CASTLE GRAYSKULL has fallen.
As the planet Eternia buckles under the dreadful tyranny of SKELETOR (a scenery-chewing Frank Langella, delivering what he believed to be his best performance), only HE-MAN (Dolph Lundgren at his oiliest) and his band of rebels can stop him! But first they’ll have to rescue the dimension-hopping COSMIC KEY from gee-whiz eighties California, the two teens that stumbled upon it (none other than Courtney Cox, fresh from Bruce Springsteen’s “Dancing in the Dark” video and Star Trek Voyager’s Robert Duncan McNeill), and a host of disgusting bounty hunters tearing apart suburbia!!
Made on a shoestring budget that notoriously fell apart into complete bankruptcy during the shoot, MASTERS OF THE UNIVERSE is a charming catastrophe of a film – desperately marketed as “The STAR WARS of the eighties!” that indeed captures that decade’s Reaganite toyetic zaniness, simultaneously pandering shamelessly to children yet with a startlingly dark, rich and fully Shakespearean performance from Frank Langella as its power-mad villain, besotted by He-Man’s purity and chaining him in a gleeful S&M tableau.
Support from Meg Foster and Billy Batty and surprisingly inventive and beautiful costuming (much work was done by European comics legend Moebius on the production) have made this film a nostalgia-bomb camp classic!
With video preshow, host Anthony Oliveira, live performance, and cocktails by the Shameful Tiki Room!