Masters Of The Universe

Donkey: Blombo and I have been friends for a long time. About twenty six years, to be exact. Our mothers worked together as nurses at the same small town hospital and decided that since we were the same age, we should be friends. So I remember never quite knowing why I suddenly starting playing over at Blombo’s house. I just did. But as much as spending time with a Dutch ginger kid sounds like it would be the formula for destroying any childhood, he and I became great friends. And as much as I hate to admit it, at that age it was in no small part because of his toy collection. He’ll protest when I make the claim now, but there can be no denying that back then that motherfucker had every toy under the sun. Not that I was deprived in the slightest, but my parents had a different philosophy. My dad actually bought Transformers and kept them in his closet until we could save up enough allowance money to pay for them, which took well over a month. Blombo, on the other hand, got damn near anything he wanted. After all, it was just plastic, right? So I LOVED going to his house since there was so much over there to play with. And since I already had a lot of Tranformers and never really like GI Joe, it was the He-man toys that we always had a lot of fun with. So when we watched Masters Of The Universe, I couldn’t happen but think back to those days in his basement and smile. That spoiled motherfucker.

The Plot:

Donkey: Masters of the Universe is the basic tale of good versus evil. And when I say basic, I’m not kidding, because there’s little else to it beyond that. On the possibly faraway world of Eternia, an animated Skeleton named, get this, Skeletor, is commanding an army of darkness that intends to rule the world. Why is he a goddamn skeleton? Where did he come from? What are his motivations? Does anyone even care? But he is opposed by He-man and his fellow so-called Masters of the Universe, yet another group that we don’t actually know anything about, who protect Castle Grayskull and its secrets by commanding an army that we never actually see. Sound good yet? No? Well how about we throw in some teenagers! When Skeletor manages to take over the Castle using the Cosmic Key, He-man and his crew flee to Earth in desperation and end up relying on the help of two teenaged shitheads to save their world.

The Case for Greatness (aka The Lowlights):

Donkey: Our movie this week begins with a narrator who delivers a ten second introductory prologue so superficial that it might as well have been, “It’s He-man, bitches! Enjoy!” while forcing us to stare at an oil painting of Castle Grayskull that they try to pass off as photo realistic. Then they roll some opening credits roll across a background that looks like a rainbow puked on the film before the movie quite literally explodes down to the surface of Eternia. Inside the aforementioned Castle, the ultimate badass, Skeletor, receives a status report from his evil, chain smoking second in command, Evil-Lyn, before taking his stolen seat on the newly conquered throne. The movie offers no explanation as to why either its chief antagonist is basically a fully animated skeleton with goddamn eyeballs or what his motivations for being evil happen to be, but I highly suspect that he’s out to plunder the universe in search of a goddamn sandwich. Seriously dude, eat something. This guy is an anorexic’s wet dream. As he brags of his recent conquest, almost like he’s writing a letter to Penthouse Letters for Evil Overlords out loud, the captive guardian of Castle Grayskull, known only as The Sorceress, spars with him verbally using every metaphor that she has in her limited arsenal. Once he grows tired of her cryptic and pointless banter, he raises his hand and, judging from the facial expression that she makes, either begins to leech her power away from her or give her multiple orgasms. Really, it doesn’t matter which is the case. Needing a smoke and a nap, Skeletor fights his urges and instead activates a device which broadcasts a giant holographic image of him in the sky outside, where he addresses the world’s population, or at least the fifty or so people in the immediate area who can see the thing. He declares that the war is officially over now that he has captured Castle Grayskull and the powers of the Sorceress. Huzzah! Free breakfast burritos for all!

As Skeletor holographic visage issues its decree, by a lone figure looks on while standing dramatically on a perch in the middle of goddamn nowhere. It’s He-Man, the most powerful/tragically named man in the universe! For those of you who don’t remember him from the cartoon, He-man was a blonde, nearly naked steroid freak in a loin cloth, fur boots, and a fucked up S&M chest piece whom rocked out with a Dutch-boy haircut. This movie captures the same spirit, but adds a modern and less blatantly homosexual twist. While he still has an outstanding loin cloth, his chest piece now looks like a medieval version of football pads, he’s sporting a beautifully flowing Kentucky Waterfall, and they’ve added a cape in a thinly veiled attempt to make him appear more clothed and therefore less likely to slam his well-oiled man-boobs into your face at any moment. In other words, his Fabulous! Quotient is still remarkably high, but now he looks kind of like a non-science fiction version of Steve Armstrong from Arena. As a matter of fact, that gives me an awesome idea for a sequel…Masters of the Universe II: He-Man Vs Steve Armstrong: Going for Gold in the Space Olympics. As a matter of fact, I’m going to pause the movie for about twenty minutes and go doodle pictures of that on some construction paper! Sweet!

Now that I’ve given up after spending an hour trying to decide which pencil crayon color is appropriate to draw awesome with, let’s get back to the show. He-man watches Skeletor’s holographic speech from on high, showing a distinct lack of emotion that one might mistake for stoic indifference rather than just a phenomenal inability to emote the most basic human expression. So while taking the news of his loss in stride, I guess, He-man decides that he’s not ready to surrender quite yet, so he jumps down from his perch to take on a group of passing enemy soldiers just for shits and giggles. Despite what you’d expect, his famed magical Sword of Grayskull is used more as ‘business’ to keep his hands busy than anything else while the battle features an awful lot of laser pistols, which I don’t ever remember being in the original cartoon. Apparently the best way to make a He-man movie is to try to make it as close to Star Wars as possible, seeing as they’re kind of, sort of, actually not even close.

