Father Malone's Weekly Roundup - Backrooms (2026), Masters of the Universe (2026)

Welcome back, midnight viewers to Father Malone's weekly round up. I am Father alone, and the liminal pug beside me is Ripley. Jean, you've gone silent? Is this because you're in the back rooms. Yes, we're gonna be talking about that viral sensation that's been adapted to a feature film.

And speaking of adaptations, we've got a children's toy line and making its big screen or reboot as well. That's right. I've been busy since last week, chatted mainly with the new job, which I want to tell you all about, and I can basically tell you nothing if you haven't heard or just tuning in. I am now a scare actor at Universal Horror Unleashed here in Las Vegas, and good god, it is the best job I've ever had. Like I said, that's about all I can say about the gig itself, other than it is a fucking honor to be working for the company and playing some of these roles.

Good lord, So come to Las Vegas, gang let me menace you. So let's dive on into that fantastic world of nostalgia. You know, I fucking hate nostalgia. Here's the trailer, who I know most of you don't remember me, but I know all of you. Even though I was stuck light years away on Earth, I never stopped trying to get back home.

Everything changed since you left. Skeletortte of my family. Me destroyed our world. That's not my fault. I know how it fails to fail.

Take the sword and when you fall, that's your chance to stand talk stop why the unit shall quick and must shudder? This is my home. I'm gonna fight for it. But I can't do it without doing Somebody wants a girl. I need every man, woman or whatever that is.

To be h bar But you're too scared to use it. Trust me, And how you. Tell everyone that you're from another planet, it just makes you sound a little very crazy. Okay. I was just the right age when Masters of the Universe made their toy debut.

I was nine, and I did have a few figures, but by then I'd seen Conan the Barbarian, and I was less inclined to the likes of Orco and moss Man, but I did have Merman, and I fucking loved that guy. Reminded me of the gill Man from Creature from the Black Lagoon, and I just now found out that his design is based on Bernie Wrightson's swamp thing blood culs to blood huh. Anyway, I watched the cartoons mainly for Eva Lynn. I'm not gonna lie. This is right in that window of all of my likes being formed.

Columbia from Rocky Horror, Red from Red Hot Riding Hood, the baroness Christine de Belle, she was ac and meatballs, and I once got a cameo from her, Someone get Little nell on Zoom. But other than it being something to watch in the afternoon, my affinity for he Man and his cohorts never grew beyond hey, he's got a skull for a head. And then there was that first movie. Now that movie is garbage, just a slice of the best cannon films. Was ever gonna do that terrible script stranding our characters on Earth for most of the runtime so they'd only have to build one set to represent all of Eternia.

Gwildour Gwildore of all the gross, flatulent looking monstrosities, and his evil finger pinching mechanical nightmare. Tila is in Gray Spandex. That girl from the Springsteen video is the lead character. Dolves Lundgren has always been an action star in search of a director. He needed someone who understood his actual charm and wouldn't have been content letting him stone slab his way through most of his rolls, much like that of he Man, which was fine for that film because that was the way the character was written, and it was the only way that character was going to be written at that point in history.

No one could have suspected that that film would still be rewatched all these decades later, And there's only one reason that that is so, of course, Franklin Jella's Shakespearean turn as the sidekick Skeletor to the film's true villain, Meg Foster's Evelyn. Fucking hell. Ladies and gentlemen. Now, I think all shades of eye are alluring, but Meg Foster is blue, transcend the time and space. Did you ever see that adaptation of The Scarlet Letter with her playing Hester Prynne.

You just look at her and you think, how can you punish her? Look into the eyes of an ageless goddess. Also, I don't remember Hester Prynne being such a fucking smoke show in that book, because all I can remember are Demi Mour and Meg Foster playing her, and in either of those cases, shut all your puritan mouths. Anyway, Masters of the Universe is saved by Langella and his dedication to making it all so real. And that shot of Meg Foster when she first gets to Earth and she uses that device to see the past action as they're telling her the complete opposite, and she's just struttin.

They've been threatening a remake or a reboot of He Man for decades, with a gaggle of writers and directors attached and then fading, and there have been animated stabs at reviving it. Mark Hamill doing Skeletor for Kevin Smith. That's a no brainer. But it wasn't until now that we've gotten a full length, big budget, twenty first century live action flick. And it was surprisingly good.

First off. The cast is across the board excellent. Even Jared ldo ooh, we love to hate him anyway, he's good. The kid playing he Man is charming in an offhand way. And I've been a fan of Human cartoon Camila Mendez since Riverdale.

That's right, fuckers. I watched Riverdale and in the first season they had a crate heading to Horlick's University show up in one episode, so please have sex with yourselves, but leave Lily Einhardt alone. They grew her in a lab and a beaker marked a girl next door. God, this is the horniest round up ever, speaking of you know, I didn't care if they ever made a he Man movie, and then I heard Alison Brie was going to be Evil Lynn. Now she is worth the price of admission, but then she always is.

