Reviews: Masters of the Universe & Scary Movie

Going to the movies this weekend made me feel like I was living through a cultural event horizon of the late 20th century, where Hollywood desperately picks up and shakes my inner child just to see if any more loose change falls out.

That week, the box office gave us two diametrically opposed flavors of weaponized nostalgia: Amazon MGM’s surprisingly delightful live-action epic, “Masters of the Universe,” and Paramount’s deeply exhausting, borderline insulting resurrection of the “Scary Movie” franchise.

One actually respects the beautifully silly art of genre filmmaking. The other barely qualifies as a movie; instead it acts like some drunk guy at a bar who won’t leave you alone, aggressively asking you if you remember pop culture phenomena that died around President Barack Obama’s second term.

We probably didn’t need a new live-action He-Man movie, especially in an era where blockbusters often feel written by a committee of crack-headed algorithms, but “Masters of the Universe” director Travis Knight and his team understand what studio suits forget: if you're going to sell us back our childhoods, you have to do it with a sharp wink, updated storytelling and actual affection for the source material.

“Masters of the Universe” doesn't apologize for being a movie about a muscle-bound bro in a furry loincloth fighting a skeleton man. It leans all the way into the glorious, brightly colored, heavy-metal fantasy aesthetic of the 1980s and captures the goofy toy commercial essence of the original cartoon, while injecting a meta-textual intelligence reminiscent of Greta Gerwig’s “Barbie.” It doesn’t have any of that film’s thematic or existential weight, sure, but it still taps into that ephemeral, long-lost feeling of the joy of just playing with your toys.

Nicholas Galitzine plays Prince Adam with a sweet, earnest vulnerability that gives way to pure action movie bona fides, and after this and his sharp comic timing in “The Sheep Detectives,” I expect we’ll see a lot of him in the future.

I hate to say it, but the real MVP here is Jared Leto as Skeletor. I say this as someone who not only thinks Leto derails half of the movies he touches (his work in “Blade Runner 2099” is unintentional camp), but that he’s also a fairly unlikable human being. Yet, Leto completely swings for the fences here, delivering a performance that is equal parts bullied theater kid that just got swole and a cackling villain only found in mid-‘80s Saturday morning cartoons.

“Masters of the Universe” is way too long and the plot drags in the second act, but when He-Man unlocks his power sword for the first time, I was trucked by a pure, unadulterated joy that made me feel like I was eight years old, eating Lucky Charms on the living room carpet. The middle-aged dads and their children (or possibly grandchildren) sitting around me agreed loudly and often.

Then we have the new “Scary Movie.” Ditching the number Six, this reboot/legacy sequel marks the return of the Wayans family in front of and behind the camera, acting as a direct sequel to “Scary Movie 2,” while ignoring the Charlie Sheen era entirely.

I love horror, I love a good spoof, and I have more respect for Marlon Wayans than he’s probably earned, but watching the new “Scary Movie” was akin to sitting through a 96-minute compilation of expired TikTok trends and sketches cut for bombing at an “SNL” table read.

The original early-2000s films (intermittently) worked because they were chaotic, clinically insane, and targeted a specific era of post-“Scream” slasher tropes. Rewatching them reminds one how much they relied on the wacky fearlessness of “Airplane!,” even if the hyper-topical jokes had a strict expiration date.

Bringing back the Wayans family and Anna Faris sounds great on paper, but in execution, it felt sad. While Faris seems desperate for laughs, the script relies too heavily on the dated gay panic of Shawn Wayans’ closeted Ray and Marlon Wayans’ painfully unfunny stoner Shorty (unless you think an annoying laugh is hysterical). It treats nostalgia like a brick, throwing moldy references at the screen and hoping your brain recognizes them instead of actually writing a punchline. Director Michael Tiddes has no style, no substance, and couldn’t set up a joke if it came with a blueprint.

But, judging from the constant belly laughs erupting at the screening I saw, maybe this one just isn’t for me. I’m not sure “Scary Movie” made me LOL a single time. Quite a few sighs, though.

Judging from how the early box office numbers are going, “Scary Movie” will make millions, while “Masters of the Universe” will flop miserably, so expect more of one and less of the other. I’m not entirely against Hollywood using my nostalgia for the rosy memories of my childhood and teenage years against me for a quick snack, but don’t make me feel like a moron while feeding it to me. I’m not that hungry.

“Masters of the Universe”
Grade: B

“Scary Movie”
Grade: D-