Once He-man finishes the group off, his two trusted allies, a grizzled old army veteran named Man-At-Arms and his warrior daughter Teela, arrive on the scene. Again, if you’re unfamiliar with the cartoon that inspired this movie, I’d just like to confirm the fact that has likely just blown the pants right off your mind: this movie has a character named Man-At-Arms. No shit. Since He-man was apparently away taking a ten pound dump somewhere while the invasion went down, they recount the tale of their decisive defeat. And while that exceptionally brief tale comes to an end, we begin to hear the harrowing cries of a midget in the distance. The heroes go to investigate, discovering that the soldiers they have just killed were transporting a tiny figure named Orko…wait, I mean Gwildor, who reveal that he’s a locksmith and inventor who was being hunted by Skeletor’s men. When He-Man asks why, Gwildor says that it would be easier to show him than explain it. Don’t do it, He-man! Stranger danger! If he takes you to a shitty van and asks you if you like to suck on ‘candy’, run like hell!

The group heads back to Gwildor’s home in The Shire, or whatever they call its shitty equivalent in this movie, where Gwildor invites them in for tea and reach-arounds. But after getting no takers, he instead shows them the reason why he was being pursued: his latest invention, which he calls the Cosmic Key. It’s basically an awkward cylindrical keyboard that can open a portal to any point in the universe from the tones that it generates, which Gwildor shows off by activating it. Being the universal super genius that he is, He-Man quickly surmises that this device is the method that Skeletor used to enter Castle Grayskull uncontested. Gwildor agrees before going on to explain that he was visited by Evil-Lyn, who stole the only other model of this device from him. He-man then asks if it’s possible to use the Cosmic Key to leap directly into the throne room of Castle Grayskull, even though he’s the one who just said assumed that’s exactly what Skeletor did. Gwildor confirms that it can be done but warns against such a move, saying that if they were to activate this Key, Skeletor could use the one in his possession to locate the signal. Not to mention the fact that He-man might end up bouncing around through time and space, entering people’s bodies just long enough to solve their problems with the help of Dean Stockwell before moving on, in an endless succession that won’t end until ratings plummet. Oh boy. But now that Gwildor’s given that warning, I can’t help but remember that he activated the Key himself a second ago just to brag. Maybe that’s why a death squad just knocked on your front door, brainiac.

As said group of stormtroopers, I mean soldiers, led a by a starving poodle with an afro named Karg prepares to break down the front door and kill everyone inside, He-man and the rest of the gang flees down a secret, yet extremely well illuminated passageway that conveniently leads directly from Gwildor’s cave to the caverns under Castle Grayskull. What are the odds of that? And as an aside Gwildor, you probably should have mentioned that little tidbit of information before activating the Key on a whim and spoiling any chance of a surprise attack. Just before they disappear down the tunnel and close the entrance behind them, Gwildor proclaims that he doesn’t like adventures. That’s good pal, because that’s not how I’d describe this movie.

As the death squad rips apart Gwildor’s bachelor pad, where they inevitably will find his collection of Brazilian fart porn, the movie cuts over to He-man and the Masters of the Universe wandering into the throne room of Castle Grayskull, which sits surprisingly empty. They scramble up to the force field in which the Sorceress is being held, trying to use the Cosmic Key to spring her while she explains that she can only hold off Skeletor until The Great Eye opens, whatever the fuck that means. But before they can accomplish much of anything, Skeletor and a legion of soldiers march in and spoil the party. With his mortal enemy in his grasp and victory all but assured, Skeletor takes a moment to expand on the bullshit the Sorceress was spouting, explaining that when the moon reaches its zenith, the Great Eye will open and the powers of the universe will be revealed to him. Oh, now it makes perfect sense. It sure is nice of him to lay out his entire plan, going so far as to give them a timeline in which they have to stop him. While he blathers on, Evil-Lyn notices that Gwildor has another Cosmic Key and shouts a warning, prompting Skeletor to launch his army into action. Despite being outnumbered at least ten times over, He-man and the Masters of the Discharge are not slaughtered right away. Of course, they don’t really achieve much either since a four piece jigsaw puzzle would be too much for these people to handle, so Man-At-Arms suggests that Gwildor open a portal so that they can escape to the fabled land of “anywhere”. Gwildor complies, and as they all leap into the portal, the retarded midget manages to drop the Key. But just before the portal closes forever, a grappling hook claw flies back from its depths and grabs the key, pulling it into the portal behind them. Enraged at their predictable and yet futile escape, Skeletor demands that someone track them the next time they use the key. After all, as he says, “I must possess all or I possess nothing”. Wow. That’s exceptionally profound. It means fucking NOTHING, but it’s profound in its meaninglessness.

