Daniel Pemberton - Eternia // Enter Snake Mountain // A Job for He-Man

Masters of the Universe

Barbie for boys, right? That had to be the pitch echoing around Amazon headquarters a few years back. Director Travis Knight's Masters of the Universe - screenplay by Chris Butler, Aaron Nee, Adam Nee, and David Callaham - attempts a similar sort of trick as Greta Gerwig's film by ascribing three-dimensional torments and traumas to plastic, two-dimensional characters. Although not directly dissected within the piece, this Masters of the Universe (like Barbie) posits an unchanging layer of reality, distinct from our own lived experience, that operates with the strange, impenetrable logic of children at play. Soldiers, who cannot understand that they are toys, stand glowering at their mutated opponents; the front line of a war trapped in perpetual stalemate. This impasse holding until the imagination that is arranging these battles returns and completes their game. They don't even have names without him. So, after escaping through a swirling portal in the midst of a coup, Prince Adam of Eternia is stranded on Earth for fifteen years, desperately searching for the power sword he lost in psychedelic transit. 

Like the title character in John Milius' Conan the Barbarian, any interim between the sacking of his kingdom and the mindless toil that greets him in manhood - the Cimmerian endlessly turning an enormous grain mill, singlehandedly; Prince Adam working for HR in a strict, backbiting American office - is deemed extraneous and elided here. Unlike Margot Robbie's doll though, Nicholas Galitzine's pretender to the throne isn't yet the finished article. He hasn't completely assumed the role of beloved action figure. The rotoscoped, cornball antics of Filmation's He-Man and the Masters of the Universe television series may exist as a yet-to-be-achieved state of success within Knight's film but, this blaring simulacrum aside, there is something very different about Prince Adam the person. Surrounded by stock characters and bullied incessantly as a child for his perceived weakness, Adam is, as his mother hints, unstuck and atypical in this setting. He doesn't instantly fulfil a role within the wider play setting. He is, in fact, a chimera: a hybrid that combines the imaginative energies that course through this fictional realm with the deeper, much more complicated emotional range of an actual human being. 

Adam's assumption of Grayskull's cosmic power then a condition of an uncanny birthright - his mother a lost astronaut originating from Earth; his father an unsparing, PVC warrior - that allows him to channel and iterate on hackneyed skirmish. This boon isn't then something that can passed freely between the rest of Mattel's product range. Impressively loud, thanks to Daniel Pemberton's thundering score and Brian May's superheroic licks, Masters of the Universe may betray a similar sort of studied irreverence as a Taika Waititi Thor (or last year's A Minecraft Movie for that matter) but Knight's vision is presented with a kind of 5½ inch fluency that registers as celebratory rather than mocking. So, Karg and even Pigboy (as well as Dolph Lundgren in a cameo that plays like a DVD extra) from 1987's Masters of the Universe cohabit with characters plucked out of syndicated cartoons, Little Golden Books, and a Trap Jaw, played by Sam C. Wilson, that could be kin to Chris Cunningham's Mean Angel from 1995's Judge Dredd. This lovingly curated brand maintenance (as that is exactly what this is) exists within a piece that, as well as Arnold Schwarzenegger's breakthrough hit, quotes liberally from the stadium rock wing of the action-fantasy canon: Queen tracks are lifted straight out of Highlander to serve space opera theatrics on loan from Mike Hodges' Flash Gordon. All of which is to say that, in presenting itself as a mutant patchwork of clashing, barely compatible sources, Masters of the Universe 2026 is an appropriately cacophonous adaptation of a 1980s toyline. 

Queen - Princes of the Universe

Hypnotize / Madara 1000 - abcdefg

Black Legion Chaos Champion by John Blanche

Memorex Memories - Farewell Atlas

Faces of Death

How to Blow Up a Pipeline director Daniel Goldhaber returns with Faces of Death, a cash-in-cum-companion piece to the original, 1978 video nasty that sees Dacre Montgomery's serial killer re-creating sequences from John Alan Schwartz's staged, mondo documentary with a series of micro-celebrity hostages then uploading them, anonymously, to a Tik-Tok-style video hosting website. Hot on his trail is Barbie Ferreira as Margot, a former content moderator for this short-form video app who lost her job quibbling with management over whether or not these highly successful snuff clips should remain on their site. Arriving at a point in time when allegedly subject elective social media platforms, like the former Twitter, have given themselves over to pushing all manner of x-rated or just plain alarming video footage in the name of the almighty algorithm, this Faces of Death is, strictly speaking, topical then but heavy-handed or, maybe more accurately, naive in its finger-wagging execution. 

The actually biting material sits in the front end of the film, when Margot is still gainfully employed, and relates to the strict, censorial parameters relating to drug and sex education (both are verboten) or the Martian double-speak of posters trained by summary deletion to type in childish euphemism. The numbing effect of seeing real people obliterated by unyielding machinery is fine but God forbid anyone actually type out words like 'killed' or 'dead'. The theatrical horrors dreamt up by Montgomery's Arthur Spevak, which in-universe are (incorrectly) taken to be elaborate fakes, pale in comparison to the steady stream of real-life combat footage that warring countries gleefully pump out or the partially obscured children trapped in the Epstein files. All of which land on timelines, unprompted, every day. The parameters for shock have shifted somewhat then, leaving this Faces of Death feeling rather quaint, specifically in its depiction of abyssal horror. This is no Red Rooms. Goldhaber's film shines though when we are allowed time with the victims powering Spevak's rental tape histrionics. A short section in which two parties attempt to make their escape, while Spevak plays suburban sniper (happily recalling similar situations from Peter Bogdanovich's Targets) is the film's highlight, proving again that Goldhaber has a knack for arranging bodies in adrenalised settings. 

Xiu Xiu - In Heaven

The Dark Knight Returns by Daniel Warren Johnson and Mike Spicer

Soleils Noircis - Un Collier De Silence

The Swordsman of All Swordsmen

Director Joseph Kuo's The Swordsman of All Swordsmen proposes, as martial arts films often do, a tale steeped in vengeance. King Hu regular Tien Peng plays Tsai Ying-jie, the last surviving member of a household that was slaughtered while he was still a child. Having spent the intervening decades honing his skill with a sharpened scabbard - all that remains of his father's treasured sword - Tsai Ying-jie has grown to manhood, dedicating himself to the destruction of the bandits who murdered his family. Despite hailing from the late 1960s (1968, to be exact), The Swordsman of All Swordsmen is reflective, compared to some of its more declarative contemporaries; less concerned with the specifics of how bodies violently intersect and, instead, preoccupied with the churning natural landscapes that house these duels. How sunlight refracts through leaves (while blind men fumble for their swords) or the way waves crash and froth on a bleak shoreline. Tsai Ying-jie's mission isn't as clean cut as you might expect either. The outlaws he chases have all aged into subtlety different variations of the kind of men willing to kill innocents to possess an ornate blade. Although a few do remain bullies others have matured into grumpy teachers or a doddering minor lord, weighed down by regret. Kuo's film, the director co-writing with Tien-Yung Hsu and Shui-Han Chiang, refuses an easy path for its hero, subjecting him to armies of anonymous heavies, poison-tipped arrows and, most unsettling of all, sobbing inquiries from a series of attractive caregivers who cannot believe that this is all the dashing Tsai Ying-jie wants to do with his life. 

Sugar Minott - I'm Still Here

Imperial Remnant Snow Trooper by Mizmaru Kawahara

Mike D - What We Got