Editorials
Admiring the Monster Makeup in 1987’s ‘Masters of the Universe’
With a new Masters of the Universe movie headed our way in 2019, we revisit the past.
This coming August (the 7th, to be exact) marks the 30th anniversary of director Gary Goddard’s Masters of the Universe, the first (and only) live-action adaptation of Mattel’s popular toy line to date. The Cannon Films adaptation is infamous for a number of reasons, most notably due to its underwhelming box office performance. Made on a budget of $22 million, the 1987 film made just $17 million at the box office; it flopped so hard that it helped put an end to Cannon Films entirely, while also killing the Masters of the Universe franchise before it ever really had a chance.
A post-credits tease promised a sequel. Of course, it never came.
Not only did the film fail to capitalize on the massive success of the toy line, but Masters of the Universe was also panned by most critics at the time. Of course, thirty years later, many fans have come to embrace the corny charms of the Dolph Lundgren-starring toys-to-film adaptation; personally speaking, it was one of my favorite childhood films and remains a favorite to this day.
I have watched Masters of the Universe more times than any other movie, and I am so fascinated by the behind the scenes trials and tribulations that I often head deep down internet rabbit holes in the hopes of uncovering new tidbits of information. Okay, so my love for the film borders on obsession; I know, by heart, the name of the kid who won a freakin’ walk-on role in a contest!
His name is Richard Szponder and he played “Pigboy.”
It’s well known that the film’s low budget resulted in Masters of the Universe not quite being what it was originally intended to be – budget constraints led to the action being set mostly on Earth, while toy character Orko had to be replaced by new character Gwildor. But though the low budget may be evident in the visual effects, you wouldn’t know it looking at the makeup effects.
The various characters that inhabit Goddard’s Masters of the Universe were designed by production artist William Stout, whose name should be familiar to fans of The Return of the Living Dead. Stout designed iconic zombie Tarman for the 1985 horror-comedy, and he also worked on films like The Hitcher, Pan’s Labyrinth, and The Mist. Not only was Stout tasked with turning Mattel’s colorful toys into fully realized characters, but he also designed, along with fellow artists such as Moebius, a handful of brand new characters that were created specifically for the film.
In the live-action world, Skeletor’s henchmen included Beast Man, Karg and Saurod, all of whom (including Skeletor) were designed by Stout. Makeup effects legend Michael Westmore (Syfy’s “Face Off”) was then brought in to bring Stout’s designs to life, but what’s interesting is that Westmore himself was not actually on set. Story goes that since Masters of the Universe was a non-union production and Westmore was a member of the union, he was only hired by Cannon to design the makeup and supply the prosthetics; he wasn’t, however, allowed to be on the set.
It was artists Todd McIntosh, Robin Beauchesne and June Haymore-Pipkin who actually applied Westmore’s appliances to the actors and handled the final paint jobs. Budgetary issues cropped up in the makeup room, as they did throughout the entire production, but the team of Stout, Westmore, McIntosh, Beauchesne and Haymore-Pipkin proved to be just what the movie needed.
The incredible Skeletor makeup worn by Frank Langella is of course one of the standout highlights of Masters of the Universe, as is Langella’s better-than-required performance. Westmore and the team turned a yellow-faced cartoon character into a genuinely imposing movie villain, and the appliances worn by Langella still hold up as being incredibly impressive.
Henchmen Karg (Robert Towers) and Saurod (Pons Maar) were both created for the movie. Karg, a half-human, half-bat creature with a nightmarish head of white hair, cuts an imposing figure despite being a mostly ineffectual character, while the lizard-like Saurod, with his inflating throat, proved to be such a cool design that Mattel ended up including him in the Masters toy line.
And then there’s Beast Man, an iconic toy line character who was played by Tony Carroll. Again, the task was to reinvision a children’s toy and turn it into a movie monster, and the team of artists knocked it out of the park. Covered in fur and wearing samurai-like armor, the film’s Beast Man is an almost werewolf-like monster that could very well be the star of his own horror movie.
Of course, the most beloved character from the live-action Masters of the Universe is the pint-sized comic relief known as Gwildor. Another character not present in the toy line or cartoon, Gwildor was portrayed by the late Billy Barty, whose performance is second only to Langella’s as the film’s best. Equally brilliant is the makeup, which is nothing short of iconic.