Rather than leaving us with the false hope that they’ve found themselves warped into the icy tomb of deep space, the movie turns right back to our heroes as they find themselves spit out of the portal faster than broccoli in the mouth of a fat man on a Pixie Stix bender. They regroup slowly after the side-splitting hilarity of Gwildor landing face first in mud, only to discover that the Cosmic Key has been lost. But it’s not all bad news, as not only Gwildor was lucky enough to have chosen a planet at random that not only has a breathable atmosphere, but they’ve landed on a part of the planet that speaks the same goddamn language they do. Deciding to make their uselessness more efficient, they split up and wander off in search for the Key.

Taking a break from this roller coaster of non-stop action, the movie now introduces us to Courtney Cox, a woman in her mid-twenties playing a high school student named Julie who’s recently been shattered by the accidental death of her parents. And by shattered, I mean that she spends her day grinning vacantly just a little less often than she would have otherwise. As she finishes her last shift at a rib and chicken joint, Courtney talks about her plans for the future with a coworker. It’s fair to surmise that she wants to follow her parents through the gates of hell, as she discloses that she’s leaving tonight to go to start a new life in New Jersey. Once her shift ends, she heads out to the parking lot to meet her boyfriend, Kevin, in his awesome rapist van. They sit and make idle chit chat for a moment, while Kevin appears to struggle to find a way to ask her to give him one last rimjob before she leaves forever. But eventually he resigns himself to the fact that he and his dry anus will have to go back to having sex with his stuffed animal collection, and the two of them head off to the cemetery to so that Courtney can say good-bye to her parents.

To remind us that this in not just a particularly shitty episode of All My Children, once the two love birds roll away, the entire search party of heroes, save He-man, pops out of the bushes looking for chow. After yet another uproarious scene where the gang discovers that the food that Gwildor has stolen is the flesh of an animal, they head back into the woods more disgusted with humankind than I was the day that I first watched Glenn Beck.

As we catch up with the two crazy kids up to their wacky hi-jinx at the cemetery, Courtney delivers a speech ripped straight out of an afterschool special starring Fred Savage about how her parents’ death was her fault. But that entire personal trauma seems to just wash away the moment they walk only to find the Cosmic Key lying in a flower bed nearby. Well done. There’s nothing that nullifies any credibility your grief had quite like, “I miss you so much, mom and dad…Hey, is that a shiny object! COOOOOOL!” Regardless, they find the Key lying in a huge goddamn hole in the ground, so naturally these two brain surgeons conclude that it must have fallen from the sky. And yet Kevin is still bright enough that when Courtney asks what it is, he says that he thinks it’s some kind of new Japanese synthesizer. Yeah, it must be. Rather than going with the direct Pearl Habour approach, the Japanese must have a developed a new strategy of dropping kick ass instruments on Middle America to slowly sedate you with rock. Undaunted by his own crippling stupidity, Kevin fires the Key up and starts jamming on it, since it seems that Gwildor was considerate enough to build it to match Earth’s musical scales. Yeah, find C sharp for me, asshole.

Back on Eternia, Skeletor and his gang detect the signal of the suddenly activated Key and manage to track it within a “parsec eon”. An eon is a measurement of time, dickheads. Did you also happen to find your lunchbox within a “mile hour”? Suspecting that it might be a trap, as apparently their witless actions to this point are just a cover for the fact that He-man and his two and a half fellow warriors are sly enough to take out an entire army, Skeletor decides to send a group of mercenaries to check out the situation first. But regardless of how poorly they decide to do it, the noose begins to tighten on our heroes.

Unaware of the moderately unsubstantial danger that they’re in back on Earth, Courtney and Kevin arrive at the high school gym where he sets up to play a gig with his band. While doing the sound check, Kevin asks Courtney for her opinion as he starts playing one of the lamest keyboard riffs that I’ve ever heard. It’s so shitty that it would be inappropriate to use as the soundtrack for a failure. She smiles and humors him, though, secretly reaffirming to herself that she’s got to get the fuck out of there as soon as possible. This is pretty remarkable when you consider that most musicians can’t help but to get laid, even if they’re at an appointment reviewing their stock portfolio or to having a boil lanced. But I’m serious when I say that this guy is so unsexy, he would dry up a vagina faster than a paper towel dildo stuck on a rubber Michael Bolton replica. He’s feeling spunky, however, so Kevin decides to rock out on the Cosmic Key again, this time amping it up to see how it sounds when he plays it badly but really loud. What, seriously? Gwildor built an output for an amp on that thing? I guess that’s in case he wants to open a portal to another world, and do it TO THE EXTREME! Kevin hits the special button on the Key, this time starting a little sound clip while again showing the mini laser rock show. Right about now I’m having flashbacks of the shitty bossanova tune that my little brother’s keyboard played if you hit the demo button.

As we return to Eternia, Skeletor’s troops once again lock in to the source of the Key’s signal, tracking it even more precisely before taking a moment to introduce the team that is to be sent to Earth. Behold the destructors:

Beastman: the lone member of the troupe whom is from the old cartoon. He can’t speak, but grunts like he’s about to hump your leg instead. If you’ve ever heard him talk on the old show, you know as well as I do that this is probably for the best.

Karg: the previously mentioned constipated poodle with an afro. He’s got a hook for a hand, which I’m going to guess was elective surgery. He’s the leader of the troupe, likely because he has the most particularly evil sounding voice that’s all the more chilling with the natural slurring that occurs when the actor tries to talk through the stiff rubber mask.

