Meet The Heroes and Villains of Eternia

GET HYPED! Prince Adam's Coming Home To Eternia

Masters of The Universe sees director Travis Knight bring the legendary franchise back to the big screen in this epic live-action adventure.

After being separated for 15 years, the Sword of Power leads Prince Adam (Nicholas Galitzine) back to Eternia where he discovers his home shattered under the fiendish rule of Skeletor (Jared Leto).

To save his family and his world, Adam must join forces with his closest allies, Teela (Camila Mendes) and Duncan/Man-At-Arms (Idris Elba), and embrace his true destiny as He-Man — the most powerful man in the universe.

Outlaw of Gor (1988)

Filmed concurrently with Gor,Outlaw Of Gor is a half-baked sequel with a turgid plot and apathetic acting that makes the original look almost Oscar-worthy in comparison.

It's about 40 years since I read John Norman's Outlaw Of Gor but I'm pretty sure this limp movie bares very little resemblance to its supposed source material.

Set three years after the events of Gor (we learn this from the VHS cassette box, not the film itself) and Tarl Cabot (Urbano Barberini) is summoned back to Counter-Earth, but this time his slimy colleague from the university, the lecherous Watney Smith (Russel Savadier), accidentally tags along... and has no problem adjusting to the fact that the pair of them have suddenly arrived on an alien planet.

Before that though, for anyone perverse enough to want to watch Outlaw Of Gor without first having seen Gor, Tarl has a very convenient flashback précising the events of the first movie - but without mentioning Oliver Reed's rather central character (obviously they didn't want to have to pay him again).

Our less-than-dynamic duo make their way to Ko-Ro-Ba (which is noticeably different to what we saw in the first film), where Tarl is reunited with his love Talena (Rebecca Ferrati), her father Marlenus (Larry Taylor), a village elder who treats Tarl like an old friend, but I'm pretty sure we've never met before (Alex Heyns), and the sinister Priest-King Xenos (a bewildered Jack Palance, who is still not an insectoid alien).

Cabot's arrival at Ko-Ro-Ba prompts a truly hilarious sequence where random people just shout "Cabot" (one of the many bizarre moments in Outlaw Of Gor ridiculed by MST3K). The strange thing about this is until they arrived on Gor, I was convinced Watney had been calling his friend "Kevin", not "Cabot".

However, things are not all hunky-dory in Ko-Ro-Ba. Turns out Marlenus has hooked up with duplicitous Queen Lara (Donna Denton), who is secretly in league with Xenos in a bid for ultimate power (over a single village - not exactly epic ambitions).

Lara promptly seduces Watney ("Tell me, how do they make love on your planet?"), kills Marlenus and frames Tarl.

However, as if one Jar Jar Binks in his life wasn't enough, Tarl is also reunited with the midget Hup (Nigel Chipps), who is even more pointless in this movie than he was in the original.

Tarl and Hup go on the run in the desert - little realising that Lara has sent Ost The Hunter (Tullio Moneta), a monosyllabic bounty hunter, after them with the express orders that Cabot be brought back alive.

Ultimately this fuels a rift between Xenos and Lara (Xenos accuses her of acting like a "bitch in heat") and eventually culminates in one of the most embarrassingly degrading death scenes for a Hollywood legend in the history of B-movie cinema.

Where the plot of Gor at least moved forward, in Outlaw Of Gor it just goes round and round.

If it wasn't for the awful lines and risible fight scenes, this film could almost be called tedious.

But thankfully, it has some wonderfully WTF moments that make bad cinema so great.

A particular highlight here is the character of a nameless slave girl that Tarl and Hup rescue from slavers in the desert (a sequence in itself so laughable as to be a classic - just watch the slavers reaction at the end when they are standing around as their camp burns down around them).

From the moment she first appears among a crowd of slaves the camera picks her out as "someone important". She is then rescued and, in true Gor style, offers to "pleasure" Tarl as a reward. He refuses, because of his love of Talena. Then they are all captured - rather easily - by Ost, who takes them back to Ko-Ra-Ba, where the slave girl gets chained up in the mines... and promptly forgotten about. Never to be mentioned, or seen, again!

All this sets up the climactic fight sequence, which is another masterclass in "what the frakkery" as Ost changes his allegiance for no readily explained reason and tips the scales in Tarl's favour.

As you may have guessed, Outlaw Of Gor isn't particularly well-written. Not only is it full of clunky dialogue (much of which clashes with the themes of John Norman's books), but many things happen without explanation.

The character of Xenos is totally wasted, as all his Machiavellian machinations are just echoes of the more successful Queen Lara's schemes, and the nameless slave girl - who you are led to believe is crucial to something or other - is simply filling a narrative role that Talena could have taken.

