Showing posts with label Space. Show all posts
Showing posts with label Space. Show all posts
Thursday, June 26, 2014
Thursday, December 5, 2013
BAD MOVIES THAT SHOULD BE SEEN (26 OF 100)
"Masters of the Universe" (1987), Dir: Gary Goddard
$22 Million in Budget vs. $17,336,370 in Gross
Another from the illustrious Cannon library, Masters of The Universe is a movie based on a toy franchise from Mattel. The movie pretty much rips off Stars Wars, but oddly has polarizing evolutions from that franchise. Whereas as Star Wars was a series of movies that eventually became designed just to sell toys, Masters of the Universe started out as toys that eventually became a movie designed to sell fried chicken... I'm not kidding. Several scenes of this movie feature fried chicken.
We open with a smudgy, out-of-focus matte painting of Castle Gray Skull and a very monotone voice-over (from no character in the film) explaining the ongoing war happening in the planet of Eternia... Yeah, it's not a very good opening. Very drab, very dull-looking. Then the opening credits start rolling, which look and are scored just like the credits to Superman. Seeming like a deliberate rip-off, the better name for it would be "a deliberate recycling" since The Cannon Group became the heads of the Superman franchise and murdered it with Superman IV: The Quest for Peace.
Production values for this film are a bit of a mixed bag. On the one hand, the sets are decent as far as the interior of Castle Gray Skull goes. But as soon as Skeletor (Frank Langella) appears in his cheap-looking skeleton make-up, looking nothing like the Skeletor we knew as children and more like Red Skull's gay cousin just visiting from Nazi Germany, it's laughable at best. Also, the costuming of the characters (or in the lead's case, lack-there-of) resemble either the Goodwill Donations from the Star Wars franchise or the veritable slingshot-wear from the Hercules movies.
The mullet-toting He-Man is played by good old Dolph Lundgren in probably his most off-putting role. The general public knows Dolph mainly for his role in Rocky IV as the giant Russian boxer, or better yet as The Punisher in the most terrifying performance of his career. Seeing Dolph being noble or heroic or caring all seems a bit strange, however, there's no shortage of obligatory chest-shots during his battle scenes. At one point in the film, Courtney Cox has just escaped Skeletor's Mercenaries, a very incompetent bunch with make-up effects that look like they came out of Rick Baker's stool. Courtney manages to run into He-Man, who assures her that everything will be alright and he will protect her... But from there, I actually expected Dolph to suddenly snap Courtney's neck and masturbate to her dead corpse or something. Sorry. I know it's a horrible thing to visualize, but that's just what I have come to expect of Dolph.
With our introduction to He-Man, we also meet his friends Man-At-Arms (Jon Cypher) and Theela (Chelsea Field), also part of the battle against Skeletor. The group encounters Gwildor, a troll-like inventor who they saved from being captured by Skeletor's army... I don't know exactly why they call him "Gwildor." Might as well call him Yoda. Played by Razzie-Winner Billy Barty, Yod-- I mean, Gwildor is part of an alien race called Thenorians who look like a mix between The Leprechaun and the lady with ovaries on her face in Eraserhead. When Gwildor invites his new friends into his house, it oddly resembles Yoda's digs from Empire Strikes Back and Return of the Jedi (with less snakes and more 80s futuristic technology).
Anyways, Skeletor is after Gwildor for something he invented called "The Cosmic Key", a device that can open portals to other dimensions. But just as Gwildor unveils this to He-Man, Skeletor's army (The Black Storm Troopers) find their hide-out and attempt to break down the door. Our heroes escape through a portal and somehow end up in 1980s Earth -- Whoa, dude! -- pretty much spending the rest of the movie there rather than some cool alien planet that kids from the 80s hadn't seen before and didn't resemble their usual route to the local arcade.
Following her Bruce Spingsteen music video "Dancer In The Dark" (skip to 2:30), Courtney Cox plays Julie, a small town waitress at a fried chicken and ribs joint. A much younger and hotter Courtney than the one from Friends, we discover that her parents died in a plane crash and that this is her last night in town, and subsequently her last night with her boyfriend Kevin, played by Robert Duncan McNeill. And if you watch the film, no, there was no plans of making this last night special. Their plans were to meet up, eat fried chicken, go to Kevin's sound check, and then go to the airport to part ways forever... Yep. No sex. None at all. Not even a hint.
As they visit Julie's parents' grave for the last time, Kevin comes upon The Cosmic Key that somehow got lost on Hercules' -- I mean, He-Man's journey between Earth and Eternia. Kevin, being a musician, assumes it's a synthesizer. When fiddling around with it, he accidentally opens the gateway to Eternia for Skeletor's army to invade Earth. Suddenly, Julie's last night in, well, Small Town Wherever turns into a intergalactic war between good and evil... which encapsulates He-Man and Skeletor destroying a couple of barren, unpopulated urban streets and goes completely unnoticed by anyone living in that town, except the movie's principal characters.
The plot of this movie is not terrible. It probably has more thought put into it than many Adam Sandler films or even the recent Star Wars movies. But it probably would have been a much better film if it all stayed in Eternia, a much more fantastical place than 1980s middle-America. I'm assuming budgetary problems were why they had to go the Star Trek IV: A Voyage Home route, making the characters look kinda stupid running around in their Star Wars garb, stealing fried chicken and busting up music stores. But then again, being budgeted at $22 million, that was double the budget of the first Stars Wars and that movie took us all around the galaxy, not just back and forth between some small town neighborhood and the interior of Castle Gray Skull.
