I thought Masters of the Universe would be lame enough to be kind of fun, and I was almost right. It has a distinctly Howard the Duck flavor, meaning that it was doomed from the beginning to be an epic flop.
First of all, the cartoon ran from ’83 to ’85, and the movie didn’t come out until ’87, so most of the kids who liked the cartoon had moved on to something that wasn’t about a pink-shirted prince who, when thrusting his “power sword” in the air and chanting “I have the power,” turned into a half naked he-man who rode a tiger. Second, the movie has almost nothing to do with the cartoon. Third, despite a relatively big budget ($22,000,000; Aliens was made for $18,500,000) that went primarily towards some cool sets by Moebius and some passable effects, Masters of the Universe is unwaveringly asinine.
Frank Langella as Skeletor is really the only high point, although Dolph Lundgren’s hair is pretty awesome. Courteney Cox has zero charisma (sinus supremus!) in her first feature film role, and it took me the entire movie to figure out that her love interest, played by Robert Duncan McNeill, was Tom Paris in Star Trek: Voyager.
(Poster images via movieposter.com and Sci-Fi Movie Posters)
2 Warps to Neptune 
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