I've extolled her virtues when we talked about us, but honestly, I've been a fan of her since Community and I watch it literally anything She's in Glow is on Netflix right now. Why aren't you watching it? It's one of the best shows of a century of great shows. The script for the reboot is the equivalent of the original films as representing a time and place in cinema. So we get a prologue with young versions of our heroes and a basic framework for place and characters.

Then it's off to Earth because fish out of Water stuff really works lately. But they didn't even hate that. Once the attorneya stuff started bleeding in, then it was exciting and Prince Adam came alive as a performer. Make him do stuff. But it's when they get back to Eternia.

Look, I refuse to say the name of the world they've decided, just like I will only ever say Harkonen. That's where the film actually becomes a film, a schitzoprend driven at times by greed and merchandising and raw meat for a fandom, as well as some genuine affection for these characters and their stories. That tone shifts between meta commentary satisfying the decades of Skeletor memes we've all come to know way more intimately than the original cartoon, and a genuine blockbuster action cinema with an eye towards competing with cinema's reigning champ, the MCU. They're both equally successful, but I don't think it ever coalesces into a hole. You feel it like whiplash when Skeletor goes from genuine menace to insecure lout.

Hey, do you have a favorite character? Well, there is no doubt they're going to pop into frame at some point in this movie. Fan service, fan blow jobs, two solid hours, plenty of eye contact. It's blonkers how many peripheral and seemingly meaningless characters show up either in the main plot or in one of the dozen mid credit scenes promising more adventures of our new best pals. Yeah, everyone but Merman.

They made sure to cater to every single one one of the fandom out there. Just no Merman. Well, fuck you, masters of the Universe. I'm kidding. I'm actually not recommending the film overall.

At a certain point, the silly aspects are swallowed up by the big bag. Gotta have our leads cracking each other's skulls while our minor character subplots play out in perfect synchrony, and it becomes basically a CGI cartoon. And yeah, it's never meant as anything more than a popcorn movie, so you can solace yourself with that. But I bet there's still a movie to be made of this franchise that satisfies the moviegoer only. All right, you're ready for some old man shit, midnight viewers, here's the trailer.

I found something. In the store. Okay, what did you find? A place? Without a place?

Comes the mean kid in me. Hello, what's youad you anyone there? Look, I know how this sounds, but you gotta understand it's massive in there. I'm not saying I don't believe you. Okay, I'm gonna come back here with proof.

All right, you feel me? Yes, follow my leader. What is this? That's what I'm trying to figure out. I've been there every night since I found the place, and I still barely scratch the surface.

I just take a slong. Oh my god, put me up, Put me up, Put me up. These rooms this place built some. It's like a maze. It just goes on and on.

Sometimes I'm scared I'll get lost. I don't understand what is tasty. It's beautiful? Oh I right. Hello.

Back in twenty nineteen, the Internet came to life, as it sometimes does, with a four Chan thread that featured photos of limital spaces, a take on the wildly popular creepy pasta genre of Internet horror, just unassuming walls for structures that had never been occupied and seemingly never ended. Took the idea of what these back rooms might be and what might dwell there, and they fucking ran with it, expanding in every direction with silly and sometimes downright sinister notions of what might befall you if you accidentally wandered between our world and it. Then, in twenty twenty two, Caine Parsons, a seventeen year old aspiring filmmaker, released his short called Simply back Rooms. It was a nine minute imagining of a filmmaker who accidentally falls into the spaces that very eerily match those of the original run of photographs.

What transpires inside was economical and harrowing and thought provoking and immensely satisfying and popular everyone saw it. He followed it up with two dozen or so shorts, each adding subtle shading to his version of the back Room's mythology. If the shorts weren't so skillfully made, one might get the feeling the way they did slender Man a few years back, when everyone was trying to get that movie out in mad until it took a more ominous shading. But of course a feature film would follow, and of course a twenty four would be vying with the usual suspect Blumhouse for the right to time make it. When I heard they beat Blumhouse, I thought, good, keep Jason Blum's grubby little Paws away from another franchise.

But after seeing the movie, maybe they should have involved him or someone like, really, any fucking person, because the film I watched at an hour and fifty minutes two twenty with trailers Get Your Shit Together, AMC had about three good beats, and every fucking one of them were repeats of that short from seven years ago. I'm not maligning Kane Parsons as a filmmaker. He did an admirable job, but making a ten million dollar budget look at least five times that amount, and he should be congratulated. Clearly, the movie is raking it in, but the script was garbage. I don't care if Chai would tell ijaphors mounts, they're forming those words.

