Robert Horton is a Scarecrow board member and a longtime film critic. This series of "critic's notes" is chance to highlight worthy films playing locally and connect them to the riches of Scarecrow's collection.
A summer weekend rife with remakes has sent me once again back to the archives, for a 1987 review of the Golan-Globus Masters of the Universe and a 2000 review of the Wayans brothers' Scary Movie, both originally published in The Herald. As you will see, I was too old to have intimate knowledge of the Masters universe, but I could recognize a My Three Sons reference. (Sorry to have not mentioned Billy Barty, who is also in the film.) The surprise in Scary Movie for me was clearly the focus on male genitalia.
Masters of the Universe
I don't know much about the Masters of the Universe, but evidently they appear in toy stores everywhere, a Saturday morning cartoon series, and a previously released animated feature film. The storylines, it seems are full of grotesque characters and incredible mayhem and violence. Kids, of course, love 'em.
Now the characters are in a live-action movie, called, rightfully enough, Masters of the Universe. This film pits those two great antagonists, He-Man (Dolph Lundgren) and Skeletor (Frank Langella), against each other.
As it opens, Skeletor has darn near the entire universe as we know it within his bony grasp. But he must humiliate He-Man, because he hates the fact that He-Man is good, and covered with flesh. (Lots of flesh—Lundgren is the blond behemoth who fought Stallone in Rocky IV).
But He-Man still has control of this gadget that makes noises and emits rays and somehow holds the key to the contest. It falls through one of those holes in the space-time continuum, and lands in a small town on Earth, 1987. The Masters follow. A girl (Courteney Cox, famed for dancing with Bruce Springsteen in the "Dancing in the Dark" video) and her boyfriend mistake the thing for one of those new Japanese synthesizers.
So the rest of the galactic superbattle takes place on boring old Earth. There are a couple of good reasons for this: The same fish-out-of-water routine worked well in Star Trek IV, and you save a bundle of money shooting on a small-town location rather than building a bunch of expensive futuristic science-fiction sets.
You can set there and wonder why Frank Langella would appear in a movie such as this. You can sit there and wonder why Dolph Lundgren works so mightily to disguise his Scandinavian accent, when the future is probably multi-national, anyway. You can sit there and wonder what Barry ("Ernie") Livingston, who plays the owner of a music store, has been doing since "My Three Sons" went off the air and why he's in this movie rather than Back to the Beach with the rest of the TV dinosaurs. Then again, you can probably just as well wonder these things without going to the movie.
Scary Movie
Raunchy.
That’s the word you’ll be hearing about Scary Movie, a startlingly lewd new comedy. It’s officially a spoof of teen horror movies, but this film will become notorious for its raunch, not for its jokes. The hair gel scene from There’s Something About Mary looks like something from an old Sandra Dee movie compared to the sexual material in this one. The days when people referred to the likes of Blazing Saddles as raunchy seem very far away, indeed.
As a spoof, Scary Movie is in the spirit of a Mel Brooks picture. It takes aim at Scream and “I Know What You Did Last Summer” and a batch of 1970s slasher flicks.
The opening scene is a take-off of Drew Barrymore’s panicky curtain-raiser from the first Scream, as a young woman is menaced by a phone call. She’s played by Carmen Electra, of Baywatch and Mrs. Dennis Rodman fame, which sets just the right sleazy tone. The rest of the picture has high-schoolers menaced by the caped figure in the ghost mask from Scream. No copyright problems here; Scary Movie is produced by Dimension Films, a subsidiary of Miramax, which made the Scream franchise.
Naturally, the teenagers are played by actors who are conspicuously older than seventeen, a hallmark of teen horror. This movie makes light of that tradition.
Anna Faris, a Seattle stage actress making her movie debut, is quite winning in the Neve Campbell/Jennifer Love Hewitt role. She does a nice job of conveying some small amount of normalcy amidst the gag-a-thon.
The school sexpot role is filled by Shannon Elizabeth, who stripped for the Internet in American Pie last year. In Scary Movie, despite being the victim of the slasher, she jokes her way through a memorable death scene. Shawn Wayans plays a high school jock who is obviously gay—obvious to everyone but himself, that is. Marlon Wayans plays a dope-smoking nerd who channels Haley Joel Osment: “I see dead people.”
Their brother, Keenen Ivory Wayans, directed the film. He’s gone the spoof route before, establishing himself with I’m Gonna Get You Sucka, a send-up of blaxploitation films, and the sketch TV series “In Living Color.” Good taste has never held Wayans back, but Scary Movie breaks new ground. A take-off on a scene from A Nightmare on Elm Street substitutes another bodily fluid for blood.
Male genitals prove to be a particular focus. There’s a very weird moment in a public bathroom, plus a scene in which a gym teacher, shall we say, lets it all hang out. This is where Scary Movie crosses a line that, in the past, distinguished an R rating from an NC-17 rating.
However, you’ll notice that Scary Movie is rated R. The ratings board seems to think that a comedy is somehow less NC-17 worthy than a drama; if this body part had popped up in American Beauty (let alone American Pie), it would have been slapped with today’s equivalent of an X.
The truth is, this film should be NC-17, and that should be an acceptable rating (including for the newspapers and TV stations that refuse to advertise NC-17 films, and the video stores that refuse to carry NC-17 titles). Instead, the ratings board has bent its rules and rendered the ratings system that much less coherent.
But is the movie funny? The preview audience I saw it with (almost entirely college-aged) roared with laughter, and occasionally so did I. The overall effect, however, is more of shock than pleasure.
June 5, 2026