There are definitely things that make this movie worth seeing. The action is very reminiscent of Star Wars and fun. Dolph kicks a lot of ass, and I mean a lot of ass. His scene where he is riding around on the flying discs is pretty cool, even if the effects don't look quite so good. But for all Dolph's ass-kicking, it inevitably leads to He-Man proclaiming "I-have-the-power," which is He-Man's famous tagline, but after he says it accomplishes nothing. Seems like they just threw that one in there for the kids. One thing I couldn't help but notice was that there was an extensive amount of damage done to music equipment in the film. When Skeletor's Muppet Show Mercenaries go after Julie, they shoot up a stage and tons of amplifiers that Kevin's band would have performed on later that evening. And one of the biggest, most memorable set pieces of the film takes place in a music store where tons of musical equipment gets blown up for the sake of action... I mean, did the folks at Cannon have something against 80s music? Who didn't like Lover Boy?
Overall, there has been a lot of Star Wars knock-offs over the years, but this one is definitely not the worst I've ever seen (I refer you to Ice Pirates). It's never not entertaining, didn't leave me quite resenting it like Super Mario Bros did, but I also never quite felt it was the Masters of The Universe film I expected having grown up with the toys and TV shows. Seemed like Cannon just took the framework and made an action film out of it... but it's still a decent action film.
And for your viewing displeasure, Skeletor becomes an utterly fabulous God!
Wednesday, November 6, 2013
BAD MOVIES THAT SHOULD BE SEEN (11 OF 100)
"Dracula 3000" (2004), Dir: Darrell Roodt
Nothing in Budget vs. Direct to Video
Back in my Blockbuster Video days, I was stuck working the Thanksgiving Day shift and going home to nobody. At the time, a co-worker of mine was from Sri Lanka and in the same boat, so rather than both spending our night by our lonesome, we decided to join forces and watch an array of bad movies instead. Of our three picks, each will be reviewed in this blog. There was Boa vs. Python, Waterworld, and the king of stink, Dracula 3000...
Oh, Dracula 3000. Completely unrelated to Dracula 2000, which has Star Trek Voyager's very own 7 of 9 getting staked in the boobs, Dracula 3000 is about a team of space aboard a craft called Mother III (Alien rip-off #1), a salvage ship that finds a derelict craft called Demeter. The crew of this ship is led by Captain van Helsing... Yeah, that's his name. Clever, huh? And better yet, played by Starship Trooper's own Aryan-bred Casper Van Dien. The film also stars Baywatch's Erika Eleniak (the not-so-hot one), Tom "Tiny" Lister (the president in The Fifth Element), and former rap sensation Coolio in a performance let's hope he's terribly ashamed of. We'll get back to that later.
So the crew finds the dead captain of the Demeter clutching a crucifix. During this discovery, their own ship Mother III decides to take matters into her own hands (Alien rip-off #2) and abandons the crew on the Demeter... without any explanation. It isn't long before Tiny and Coolio discover a cargo bay full of coffins. Thinking the coffins might have been used to smuggle drugs, Coolio opens one and is attacked by a vampire. Now under Count Orlock's control, an army of vampires intend to force the crew to bring the Demeter back to earth (Alien rip-off #3), and release a blood-sucking, vampire clusterf*&% (as if the earth's population couldn't possibly fight off 20 to 40 vampires).
Now, for all its terrible plottery, terrible actors, and a set that looks like the back of a grocery store (but turns out was a re-used set from the short-lived series Space Rangers), the biggest flaw of the film is Coolio. In mentioning my co-worker from Blockbuster at the beginning of this review, I wasn't just trying to highlight that I once had a friend, and that friend was a black-friend too, and a woman for that matter, but that her reaction to Coolio's performance was what put Dracula 3000 on this very list.
If you were around in the 1990s, you remember Coolio's 1995 hit song "Gangster's Paradise." For this socially-conscious tune, Coolio received the reputation of being a street philosopher and a positive role model for black youths. Flash-forward ten years to Dracula 3000 and Coolio is playing a pot-smoking cargo specialist named 187... Yep. 187. His interests are getting high and sexually harassing Erika Eleniak. When finding the corpse of the Demeter's dead captain, Coolio insists they search it for drugs. When Coolio turns into a vampire, instead of killing Erika, he goes on a rant describing in great detail how much he fantasized about, well, you might as well just watch the clip... And unfortunately, I cannot find the clip where Coolio chases Erika around the produce department -- I mean, ship, trying to run along the walls after her. Now, typically, when attempting something like that, a film production would employ special effects. But since this particular production didn't have any money, instead, what we get is Coolio trying to run along the walls himself, and for some reason making offensive monkey noises, leading to a speech where he actually refers to himself using the N-bomb. At that point, my co-worker screamed, "Holy sh*%! Coolio just sold-out his entire race!" And for the guy who used to speak out against negative black stereotypes, to do a complete 180 for Dracula F*&%ing 3000, I would agree.
As for the rest of the movie, once Dracula (or Count Orlock) actually enters, that's when everything just starts raising too many questions: Why was a cargo ship transporting coffins into space? If it's the year 3000, why is Dracula still dressed so Elizabethean? Did the vampires at some point learn how to navigate an interstellar spaceship? And if they did, why then do they need Capser, Tiny, or Coolio to do anything? Unfortunately, the only reason one really has to watch this film is if you wanna see Coolio make a fool of himself, and he does, dearly.
For your viewing displeasure, the title character Dracula gets one of his only scenes in the whole damn movie. Poor guy.
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