Blade: the gay cyber pirate of the future. He’s got the mandatory eye patch, pirate boots, chainmail, and two swords. But what you don’t see if how much he loves to snuggle up at night with a cappuccino and the latest issue of Good Housekeeping, dreaming about giving up all the plundering and pillaging so that he can get that little cottage of his own one day.

Saurod: He’s a lizard in armor. He’s got a gun. Enough said.

Before they leave, Skeletor instructs them to find the key, bring He-man back alive, and do whatever they want with the others. I think he’s slyly suggesting either rape or challenging them to an Over The Top style arm wrestling tournament.

Back on Earth, Kevin is finishing up his sound check when he decides that now’s the perfect time to run over to Charlie’s music store to show off his new synthesizer, leaving Courtney behind to stare at an empty gymnasium. Sure, that seems like a perfectly reasonable idea when it’s your last evening together with your girlfriend. But almost immediately after he leaves, the portal delivering Skeletor’s mercenaries opens just outside the gym. Since they are pretty blatantly useless throughout the rest of the film, the troupe stops for a minute to prove that they can at least slap one person around by picking on a helpless janitor that happens to wander into the room. When they finish with him, they burst into the gym to find Courtney all alone. She manages to escape them by pulling the ultra sneaky moves of crawling under a stage and then running out a door. Wow, I think even the most effective mercenaries would have been helpless to stop that clever sequence of evasive maneuvers. As they leave the place burning behind them, the group follows Courtney out into the night.

Courtney shouts for help while running into an outdoor storage area/open walled warehouse, where, naturally, she runs into He-man after he heard her cries for help and decided to intercept. Apparently running into a nearly naked, oiled man with a sword and a mullet doesn’t astonish her, as once she tells him that she’s being chased, she doesn’t object in the slightest when he carries her to safety, leaves her hidden, and then runs out to face the group of pursuing villains. He takes them all on one after the other, in an orgy of complete and utter martial incompetence. And after He-man has slapped them around for a while, Man-At-Arms and Teela arrive in the distance and start shooting before taking so much as a second to figure out who they should be shooting at or why. The villains flee, leaving Courtney to be assured by a nearly naked stranger that everything is going to be fine. No, that’s pretty far from goddamn fine, thanks.

He-man takes a moment to share the insane tale of his journey through space with Courtney, ending it by asking if she’s seen the Cosmic Key, not bothering to add the disclaimer that his question is retarded due to the incredibly unlikely chances that he just happened to run into the one of the two people who just happened to find the Key a short while ago. But of course she recognizes the description right away, and agrees to help before telling He-man that Kevin’s got the Key. Concluding that Kev-Bot’s likely in danger, He-man decides to stop trying to find the right moment to ask if she would be willing to go behind some crates and put a finger in his ass, declaring that they should move out. Once they get up, he introduces Courtney to his semi-competent companions, Man-At-Arms and Teela, just before Gwildor rolls up in a car that he stole from a retarded pimp and then somehow managed to convert to an entirely new power source within an hour at most. And the entire purpose of the scene is so that for the remainder of the film, they get to roll around in a shitty Cadillac that has an extra light on the back and makes space-aged sounds while it drives. That’s totally unnecessary. Are they going to do so much driving that stealing a car with a full tank of gas wouldn’t have been good enough?

Having left his soon-to-be-ex-girlfriend both not laid and in mortal peril, Kev-meister shows up at Charlie’s music store to show off the Cosmic Key. After what’s becoming the very standard brief laser Pink Floyd show, he and Charlie notice a bunch of sirens racing past the shop. Finding this considerably more interesting than Kevin’s useless tool, Charlie pulls out his police band radio, which is screeching something about a fire at the school gym. After the sudden realization that he truly is an asshole dawns on Kevin, he takes off to find Courtney. He soon makes it back to the school and tries to run past the police and fire crews, only to be stopped by a bald cop played by the unspeakably awesome James Tolkan, or as most of us would know him, Strickland, the principal in Back To The Future. Despite Strickland’s insistence that there was no one in the building apart from a molested janitor, Kev-o-matic tries to explain that his girlfriend really was there and demands to know why Strickland isn’t out there doing something about this. Really? Why isn’t he out looking for a girl that you just told him about only seven seconds ago? Do you really need an answer to that question? Strickland’s reaction, which is far more merciful than the nightstick beating deserved, is to grab Kevin and throw him in his car so that the two of them can go looking for Courtney together. The first place that the two of them look, naturally, is Courtney’s house. They walk in just as Courtney calls from a pay phone to make sure that Kevin still has the Cosmic Key, telling him to stay there until she can get there. Once the call is over, the two men sit in awkward silence for a moment before Strickland activates the key and by banging on it like a monkey with a coconut.

Back on Eternia, as Skeletor laments over his lack of popularity with its general population like a goddamn twelve year old girl, his quartet of bumbling mercenaries stride into the throne room and recount the tale of their unbridled failure. In a show of appreciation for their noteworthy underachievement, Skeletor capriciously blasts Saurod with a bolt of lightning that disintegrates him instantly. Fare thee well, random armored lizard. We hardly knew ye, mostly because you didn’t have a single line of dialogue or productive moment in the film. The others beg for an opportunity to fail again, and since Skeletor seems perfectly happy to destroy them one at a time with lightning power, he obliges by dispatching Evil-Lyn to lead them back with a small group of soldiers.