One could argue that Masters of the Universe probably deserved a “Best Makeup” nomination at the ’88 Academy Awards. You can say what you want about the film, which is undeniably cheesetastic, but one thing you can’t take away from Goddard’s failed vision is that the character designs, makeup effects and even costuming were incredibly on point. In a decade where the horror genre was giving us some of the coolest movie monsters of all time, Masters gave those films a run for their money, and that’s one of the big reasons I look back so fondly on it.
The movie may not hold up, but it proves that good monster makeup is truly timeless.
Editorials
Hidden Treasures: Rediscovering the Horror-Comedy Gems of Bob Hope and Paulette Goddard
1939 is often called Hollywood’s Greatest Year, and it is indisputable that a huge number of America’s greatest classics were produced in that single year. A usually ignored element of that greatness is that 1939 was also the year that Hollywood resumed production on horror films after a two-year pause. In late 1936 two major factors led to the practical death of the genre: the Laemmle family, of whom Carl Laemmle’s, Jr. was horror’s greatest advocate, lost control of Universal and the British Board of Censors began enforcing the “H” certificate, which for all practical purposes banned horror for its target audience in Britain. The loss of this lucrative market combined with dropping box-office receipts and mounting pressure from American religious groups, Hollywood saw no reason to continue producing horror. The phrase “horror is dead” has often been thrown around over the decades but in 1937 and 38, it was actually true.
Then in 1938, Emil Umann (surely one of horror’s great unsung heroes) of the Regina theater in Beverly Hills programed a triple feature of Frankenstein, Dracula, and Son of Kong (quickly dropping the third film to add more showings) and business boomed proving to Hollywood that horror was still in demand. In 1939, Universal broke its horror silence with the release of Son of Frankenstein. Paramount, who had also been an important voice in horror in the early thirties, opted for a different track, combining a remake of a classic silent horror film with one of its most popular comedic actors, Bob Hope, and teaming him with a rising star, Paulette Goddard. The pair appeared in two horror comedies together, The Cat and the Canary in 1939 and The Ghost Breakers in 1940. Though usually overshadowed by the string of Abbott and Costello meet the Monsters movies produced by Universal in the late forties and fifties, these films all but invented the horror-comedy as we know it.
Of course, humor had been in horror movies before, James Whale was particularly adept at this, but The Cat and the Canary is something different, combining the laughs and chills in a way that had not been seen before. It begins at an old, crumbling mansion on the Louisiana bayou where a group of relatives gather to hear the reading of Cyrus Canby Norman’s will at midnight on the tenth anniversary of his death. If that sounds cliché that is entirely the point. Hope’s character of actor Wally Campbell even points out that it is. “Midnight, the alligators…the heirs, and the family lawyer all gathering to hear the reading of the will. It reminds me of a lot of the melodramas and murder mysteries I played in.” And there are many more tropes than that including the old spinster housekeeper who believes the house is haunted, a portrait with the eyes cut out through which the villain observes the heroine, secret passageways behind bookcases, cobweb-filled cellars, a treasure hunt, an escaped maniac from a local asylum, and a couple murders here and there. The difference is that the characters in the movie know they are clichés and use them to their advantage. In fact, The Cat and the Canary is one of the first self-referential horror films—it was “meta” almost sixty years before Scream.
The story of The Cat and the Canary had been around for quite some time by 1939. It began life as a play by John Willard in 1922 and had already been made into two films, the first in 1927 under the original title, and in 1930 as The Cat Creeps (not to be confused with the 1946 film that is something else entirely), and was remade once again in 1978. Most versions of the story are straightforward murder mystery/horror stories, which is one of the reasons why the 1939 film is so special. One of the elements that makes the film brilliant is that most of the characters and situations are serious, and only Hope is the comic foil.
The visual style is very much in line with classic horror films and director Elliot Nugent seems to be taking his cues from great horror directors who came before like F.W. Murnau and James Whale. The film is absolutely dripping with the kind of atmosphere horror fans would expect and the scares are genuine. I would argue that these two films are more frightening than in the brilliant Abbott and Costello Meet Frankenstein (1948), which leans much more toward the comedy. In The Cat and the Canary there are huge stakes and real danger involved. The killer takes out two people and very nearly a third. Also, there is never a moment to disprove the ghosts the housekeeper Miss Lu (Gale Sondergaard) believes in, a dead body drops out of a passageway, and shadows creep and crawl over the walls like the vines and moss that cover the outside of the Norman mansion.