I'm also not sure why this merits an 18 certificate, while the original was only a 15. Once again there's no nudity or cussing and the fights are comparatively tame (Tarl has a knack for killing floored opponents by stabbing the ground beside them). I can only imagine it's possibly because of the reasonably protracted torture scene of Tarl being whipped for Lara's pleasure.

The cassette box claims that "Tarl embarks on a series of wild adventures battling the strange and magical creatures who live in this forbidding universe". Doesn't happen. There are no "strange and magical creatures" to be seen anywhere in Outlaw Of Gor... and even "wild adventures" is stretching things a bit!

Gor (1987)

Generally I'm not one to complain if a movie based on a novel doesn't stick one hundred per cent to its source material, but this 1987 adaptation of John Norman's Tarnsman of Gor is simply taking the piss.

Branded as John Norman's Gor, the opening credits proudly proclaim that this film is based on Tarnsman of Gor - but the first thing you notice is the marked absence of any actual tarns: the roc-like warbirds the warriors of Gor ride into battle.

Instead they have horses.

This is pretty much on a par with Peter Jackson replacing the eagles with Irish Wolfhounds in The Hobbit or Lord of The Rings trilogies.

But this isn't the only peculiar choice scriptwriters Rick Marx and Harry Alan Tower and director Fritz Kiersch make in this un-faithful of adaptation of Norman's 1966 pulpy sword-and-planet story.

It almost feels as if they scanned through the book, picked out key names and phrases and then scattered them at random throughout the script.

We first meet our protagonist, wimpy physics professor Tarl Cabot (Urbano Barberini) lecturing bored students about the magical ring he inherited from his father and its connection to an alien world known as Counter-Earth or Gor (which is odd because when he actually arrives on this alien world and is told the planet's name he doesn't register that this is the place he was talking about 10 minutes earlier).

Having lost his girl to a campus bully (an early appearance from The Mummy's Arnold Vosloo), Cabot is involved in a car accident and wakes up to find himself on Counter-Earth.

However, it's not the alien world readers of the Gor books would be familiar with - the towering spires of the Gorean cities have been replaced by mud huts and caves, while the verdant nature of Gor is replaced with never-ending deserts (more Barsoom than Gor).

Clumsy Tarl accidentally stumbles into the role of hero when the village of Ko-Ro-Ba is raided by the soldiers of Priest-King Sarm (Oliver Reed) - in the books the Priest-Kings are large insectoid creatures, but not here - who are stealing the village's mystical Home Stone (a big point in the book is how bland and ordinary the Home Stones are) and kidnapping the village's ruler, Marlenus (Larry Taylor).

In the book, Marlenus is, in fact, the villain of the piece and it is his megalomaniacal schemes to take over Gor that Tarl is opposed to. Here, he's just some old duffer that Tarl has to rescue - aided by Marlenus' daughter Talena (Rebecca Ferratti) and other random one-dimensional characters - including an annoying midget called Hup (Nigel Chipps). No, I don't know why, either!

With a two-minute training montage, idiot Tarl is transformed into hero Tarl and the plot devolves rapidly into a run-of-the-mill "lifting the yoke of slavery" storyline - which, again, anyone familiar with Norman's Gor series will appreciate the irony of.

Given the general level of sauciness in the novels, it's bizarre that when Tarl is taken to Sarm's decadent palace of delights, it's more Flash Gordon than Flesh Gordon.

This is possibly the only '80s babes-and-barbarians movie where the women keep all their clothes on!

Then just as you think everything is coming to an end, and you're wondering where Jack Palance - mentioned high in the opening credits - has got to, Jack Palance appears, as another Priest-King, and introduces a whole other storyline which goes nowhere and doesn't appear to amount to anything.

Who could have realised they were actually, rather clumsily, setting up a sequel - Outlaw Of Gor - that was filmed alongside Gor?

While Palance is barely in this movie, mention must be made of the other big name though: Oliver Reed. Clearly the worse for wear from drink in many of his scenes, I hope Oli's towering genius was well-rewarded with alcohol for allowing his name - and talent - to be attached to such a trashy flick as this.

Gor is one of those incredible pieces of cinema that is so changed from its source material you have to wonder why the film-makers didn't go the whole hog and simply make it its own thing. It's not as the Gor books have ever had the same cultural cachet of, say, Lord Of The Rings.

There are only really a couple of minor details that they actually get right, subtle little background details (such as the Gorean drink 'paga'), that it would have far simpler to have changed the character and place names (most of which are already used incorrectly anyway) to something else and dropped the Gor connection entirely.

On the plus side, Gor is full of unintentionally funny moments, crappy fight sequences, no-budget special effects, a plot that meanders all over the place, and a drunk Oliver Reed. And Oliver Reed - drunk or sober - can make anything watchable.