Wesley Fenlon | Not with a bang but a whimper.

Every so often, a story manages to brook the transition from written form to television to the silver screen.  Batman and Superman both began life as comic book characters, starred in a number of live-action and animated television shows, and eventually achieved success in Hollywood.  Masters of the Universe is not one of those stories.

In 1987, the popularity of He-Man and the Masters of the Universe had reached its fever pitch — the cartoon show and its spin-off She-Ra had just concluded, and the toy line from which the series was first born was still going strong.  It was time to take the muscle-bound, uncomfortably homoerotic hero to the big leagues.  Though this decision undoubtedly thrilled legions of 10 year-olds around the world, the resulting film was, not-so-surprisingly, a mess of bad acting, an utterly asinine script, and a hodgepodge of movie clichés.

The opening titles of Masters of the Universe look and sound as if they were ripped straight from 1978’s Superman, and the legions of ineffectual soldiers are dead-ringers for the black-helmeted crewmembers of the Death Star.  Even borrowing heavily from its betters, Masters of the Universe may have been a salvageable effort if it took place in the creative sci-fi/medieval fantasy world of Eternia.  Instead, everyone involved decided it would be much more fun to throw the heroes through a wormhole, drop them in New Jersey, and pair them up with a couple troubled teenagers (including a pre-Friends Courteney Cox).

If the relocation to Jersey wasn’t a clear indication, practically nothing in Masters of the Universe corresponds to the original He-Man comics.  Most of the major characters are represented, but other heroes like Stratos are nowhere to be seen.  And Orko, He-Man’s floating sidekick whose blunderings once served as comic relief in the animated series, is replaced by the film’s ugly Hobbit/troll mashup Gwildor.

Though Dolph Lundgren would’ve been a far better He-Man without ever opening his mouth, Frank Langella’s Skeletor may be the highlight of the film, simply because his make-up looks a little cool.  Considering how limited his facial expressions are behind Skeletor’s yellow-white skull exterior, Langella’s voicework outpaces the rest of the cringe-inducing cast…until the finale, anyway, when Skeletor transforms himself into some sort of Golden God and utterly ruins everything.

Kids may blissfully overlook the terrible acting and moronic plot, delight in Skeletor’s cliché blundering henchmen and be thrilled by the clumsy choreography of each painful fight scene.  They’ll even get a kick out of the real-world setting and the infusion of distraught teenagers, who rise to the challenge of helping a mostly naked man save his home planet and are rewarded with true love forever. For everyone else, Masters of the Universe is a textbook on how to make a bad children’s movie — take a terrible story, cast bad actors, and try to make it look as cheap as possible.  New Jersey seems to boast a population of about twelve people, but maybe that’s understandable — nobody else wanted anything to do with Masters of the Universe.