Once the new team arrives on Earth, Evil-Lyn and the band of merry men arrive back at the scene of their brief battle with He-man. After she finishes watching the mulleted wonder beat the piss out of the mercenaries on some kind of scanner which shows the events that unfolded there earlier, they pick up the signal of Strickland activating the key back at Courtney’s house. To the Douchemobile! But before the crew of circus rejects can reach Courtney’s house in time, Strickland gets suspicious of the whole affair and confiscates the Cosmic Key, leaving Kevin behind to sift through Courtney’s dirty underwear. The Kev-baller doesn’t have time to get too freaky, however, as the horde of villains arrives only moments later. They burst into the house and subdue Kevin by placing a electronic collar around his neck that leaves him in a hypnotic trance. They interrogate him, learning that Strickland had just left with the Key.

Having finished with the young shit stain, the crew of dastardly dillholes flies away only moments before our heroes finally arrive at Courtney’s house. And by fly away, I mean that they load up into their ship, which then appears in the next shot in cardboard cut out form as it is slowly and stiffly raised into the air before jerkily sailing away. He-man and friends run into the house to find Kevin still under the power of his collar. They take it off so that he can slowly regain his senses, which obviously results in Kevin freaking out when he sees his girlfriend standing with shitty Halloween rejects. And things don’t get much better when Gwildor saunters in dressed like an old woman. Once he finally collects his wits, Kevin tells the gang that the Strickland has left with the Key, heading to Charlie’s music store. To the Cadillac! And only seconds later, the movie transitions back to that pivotal store, where we see Strickland trying to get Charlie to tell him what the Key is and whether or not it was made by communists. Not bothering to beat around the bush, He-man and the Masters of the Self-Cut Hair stride directly up to Strickland and demand the Key back, just as they detect that Evil-Lyn and her strike force are approaching.

The stage for yet another greatly disappointing battle is now set. While the villains prepare for their assault, He-man and Man-At-Arms try to fortify the store with keyboards and various other musical instruments to defend themselves as the others all hide in a back room. The fighting finally begins when generic soldiers run through the store’s front windows and begin firing their laser rifles in no particular direction, managing not to come close to hitting their targets, despite the fact that they once again outnumber them considerably. He-man and Man-At-Arms return fire, and that’s basically it. There’s nothing else to it. They hide behind a stack of keyboards basically playing a shitty game of Duck Hunt while enemy soldiers continue to wander in through the smashed out front windows. Wanting a piece of the tedious action as she listens from the back room, Teela leaves Kev-O in charge of the gun, instructing him to keep Strickland at bay while Gwildor tries to find the right code in the Cosmic Key to get them home.

As this scene gets clearly boring, we see this reflected in Courtney’s face as she would rather sit and look out the window than face the mundane situations she finds herself in. But as she stares down the alley behind the store, she sees her dead mother standing at the end of it. Sure, there’s nothing even remotely suspicious about that. But as she’s proven several times by accompanying a naked stranger who claims to be from another planet in the middle of the night, Courtney isn’t too bright. She wanders outside while the Kev-Master starts wrestling with Strickland for the gun, which proves that not only is she not very bright, but she couldn’t care less if Kevin lives or dies. As she slips away undetected, she reaches the end of the alley and meets her mother, who tells her that she and her father didn’t actually die in a plane crash, but just had to disappear because they’re doing very important, very secret work. Ah, that old story. Her mother then says that her new friends are involved in the whole affair, that she and her father need the Cosmic Key, and asking her to go get it for them. Still not catching onto this painfully obvious ploy that couldn’t fool a beagle with a learning disorder, Courtney runs back into the storeroom where a confused group only watches as she grabs the Key and takes off again. When she makes her way back to her mother and hands it over, the curtain to this painfully obvious magic trick is pulled back, revealing that her mother was actually Evil-Lyn. As Courtney screams in horror, the wicked sorceress simply walks away with the prize.

Now that Skeletor’s minionss have the Key and the pointless conflict becomes exponentially more pointless, the soldiers still fighting in the store all begin to withdraw, leaving He-man to pursue them through a haze of confusion while Evil-Lyn sends a message back to Eternia saying that they finally have the Key. Back in the store, Strickland asks Charlie if he has a gun while the two of them stand alone in the rubble. He does, of course, and pulls it out from under the front counter. No wait, he doesn’t have a gun. He has a fucking twelve gauge shotgun. That’s fucking ridiculous. What music store owner would keep a goddamn shotgun under their desk? Now that he’s armed again, Strickland runs out to attack the fleeing soldiers, only to be nearly killed when they return a volley of laser fire. With rapidly filling boxer shorts, he decides that he’s got to go get backup. Oh Strickland, your crusty antics warm me inside like a baked Pizza Pop. Will you never learn?

He-man and the Masters of the Ass Fissures are still running down the street in aimless pursuit when a portal starts to open near them. They flee the scene just in time for Skeletor and his army to arrive. His army consisting of about a dozen soldiers standing around his floating throne ship. Upon discovering that He-man is still running free, Skeletor dispatches his “Air Centurions”, which are the same old regular soldiers who happen to be riding shitty hoverboard platforms. Fleeing from these flying atrocities, our heroes manage to break into an abandoned building, where they head for the roof, because that’s the best fucking place to hide when you’re being hunted by flying enemies. Why not try the basement, you goddamn turd hammers. But to try and redeem himself, He-man hides near a window and waits for one of the Air Centurions to pass before shooting him dead. With a sweet ride now up for the taking, he jumps out and flies off the hoverboard.

