I Have the POWER!
Ok, the Lundgren thing is over for now. Or at least on hold. Four movies in one weekend is pushing it even for me. Though I really want to find Showdown in Little Tokyo and Army of One, maybe even Red Scorpion and Men of War (though I admit, that's mostly to see early Catherine Bell trying to overcome her blatant loveliness to be a butch mercenary.)
My copy of Masters of the Universe totally sucks. It's a taped copy on VHS. The color is shit, sometimes the picture gets all distorted and skips like a record. However Frank Langella overcomes all of these faults and completely walks away with the movie every time Skeletor opens his mouth. "Tell me about the loneliness of good, He-Man. Is it equal to the loneliness of evil? " God he's fabulous in this. He manages to make the masturbatory bad guy monologue entertaining. And he's very, very creepy while he's watching He-Man get laser-whipped. Nothing like introducing some vague S&M into a movie based on a kid's cartoon!
Courtney Cox just cracks me up here. She spends half the time in the movie curled against He-Man or wrapped in his cape. Lady! The guy didn't have that much on to begin with! Give him back the cape already. Seriously, I'm all for seeing more of Dolph Lundgren's buff physique, but why did everyone else get clothes except him? But Cox's character is a lot like a good Doctor Who companion: come face to face with interstellar scariness, freak out. Meet interstellar hero, calm down a bit, totally ignore the larger issue of finding out there is indeed something out there, and get down to the business of saving multiple worlds. It's especially noticeable when her boyfriend flips out after his first encounter with the aliens.
Speaking of the boyfriend, it's Tom Paris from Star Trek Voyager! God half the fun of watching an 80's movie is seeing where people went from there.
I had forgotten how much this movie blatantly ripped off Star Wars, but I totally don't care, it was fun anyway. I especially loved the Air Centurions, god, talk about being the bike police of Skeletor's army. I wish they'd given the sorceress the cool eagle costume, I can see putting her in white to make the contrast between her and Skeletor just THAT much clearer, but really, she lives in a GIANT SKULL. Where did that skull come from anyway? And why is HER skull a good place to be but Skull Mountain sucks? Where did all these enormous-boned creatures go?
As nostalgia goes, this ain't the cartoon He-Man, and thank god. Sure, I wish there was a Battlecat, how awesome would that have been? But there's no Orco, no clueless King and Queen, and no smarmy smirking Prince Adam. Instead we have evil troopers that can actually aim (oh shit! we better take cover for real or we might get hit!), a Teela that's not a whiny pain in the ass, and the funny bald cop ("Nobody takes pot shots at LUBIC!") And Dolph does nicely, his accent smoothly standing in for that goofy booming voice cartoon He-Man used. And I must admit, the cape does good things for him, even if it probably does get in the way of the sword (whose power is completely unexplained!) And as Marc-Anthony pointed out, there is that feathered hair. WAY better than a Prince Valiant cut, don't you think?
Amazon has this on dvd. Soooo tempting. If I bought $25 worth of his movies, I could get free shipping...
My copy of Masters of the Universe totally sucks. It's a taped copy on VHS. The color is shit, sometimes the picture gets all distorted and skips like a record. However Frank Langella overcomes all of these faults and completely walks away with the movie every time Skeletor opens his mouth. "Tell me about the loneliness of good, He-Man. Is it equal to the loneliness of evil? " God he's fabulous in this. He manages to make the masturbatory bad guy monologue entertaining. And he's very, very creepy while he's watching He-Man get laser-whipped. Nothing like introducing some vague S&M into a movie based on a kid's cartoon!
Courtney Cox just cracks me up here. She spends half the time in the movie curled against He-Man or wrapped in his cape. Lady! The guy didn't have that much on to begin with! Give him back the cape already. Seriously, I'm all for seeing more of Dolph Lundgren's buff physique, but why did everyone else get clothes except him? But Cox's character is a lot like a good Doctor Who companion: come face to face with interstellar scariness, freak out. Meet interstellar hero, calm down a bit, totally ignore the larger issue of finding out there is indeed something out there, and get down to the business of saving multiple worlds. It's especially noticeable when her boyfriend flips out after his first encounter with the aliens.
Speaking of the boyfriend, it's Tom Paris from Star Trek Voyager! God half the fun of watching an 80's movie is seeing where people went from there.
I had forgotten how much this movie blatantly ripped off Star Wars, but I totally don't care, it was fun anyway. I especially loved the Air Centurions, god, talk about being the bike police of Skeletor's army. I wish they'd given the sorceress the cool eagle costume, I can see putting her in white to make the contrast between her and Skeletor just THAT much clearer, but really, she lives in a GIANT SKULL. Where did that skull come from anyway? And why is HER skull a good place to be but Skull Mountain sucks? Where did all these enormous-boned creatures go?
As nostalgia goes, this ain't the cartoon He-Man, and thank god. Sure, I wish there was a Battlecat, how awesome would that have been? But there's no Orco, no clueless King and Queen, and no smarmy smirking Prince Adam. Instead we have evil troopers that can actually aim (oh shit! we better take cover for real or we might get hit!), a Teela that's not a whiny pain in the ass, and the funny bald cop ("Nobody takes pot shots at LUBIC!") And Dolph does nicely, his accent smoothly standing in for that goofy booming voice cartoon He-Man used. And I must admit, the cape does good things for him, even if it probably does get in the way of the sword (whose power is completely unexplained!) And as Marc-Anthony pointed out, there is that feathered hair. WAY better than a Prince Valiant cut, don't you think?
Amazon has this on dvd. Soooo tempting. If I bought $25 worth of his movies, I could get free shipping...