MOTU Review

Welcome to the battlefield for this special edition. This is the “It’s so bad I can’t even believe it’s a movie” review. Last week I was going to use this film in the battle versus Ricky but I knew I would only be throwing the match. This film is so bad that I would have to watch 1000 more bad movies to find its equal.

I remember He-man as being a cartoon I used to watch with my brother on Saturday and sometimes weekday mornings. We would be so excited and He-man would defeat the evil, but bumbling, Skeleton. It was fun and we had enemies such as Beastman and Mossman (What a crap life Mossman must have lead.) We had the toys and Castle Greyskull would sit high on couch mountain and Snake Mountain would sit on the lower regions of the carpeted abyss. Our epic and childish adventures would amuse us for hours. We had imagination and props. It’s all we needed. Its all any kid needs to get through a boring rainy afternoon. We made adventures that no one had heard of and we were often happy with the outcome. Established characters, established intellectual property and plotlines that only knew the boundaries of a child’s imagination. Now with that in mind I can only conclude that masters of the universe, the 1987 movie was written by a half dead retarded monkey in the process of having a stroke and aneurysm at the same time.

I often think as I write my reviews “What was the director/ script writer thinking when they did this. “What was the motive for having that actor do it this way?” I think that this movie has a very obvious focus. Merchandising. There were only two characters in the movie that even resembled the cartoon. This movie was made for some douchebag in a polyester suit sitting in a corner office on the 42nd floor of a building in Hollywood or New York. By the time this debauchery came out I was out of toys, but I can probably safely assume the albino toy version of He-Man came out after the movie aired. Note to the director and casting people; Adam / He man had blond hair. His hair was not white. That one glaring issue makes it unwatchable in my eyes but there is more.

Batman and He-man have one thing in common. Well I suppose two, they are both guys and they don’t use guns. To put a gun in either of their hands is to betray the image the original writers tried to create. I am pretty sure the reason they gave Adam a huge sword was because he didn’t have a gun. He didn’t need a god damn gun he was He-Man for god sakes. If someone approached him he would call on the powers of Greyskull and stomp the bugger into the ground. It’s that simple. During almost the entire movie Adam carries a gun. He has his sword in one hand, which seems like an afterthought at best and his gun. I wonder if the director and writer realized that if he lost the sword he would no longer be He-Man. Of course in this bastardization of the classic cartoon He-man’s identity as Adam is never revealed. I want answers. I want to know why they tarnished such an amazing image that the cartoons worked so hard to create.

Let’s talk about Skeletor for a minute. The first thing that I absolutely have to admit is that he actually looks like Skeletor. He acted like Skeletor’s older brother who had been touched too many times by Skelefather and beaten to a bitter angry … skeleton of a man. He was portrayed as a dark and evil character much less retarded then the Skeletor of the cartoons. I can’t say that this was really all bad. I enjoyed the change and it didn’t make me sad, Beastman however, is another story. Beastman in the show was just a guy in need of a shave, REALLY badly. In the movie he was literally part beast. The rest of the bad guys that Skeletor sent after He-man were made up. Made up to sell toys to kids who bought into the garbage of merchandisable movies.

Why does every damn movie like this have to happen on earth? Why do directors and writers feel that a human, from the planet earth, needs to be in every movie ever made? Was it not enough that they had the rich green land of Eternia? Was it not enough that they had an established lore of their own. Why make it so that they come to earth. People here are always portrayed as plot devices, in this case, they were not only plot devices but also retarded. They find this device that they call a synthesizer and when they play it, or key mash it, it creates images. That’s absolutely what synthesizers did in the 80s. Oh ya. Drugs in the 80s must have been amazing. Quite frankly I’m sick of seeing movies that treat the audiences like nothing more than captive tarts that will believe whatever they are fed and accept it as being believable. Another example that I feel the need to mention is Aliens Vs. Predator. Why the hell did that have to happen on earth? Wouldn’t it have been much better for the entire battle to happen intergalactically or perhaps on one of their home worlds? I would much rather have seen Adam on the forest floor of Eternia.

Man-at-arms was nothing more then a storm trooper and may as well have not spoken the entire movie. In the cartoon he was lauded as someone who could take down any situation. He was almost as powerful as He-man and definitely a trusted advisor. Speaking of He-Mans entourage, where was Orko? What the hell was that pudgy dwarf looking thing and why was there a woman with them. I am pretty sure that they made She-ra because there were no women in He-man. Does that mean its ok to just randomly add people to the show? NO! It means make a god damn She-ra movie. There is a line in the movie where she blurts out “Woman at arms”, that’s the first time I turned off this pile of trash off and began what will always be known as the Masters of the Universe hole in my wall. This is where I beat my head in order to void it of the extreme stupidity I have watched. Let’s not even talk about Cringer, and his absence.

Now at the end of it all I sit here writing my review and pondering if I have possibly always known deep down that this movie was the worst of all time or if my recent run of reviews have made me watch it more critically they I ever have before. I suppose it doesn’t matter now, It’s in my over-sized ashtray melting. This disc and all the intellectual property it contains must meet a fiery death and never be shown to kids of any age. It is a dark secret of humanity and we should all be ashamed it was ever made.

The harsh reality here is with a movie like this, no one wins. It only serves as a disgraceful image of things long past, imagine if this was the only image of what we had of He-Man. I would never seek out the cartoons or even have a slight interest in what He-Man really is. Is this article a review or is it merely a rant from someone who grew up watching something that will now be only remembered by some as an absolutely terrible movie made to exploit heroes made for a generation that had no internet and had only their imagination to provide fantastic images of CGI.

On the next installment of B-Movie Battlefield, It’s back to the normal format and we see two more B-Movies fight for dominance of the battlefield. Thanks for indulging me this week.