Now that He-man has a idiotic excuse to be airborne, the movie tries to throw another brand of action at us as we’re treated to a whole series of flying scenes. It’s kind of like watching Top Gun as long as you’re watching it with hot sauce and cat turd smeared in your eyes. There are two ways that they make him appear to ‘fly’ in this movie, and both of them are equally outstanding. Half the shots are close ups of He-man crouching slightly as scenery whips by. Trust me, in no way does this look like they filmed Dolph from the waist up while he’s riding in the bed of a moving truck, because that would just be stupid. But that kind of stupidity is actually as good as it gets, because the other half of them are much worse. They are the shots of He-man and his hoverboard flying through the air, which consists of a model moving through the air while staying perfectly rigid. And when I say rigid, I mean no movement whatsoever, even when gravity would demand that he at lean in a certain direction. His head, arms, back…nothing. It would honestly look entirely appropriate for a giant hand to be holding onto He-man as he moves through the shots.

He-man races through the air, eventually catching up to Evil-Lyn and her gang. He takes out a few random soldiers before eventually using Gwildor’s grappling hook to snag the Cosmic Key out of their grasp and making a quick getaway. But as he flees the scene, he finds himself heading directly towards another Air Centurion. To elude him, he does a giant loop in the air, where he literally flies upside down for a moment before swooping back down and taking the soldier out with his sword. That’s unspeakably awesome, because to show He-man flying upside down, they just flip a close up shot of him over so that it looks like he’s hanging upside down. The problem is that the hoverboard that he’s riding is just a floating platform. There’s no way that he’s strapped in or stuck to that thing in any way. So apparently he’s able to stay on it while flying upside down through the sheer power of his mullet. And to make it all the scene that much more awesome, when he slashes the Air Centurion with his sword, the guy goddamn explodes. So I guess that was either a robot or that guy had some unfortunately timed explosive diarrhea.

While He-man is off flying around like shithead, the remaining Masters of the Penal Rod stay crouched on the roof of the building, in the mildest of attempts to hide the fact that they’ve couldn’t have picked a place to hide that’s more out in the open. But as they yammer away about the price of tapshoes or some bullshit, Skeletor’s floating platform rises up beside the building to face them. His soldiers spring into action, having them small band disarmed and rounded up just as He-man files onto the scene with all the absolute glory that a cardboard cutout can muster. Courtney tries to warn him that Skeletor has set a trap for him, because Skeletor’s presence along with dozens of troops apparently isn’t quite obvious enough, and ends up getting blasted in the leg by more of Skeletor’s lightning. However, rather than disappearing into nothingness like our old friend Saurod, she simply starts to rot away slowly, like she’s being overrun by space herpes. He-man lands on the roof and takes on soldier after soldier, with his friends trying, and quickly failing, to join the fight until eventually Skeletor simply tells him to cut that shit out. He gives He-man the choice of returning to Eternia with him as his slave and leaving his friends alive here, or staying with them here until they all rot. Surrendering the Sword of Grayskull despite the protests of Teela, He-man pipes up, “Teela, I have no choice. This is our fight. I don’t want innocent people to die”. The line itself isn’t so remarkable as the fact that the way that Dolph spits it out seems completely unnatural, like he’s fighting the English language more than he has to with any other opponent that he’s presented with.

Left to their own devices after the party escorts He-man back through a portal and dissipates into the night, the two and a half remaining heroes of Eternia tell the Kev-tastic one that they must get Courtney back to their world if she’s to survive Skeletor’s herpes, as the Sorceress is the only one that can save her now. But Gwildor rules that out as impossible, saying that during the fight, their Cosmic Key had it’s memory melted, so the tones contained in it were gone. Someone would have to remember the exact tune that was required to get to Eternia, which happens to be the one that played when the shitty laser rock show was going on. Frustrated with the thought of losing the girl that he was going to lose within a matter of hours anyways, Kevin proclaims that there has to be a way to save her. Gwildor says that only a Master Songmaker could pull it off. And wouldn’t you know it, Kevin just happens to be a shitty musician. He starts to hum the tune from memory to the amazement of everyone. At this point, I’d like to point out that it’s unspeakably awesome that a high school student can remember the tones after hearing them three times, yet the guy that engineered the damn thing, purposely based around music, is at a loss. Gwildor declares that he can get them home if only he had three things, two of which the Eternians happen that have on them, with the third being a keyboard. That’s no problem, as Kevin runs to get one from Charlie’s.

As our attention turns to Eternia, Skeletor marches everyone back into the throne room of Castle Grayskull where he gloats for a while before putting the Sword of Grayskull into some kind of electronic sheath. Then wanting to put the final piece of his gay domination in place, he demands that He-man kneel before him, which the blonde badass of course refuses to do. In response, he motions for Blade to pull out a laser whip and commence giving him a digital lashing. Of course the easiest way to create a laser whip is obviously just to animate one, but the glaringly poor animation of the whip coupled with the obviously impossible physics of it in motion make it more obviously animated than if Blade were striking him with Daffy Duck. So this short scene becomes just about one of the biggest dumps in the growing pile of dookie this movie will leave on your chest.

