Ready Reviewer One

So wait, Dan Aykroyd was the villain of Temple of Doom?

Everyone in Pennsylvania is an asshole, so...

LABYRINTH (1986)



Seakazoo and sabin26 on their wedding day


Jim Henson, George Lucas and Terry Jones (of Monty Python) joined forces to give us David Bowie's bulge. A career highlight, I'm sure. I've watched this movie in all three stages of my life. Childhood. Teenhood. Adulthood. My reaction has largely been the same. Indifference. Let me ask a controversial question. Does Jim Henson suck? Instead of wasting his time badmouthing The Goonies, maybe Dracula should dive deep into the world of Jim Henson and give us definitive answers on this subject matter. I'm not the one to do it because, like the rest of you, Jim Henson is ingrained in my boyhood DNA. Sesame Street and The Muppets are cultural milestones and among the first things in entertainment we were exposed to. But mostly everything else with Jim Henson's name attached to it has been crap. Objectively, I can't really say Jim Henson did anything significant outside his two franchises. Dinosaurs was popular in the 1990's but it seems forgotten today. It feels fitting that George Lucas was involved in Labyrinth. Henson and him seem like the same thing. Both are defined by their two franchises and their special effects company. I'm not gonna deny Henson his place is history cause he definitely contributed to the advancement of puppetry. I'm just saying that hard work was wasted on nonsense like Labyrinth.

It stars Jennifer Connelly as a whiny teenage girl whose infant brother is kidnapped by David Bowie and a bunch of muppets. She then goes on a quest to rescue him and grows up in the process. It's a good premise and I do like Connelly and Bowie in their roles. But the story is a giant bore. Really, nothing happens. Connelly runs around in a maze and interacts with a bunch of muppets. Meanwhile, Bowie is just singing and dancing. Enough people like it for it to be a cult hit. This is definitely not The Dark Crystal. But, as I said, it has never done anything for me. It's just one giant "meh."

I was. Once. It didn't end well.

How dare you call the series tthat spawned this shitty?

His best performance is Critters 3, his worse is The Revenant. His talents diminish with each new role, a Benjamin Buttons of sorts.

THE LAST STARFIGHTER (1984)



Star Wars spawned many imitators but this is probably the only one to get it right. Yeah, you can tear apart the plot for its silly concept and its story beats that closely resemble Star Wars, but all that is countered with heart. This isn’t a shameless cash-in. They genuinely wanted to make a good movie and it shows.

The movie begins in a trailer park community. Our hero is an average college-aged kid with too much free time and no direction in life. The only thing he excels at is in an arcade game called Starfighter. He beats the game and then a space man shows up to recruit him for an intergalactic war. He reluctantly joins and goes on to become the hero of the war.

It’s dumb. It’s child level fantasy. But that’s not the point. It’s a coming-of-age story. It’s about a young man who’s insecure and faces constant obstacles but ultimately finds his place in the universe and comes out ahead. It’s well-meaning. It’s fun. It’s different. It has a lot of heart. If you hate this movie you’re just dead inside. Your heart is as black as coal.

MASTERS OF THE UNIVERSE (1987)




At the risk of angering Frizzo the Clown and Wyldstaar, I'm just gonna rip that bandaid and say it, I don't hate this movie. It's too bizarre to hate.

Let's break it down.

There's no beginning. You start in the middle of a fucking movie. All the characters are established. The story is in motion. If you had no knowledge of He-Man whatsoever you would have no idea what the fuck was going on. The balls in expecting your audience to know all the backstory. They don't even give you a Road Warrior/Evil Dead style montage to recap things.

After the shock of their being no first act has settled in, they then ship He-Man off to Earth. This is usually where people turn off the movie. I'm sure 99.8% have never seen Masters of the Universe from beginning to end. The fact Courtney Cox has gone her entire career without being mocked for being in He-Man: The Movie is evidence of that. It's like Matt Le Blanc and that baseball/monkey movie that only thebtskink has watched. Only 00.02% of people have watched Masters of the Universe in its entirety: those unfortunate ones that paid to watch it in theaters, masochistic fanboys and now me.

Perception is that this is a cheapo Canon production, one of many, but it actually isn't. He-Man lands on Earth. He meets Courtney Cox and her boyfriend (He-Man is gay, obviously, so he ain't gonna bang Monica Geller) and then Skeletor sends a bunch of monsters to kill them. It's like a way more convoluted version of Terminator. So once the premise has been set-up, all that follows is a series of action scenes. It's alarming how much action there is in this movie.

Here's what I think happened. Clearly, there was a budget. They did build a set for Skeletor's lair. There's make-up, costumes and weapons. They closed down streets in Los Angeles to film a shit-ton of action scenes. There was money invested into this movie. But there was no faith in the audience. They knew kids were gonna drag their parents into this movie, so they made a movie for the parents and hoped the kids wouldn't care that it was a He-Man On Earth movie. But kids hated the movie because they wanna watch He-Man on He-Man Land, and since there's no first act, parents have no idea what the fuck is going on and tuned out right away. Lesson here is: stick to the damn source material. Other misguided adaptations could teach us that lesson as well, but at least this one is interesting to say the least.

Let's now conclude by saying that Frank Langella is awesome as Skeletor.

The original script by David Odell (The Dark Crystal) did take place on Earth but there was A LOT more scenes leading up to it and there was some convoluted nonsense about He-Man's mother being from Earth. If they did run out of money, which is possible with Canon, it might explain the movies lack of a first act.