and we finally got some of the kinky, gay content we were hoping for but most of the time we were just really confused about what was going on and why anything was happening.

Skeletor was fairly campy and Dolph Lundgren was actually unusually inarticulate but overall this movie really didn't have the comedy we were looking for. The script was nonsensical and alienating for anyone who didn't know the He-Man story while also clearly not delivering for any fans who may watch it. The idea of going into the modern world was particularly silly and overplayed and the movie didn't even give us any memorable quotes worth noting. Also, isn't He-Man supposed to be the leader? The movie really didn't put the kind of emphasis on him that it probably should have. It was kind of easy to forget he was there aside from him being half naked and greasy (which has its merits but still). By the power of Greyskull, just don't bother.

Spoon Rating: 2.