To keep the suspense flowing like piss out of an elderly man with an inflamed prostate, the movie switches back on Earth just to show the Kevola Bar arriving with a keyboard just as Gwildor finishes rigging up the Cosmic Key like a goddamn tent for a night of camping, then jumps right back to Castle Grayskull as the time of the fateful moon rise has finally arrived. To commiserate the moment, Skeletor once again gets onto the holographic display and addresses the entire world, demanding that they along with He-man bear witness to his ascent to power. And with that, the moment is upon us. The Great Eye, or the fucking wall behind him to those of us that aren’t retarded, finally opens as the moon reaches its zenith. He stands there in anticipation as two golden balls of energy fall from the sky to circle around Skeletor before finally absorbing into his head and causing him to pulse with golden light. He rambles through a shitty and meaningless speech before finally declaring that he’s a god, errupting in light and transforming from a skeleton in a black robe set into a skeleton in a shitty golden outfit. So that’s how he attained the most ultimate power in the universe? He was just standing in the right spot at the right time? Really? That seems way too simple. He didn’t even have to cast a spell, sacrifice a chicken, or open the Necronomicon. Hell, a janitor could have accidentally wandered up and been given he power while buffing the fucking floor. Anyways, now that Skeletor has achieved godhood, he once again begins to demand that He-man kneel, hitting him with golden beams of energy from his eyes when his demand is once again refused. Wow. Considering that those beams don’t affect He-man any more than the shitty whip did, those are some impressive god powers!

Now that the deadline for stopping Skeletor’s maser plan has officially past and any efforts to stop him should be theoretically futile, our heroes back on Earth they finally begin the process of activating the Key by running power to it while the Kev-aholic begins to tickle the ivories. But just as they get started, Strickland rushes in with his shotgun, having followed Kevin back earlier from his run to Charlie’s for the keyboard. And even though the tune continues to play during this surprise intrusion, Kevin takes his hands off the keyboard to appeal to Strickland to fuck off. So despite all that bullshit about precisely the right tones and such, they end up warping back to Eternia anyways, despite the fact that Kevin had given up playing entirely.

The scene in Grayskull provides more of the same shit we’ve come to expect, as Skeletor continues to ramble on about God knows what. But as he reaches the middle of nowhere in his speech, the portal suddenly opens in the throne room and the Super Friends, along with Strickland, half a car, and part of a brick wall all suddenly appear. Being once again horribly outnumbered, the heroes immediately take cover and start blasting away at Skeletor’s troops, knowing quite well by this point that nothing that opposes them will pose them any real danger. During the commotion, He-man manages to free himself from his chains by coaxing Skeletor to shoot lightning at him again before raising his arms to absorb the impact with his shackles. And now that he is free to join in, a ridiculous brawl scene transpires. Soldiers are killed left and right without so much as a single casualty among He-man’s gang, until it all culminates into one moment of pure sweetness. He-man takes cover behind a giant statue, much to the chagrin of Skeletor, who hits it with lightning in an attempt to…I don’t know…kill him through the stone, I guess. Seeing his chance for glory, He-man pushes on the massive stone statue while pantomiming in a way that, I swear to God, looks more like he’s taking a dump than almost anyone in the history of cinema who intentionally tried to look like they were taking a dump. Finally the statue falls down on no one at all and essentially accomplishes nothing. Talk about symbolism for the entire movie, but I guess it was supposed to be pretty bad ass.

So with the prerequisite bar fight out of the way, it’s time for the mandatory final showdown. He-man swings down from up high to the platform where Skeletor is standing. Despite being pummeled non-stop with a stream of god-powered lightning, he manages to pull his signature Sword of Grayskull from its sheath, which bathes him in light as he finally belts out the signature line, “I HAVE THE POWER!” Or, as Dolph yells it: “Ahhh Maaahhhh Daaahh Pawuhhhh!” And with that cry, the two rivals face off for their duel. As they begin their incredibly short and underwhelming clash, the lights suddenly go out, leaving them to battle alone in the room while a single spot light illuminates them from behind. I’m not sure if this is to make the fight look dramatic or to hide the fact that Dolph and the stuntman playing Skeletor are about as comfortable with their sword and staff respectively as they would be if they were wielding spitting cobras. After this ultimate battle drags on for a whopping 38 seconds (yes, seriously), He-man finally gets the upper hand and with one mighty chop of his sword, he cuts Skeletor’s staff in half. For some reason, this somehow forces the power out of him, causing him to revert back into his old, dark robed self. So I guess the ultimate power of the universe is centralized in a staff. That’s…awesome? Standing over his beleaguered opponent, He-man declares that it’s over. Skeletor agrees, just before pulling a sword out from under his robe and lunging for a quick attack. Completely caught off guard, as he must have thought he had just finished a tickle fight, He-man has the Sword of Grayskull chopped from his hand. It slides to the edge of a pit, where He-man dives and catches it just before it goes over. He turns the immediately and parries Skeletor’s follow up attack, then somehow managing to chop at Skeletor and send him over the edge of the random drop, where he plummets hundreds of feet to his ultimate demise.

