dude

The gang is gonna be playing some lethal company without learning how the controls work first. What fun! I'm sure it will all go very very smoothly.

i’ve been wanting to watch the 1987 he-man movie for a while now, and decided to use the power of birthday peer pressure to con my beloved friends into watching it with me. primarily by hearkening back to my first (only) dolph lundgren exposure, In the Name of the King 2: Two Worlds, an Uwe Boll movie that i didn’t realize starred He-Man until we got to the credits and said “wait. I know that name,“ which nobody has ever let me forget

i got home from work & we chilled for a while, shooting the shit, watching some cat videos, playing scrabble, a veritable buffet of clare treats. neo kicked my ass with “jerking” played on a triple word score & every turn took twenty minutes because i can’t multitask (there were cat videos in another tab, what was i supposed to do), but by the time we’d all eaten dinner and settled in i was fuckin’ vibrating with excitement. when i say i’d been wanting to watch it for a while i mean like, at least a year.

hollis gets back from eating & they reveal they were able to find a version with subtitles, which is essential to my enjoyment of movies bc for real, i can’t multitask. how listen and watch thing at same time? impossible.

i cheer and clap and cheer as they load it up & as i see the file load i remember, abruptly, the blorbius incident.

“this isn’t gonna turn into morbius halfway through, is it?” i ask, deeply suspicious. they all laugh and hollis assures me it isn’t. “when would i have had time to do that” they ask, like they hadn’t apparently spent hours searching for a subtitled version. “it took three weeks to cut blade and morbius together” they said, which sounded like bullshit, but Castle Grayskull was onscreen so i kind of blacked out for a minute

first twenty minutes or so are a wild ride. the effects are insane, the matte paintings are beautiful, i’m dropping Masters of the Universe trivia left and right, Monica from Friends is there… the bad guys set fire to a high school as they hunt the macguffin, which He-Man manages to track just in time, running down the sidewalk

and then Dolph Lundgren falls out of a portal and it’s In the Name of the King 2: Two Worlds. they did it again. i was lulled into a false sense of security by being a little birthday guy & they got my ass, again.

so now one of the worst movies i’ve seen is playing out as we laugh ourselves silly, just long enough for me to catch my breath & realize they’ve added cartoon sound effects as well, which sets me to a fresh round of cackling.

“you son of a bitch” i wheeze, as they take Dolph Lundgren into a terrible, terrible castle set. “i’m obsessed with–”

a slideshow of he-man pictures set to “Crom” from Conan the Barbarian: The Musical begins playing. the same picture of a skeletor t-shirt features at least 12 times. it is my birthday.

the first 40 minutes or so pass with many a delighted exclamation. stan lee was credited & i’m told blade was a marvel property, which is news to me. i’m thoroughly enjoying myself. the cop familiar gets the shit beat out of him & tells blade to check the fridge. the wind roars as the scene transition fades to black.

in fades a helicopter. a man with long dark hair on crutches emerges from it. i do not immediately recognize the man, but from the crutches & the hair i immediately go “morbius??”

they assure me he isn’t morbius. i accept that they don’t want to admit he’s morbius for some reason (maybe they just don’t want me to think blade is in the mcu?) as the entirety of michael morbius’s backstory plays out on screen.

i repeatedly ask “okay but this is literally morbius right” and “why are you doing this” as it becomes increasingly clear that we are now, somehow, watching Morbius (2022). everyone continues to insist it’s Blade (1999) until finally i ask “how long were you planning this” and logan says “you wanna know how long” and gives me a screenshot