Bob Hope is then dropped into this scenario and offers a performance that in itself balances realism, fear, and humor. Wally Campbell is a classic scaredy-cat that pretends to be a heroic lead, a tradition that would carry on in more exaggerated forms with actors like Jerry Lewis and Don Knotts, and in characters like Shaggy from Scooby-Doo. Campbell even draws attention to this fact with the line “I always joke when I’m scared. I kind of kid myself into being brave.” He is also a voice for the audience, pointing the clichés out to his fellow characters before the audience can groan at them, thereby subverting the tropes and keeping the mystery engaging. Again, a similar idea to Randy (Jamie Kennedy) in the Scream films. Hope even has something of a “straight man” in several scenes in the character of Cicily (Nydia Westman) who sets up several punchlines for the comedian. “Don’t big empty houses scare you?” she asks. “Not me, I used to be in Vaudeville,” comes his quick response. Another great exchange as the two are making their way into the darkened cellar is “Do you believe in reincarnation? You know, that dead people come back?” she asks. “You mean like Republicans?” he quips.
In the film’s vein of commenting on its own plot, just as Hope asks where his leading lady is, she enters—Joyce Norman, played by Paulette Goddard. At the time, Goddard was best known as Charlie Chaplin’s co-star in Modern Times (1936) and as his wife in real life. She also starred in George Cukor’s The Women earlier in 1939 and would go on to co-star in Chaplin’s The Great Dictator the following year. In The Cat and the Canary, she is a classic leading lady of the thirties—beautiful, sometimes in distress, but more often modern, self-possessed, and perfectly capable of taking care of herself. Though Hope is not the classically handsome leading man, the two have an undeniable chemistry and it is believable that they would fall for each other in the world of the film. Her role is not particularly comedic, but the audience is easily won over by her considerable warmth and charm.
Hope and Goddard were reunited for The Ghost Breakers the next year. Despite its title and trailer featuring “Chief Exterminator” Bob Hope behind a desk full of phones answering one with “Ghost Breakers. You make ‘em, we shake ‘em,” bears practically no resemblance to the Ghostbusters films. In it, Mary Carter (Goddard) has inherited a supposedly haunted mansion off the coast of Cuba. Hope plays Lawrence “Larry” Lawrence (“my middle name is Lawrence too. My folks had no imagination.”), a radio personality who runs afoul of some gangsters and stows away in Mary’s trunk on the ship to Cuba along with his valet, Alex (Willie Best). Once in the Cuban mansion, the three of them meet up with zombies, ghosts, and voodoo curses. The sequences in the house are most effective, filled with plenty of laughs but also genuine chills. The comic timing between Hope and Best is impeccable, rivaling the best comedy teams of the age. However, the film is marred by some of the racial attitudes and stereotypes of the voodoo religion of the time which make portions of the film difficult to watch. This is unfortunate considering how truly brilliant much of the film is.
The success of these films led to one more pairing of the two stars in Nothing but the Truth in 1941, a comedy without any horror elements in the mix. It is often said that horror and comedy are perhaps the hardest genres to do well and doing them well at the same time is nearly impossible. In the history of film there is Abbott and Costello, Joe Dante, John Landis, Sam Raimi, and a handful of others that have really been able to pull off truly great horror comedies. Unfortunately, The Cat and the Canary and The Ghost Breakers have too often been overlooked for their ingenuity and influence (the latter with some reason) but are worthy of being rediscovered 85 years after their release. Fortunately, they are more available now than they have been with Blu-ray releases available through Kino and on some streaming platforms.
There is a sequence in The Cat and the Canary in which Hope and Goddard follow a series of clues to discover a diamond necklace, the true Norman family treasure, hidden away in a secret compartment. Finding hidden gems among the dust and cobwebs is a bit what a movie lover feels discovering new favorites. I had that feeling discovering these treasures, and what a joy they were to find. There have been very few masters of the horror-comedy subgenre, either in front of or behind the camera, but Hope and Goddard deserve to be mentioned alongside the greats.
In Bride of Frankenstein, Dr. Pretorius, played by the inimitable Ernest Thesiger, raises his glass and proposes a toast to Colin Clive’s Henry Frankenstein—“to a new world of Gods and Monsters.” I invite you to join me in exploring this world, focusing on horror films from the dawn of the Universal Monster movies in 1931 to the collapse of the studio system and the rise of the new Hollywood rebels in the late 1960’s. With this period as our focus, and occasional ventures beyond, we will explore this magnificent world of classic horror. So, I raise my glass to you and invite you to join me in the toast.
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