With the battle over, the lights suddenly turn back on to reveal that all of Skeletor’s troops are magically gone. Overcome with joy, Man-At-Arms declares victory. Huzzah! With the slightest grin, He-man agrees, showing so much emotion that you’d think that someone just explained to him that he could now have his Subway sandwich toasted. Seriously, I’ve looked happier after walking out of a dentist’s office than that (mostly because I pay for the “happy ending”, if you know what I mean).

The scene transitions to the same throne room a short while later as He-man marches with the freshly healed Courtney and the Kevatron 2.0 to greet The Sorceress and the rest of the group by the throne. They’re surprised to see Strickland there, who has apparently decided to stay now that he’s been issued an official alien prostitute. Yes, he’s staying behind because he now has a castle and a woman. So unless they’re suggesting six months have passed, that’s a hooker. And a castle? Did they hand over the keys to Castle Grayskull to this asshole just for showing up and deciding not to leave? If so, I’m getting me a Casio and a car battery and playing up a storm until a portal opens. But unlike Strickland, Courtney and Kevin have no interest in staying. The Sorceress gives Courtney a broach to remember them by, like this clusterfuck of a night is something they could possibly forget. As they turn to say goodbye to Teela and Man-At-Arms, they explain that they never say goodbye, but instead they say, “good journey”. Sure, why not throw unnecessary local dialect in at this point. Finally He-man and his freshly feathered mullet give Courtney a big hug before Gwildor asks if there’s any time that they’d like to go back, as he can send them back to the Earth at any point in either the past or the future. WHAT?! TIME TRAVEL? Are you fucking kidding me? You throw that in right at the end? If they could go through time at any point, why didn’t they just go back to Eternia to the moments before Skeletor had invaded and stopped the whole thing in the first place? What was the point of all of this bullshit? As I’m busy choking on my own rage, Kevin tells Gwildor that it’s okay, they just want to go home. Gwildor obliges, opening a portal that they begin to walk through. But just as they start to cross the threshold, Courtney gets an idea, turning back to shout for Gwildor to instead send them back to either before her parents died, or before she allowed this half assed pianist to touch her.

But before we can tell if Gwildor heard her cry, the transition completes and Courtney finds herself back at home in her own bed. She gets up, showing off what has to be one of the least sexy things a woman could possibly wear to bed next to a goddamn scuba suit, and rushes downstairs to find that Gwildor had heard her after all. Her parents are still alive! She grabs their keys from them and forbids them to take the plane ride that day that was destined to kill them, running out into the street where she finds the Kev-tard running to meet up with her. They both wonder aloud if the whole thing was a dream, just before she pulls out the broach that The Sorceress gave her as proof. They look into it to so that we can get one of the greatest closing shots imaginable, seeing He-man, standing with his sword held aloft in front of the image of Castle Grayskull, once again yelling, “Ahhh Maaahhhh Daaahh Pawuhhhh!” Fuck yeah! Like he said!

That would be the last shot of the movie if you didn’t sit through the credits, which most people wouldn’t because they’ve got far better things to do with their lives than discover who the key goddamn grip was. But if you had the patience to do so, you’d be treated to an outstanding epilogue consisting of Skeletor’s head popping out of a pool of water and yelling, “I’ll be back!” I’m sure at the time they made this film, they were hoping it would be a big enough hit to make a sequel, justifying that comment. But as Killian said to Arnold Shwarzenegger in The Running Man: “Only in a rerun.”

The Verdict:

Donkey:  This is probably as good as He-man is ever going to get, barring a complete reinvention. And who the fuck would look at He-man and even bother trying? But that doesn’t make this film good by a long shot. My biggest complaint is that there’s simply not enough characters, or at least not enough of the original ones. After all, half the fun of the old cartoon and the toy collection was just seeing what kind of crazy motherfuckers the company would dream up. Where’s Man-E-Faces, Fisto, Trap-Jaw, Two-Bad or even Stinkor? And let’s not forget two of my personal favorites, Rokkon and Stonedar, the precursors to the Rocklords (That’s right: the Go-Bots didn’t even think to invent robots that transform into fucking rocks, one of the shittiest toys in the history of man, on their own. They actually thought that was worth ripping off). They were two dudes made out of rock that didn’t so much “transform” into rocks as much as just kind of bend over a practically scream out, “Look kid, I’m a fucking rock. What do you want?”. But instead of those classics, we got Karg, Blade, and Saurod. Who? And why not just have Orko instead of renaming him Gwildor? Throw a scarf and a pointy hat on that midget and it’s the same goddamn character. On the plus side, while I thought Dolph did a mildly passable, if not excessively wooden job at playing He-man, Frank Langella was awesome as Skeletor. It’s an inherently retarded character in the first place, but he brought it to the big screen as well as anyone possibly could. Overall, I give the movie four greasy man in loin cloths out of five inexplicably cackling skeletons.

What We Learned:

Donkey: Godlike powers amount to little more than a new outfit, rather ineffective eye lasers, and an exceptionally flimsy staff, all of which can me defeated by a man with a mullet, a sword, and absolutely no more powers than he presented before you ascended to your diety status. Yeah, that sounds about right.

Don’t forget to check back every Sunday for a new fresh review! Next week shittymovienight.com presents: one of the worst films that Canadian cinema has to offer, which is really saying something, when we try to sit through…NIGHTBREED.

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