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Masters of the Universe (1987) - Cannon...Makes a Pretty Decent Film?

 



Last year I bought a used copy of a DVD box set called The Bombs, Babes & Blockbusters of Cannon Films because I am totally fascinated by the story and products of Golan and Globus which gets told well in an excellent documentary (Electric Boogaloo: The Wild, Untold Story of Cannon Films) included in the set. However, other than said documentary, it has just sat on my shelf untouched and unwatched for months so I thought what a better way than to break out of the horror realm for this blog briefly. So I decided to watch Masters of the Universe as the only one on the collection that could be described as having a genuine cult following.

There are definitely issues. The Skeletor mask looks hilariously awful, like a bad Spirit Halloween costume, and it has a common problem with any of the facial prosthetics used in the film which is that they could not figure out how to keep the mouth moving looking weird and fake. None of the protagonists except Billy Barty as the purposefully hideous Gwildor give a particularly good performance, not even a young Courtney Cox or the man who’d go on to be Tom Paris on Star Trek: Voyager, with the Masters woodenly working their way through chunky dialog and the teens being broad and cartoonish. The movie takes the road that so many B sci-fi and fantasy films in the 80s do, which is cheap out after building one decent set and arrange for the plot to allow them to just shoot at various locations in a normal Earth town for which they don’t have to do any real design work. Finally, a lot of the action is clumsy and not particularly well coordinated or shot in a clear manner, however you can say this is just the house Cannon style.

I was surprised however how much of the film I genuinely enjoyed. First off, Frank Langella despite that stuff glued poorly to his face gives a really fun, scenery devouring, Shakespearean performance as Skeletor that makes you sad every moment he’s not on screen he so completely steals every scene he is in, and I also really enjoyed the performance by James Talkan as a put upon cop just trying to make sense of what is going on around him. Some of the makeup and design of Skeletor’s various beastie bounty hunters is really solid as long as they aren’t asked to move their mouths on camera. A lot of the scenes at night have really interesting use of lighting that is one of the biggest of the director’s cited Jack Kirby influence on the film, though the comic book approach is abundantly clear frequently which I can really appreciate and I’d mostly call Gary Goddard successful in that pursuit. The SFX work for the portals and lightning/energy effects all look really, really good for a fairly low budget 80s film. It moves at a pretty brisk pace and rarely has much dull lag which is the case of so many 80s genre films of its era that give you like 30 minutes of action and 60 of walking around the woods.

The film is cheesy and pretty low rent for such a beloved property of children of a certain time, but I absolutely understand now why it has the cult following that it does because I found myself genuinely entertained either for the right or the wrong reasons, but more for the former than the latter, pretty much from start to finish. This is a DVD in my collection I definitely see myself picking up and throwing in from time to time in the future.


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