The words are boring, the concept is boring. Look putting aside that stranger things came along and Strip mined a lot of the ideas that Parsons would explore in the later back room shorts, the government investigation, the bodycam footage of passing between dimensions, hazmat suits everywhere, dealing with ferocious beasts, rendering a lot of them redundant in the greater cultural consciousness. What he does present as the reasons behind the place at all are just so in line with what's been going on in Horror Forever. It's all trauma, everybody, Okay, spoilers, gang, Wait, here's the movie without spoilers. Drunk owner of a furniture store in California, which inexplicably has a lower floor a basement, stumbles through a wall in the basement into the back rooms, and it's basically every iteration of the back rooms you've seen at this point.

And then he's out, and then he's luring his young employees who also shoot his commercials think better call Saul's camera guys with less charm to go back and document the action with him. Eventually his therapist comes looking for him there and she joins the fun, and then those hazmat suits show up and there's a monster. Okay, all the action I just described is the back hour. Most of the first hour is getting to know our furniture store owning lead in his failed marriage brought on by his failure in the world of architecture, and all the trauma he's not addressing, all the accountability he's not taking. And if that weren't enough, his therapist has her own trauma, childhood trauma.

In her case, she had an agoraphobic mom who treated the outside world like it was another dimension. Do you get it? Have you figured it out yet? Everybody? Now, whatever greater mythology exists about this new backrooms dimension, and I'm sure we're going to be getting many sequels and other media with the amount of threads and breadcrumbs they lay scattered in every direction in this movie.

Putting all that aside, the back rooms as we experience them through these characters are their own memories played back, and every time the back rooms are reremembers it, it makes it all a little more distorted. So there are bits of furniture, advertising, pennants and desks in ar noirs here and there, and they get weirder as the movie goes on, as do the people he encounters. Every time they're a little more grotesque and apparently delicious. I won't ruin that anymore than I just did. But it's the memories that are the problem, because the memories are all trauma based.

Luckily, childhood trauma defeats adult narcissistic trauma anyone else. Fans have done of the Dead the seventy eight film, which is the only film. What's that movie about? What are the zombies? On the most obvious level, they're a parody of American capitalism, mindlessly returning to the mall where they eat human flesh the ultimate consumer.

Or the zombies may be the youth revolution that had been erupting since Romero made Night of the Living Dead in the late sixties amongst that tumnuls. The zombies may in fact be the new society coming to supplant the old, and while we identify with our human leads, the fact is they're polishing the brass on the Titanic. Or the zombies might be representations of good old class warfare. Yes, is the answer to all of those interpretations, no matter your viewpoint. Are vampire symbols of repressed Victorian sexuality or present day queerness?

Are they metaphors for drug addiction and fear of contagion? Yes, all of it. But the back rooms are just my own accountability, twisted and mirrored and making me face it or not. It's come up as horror as Rockney O'Bannon and the Twilight Zone writers called it. A bier gets a bit.

It's so narrow in its focus while playing at being wider in scope. And listen, I love niche horror movies. Not every monster needs to be understood universally. Sometimes I've had quite enough of elm Street and need to spend some time in the paperhouse, and there are certainly tiny horror tales that I feel are so idiosyncratic that they feel as though they were made for an audience of about two dozen, of which I consider myself a member. But none of the recent movies have aspirations so small, so actually focused.

They're confusing enough springboards for what will, no doubt be the same basic boring government investigates the unknown stories that they've been slapping on the screen since the nineteen fifties. Look, you can write my dismissal off as that old guy in therapy. Of course he doesn't like it cuts a little too close to home, to which I would repulst Go fuck yourself, you myopic prick. The psychological horror done well is some of the finest in the genre. This is not that this is once again bandwagon bullshit that thinks it's deeper than it is.

I have always fucking said you can't go wrong making dumb people feel smart. Not you. If you like this, I'm sure you're very intelligent. It's those other assholes I'm talking about. I'm raging a bit because this is such a terrible squandering of such a potent idea, those abandoned man made places we all find ourselves in at some time or another, some underground parking garage, a cubicle farm, before or after business hours.

When we find ourselves in them, particularly in moments of silence, it's easy to feel like the world has slipped away, and in those moments, the limitless possibilities are just fire in every direction. What is this place? What will we see? What will we encounter? In this case, a giant sports team mascot that bellows and stumbles around slowly.

That might seem ridiculous, but once you consider that it is our lead character's failure. You're at his career and his marriage made flesh, it's super scary. Now you're right, Megan, all of your coworkers are wrong, and I would look askance at that husband of yours. That is the roundup for the week. Tune in Monday to a Fest.

We are talking Dormamu in the Dark Dimension with our Von Dumfest coverage of Doctor Strange. Meanwhile, over on the Patreon channel, we are continuing step off where HP and I look at the one season early two thousands Wonders that was the White Wrapper Show. Also Vault seven oh two is reopening, where Nuka, Kota, Quantum, and I are back evaluating radiation levels and character arcs of the Fallout TV universe and the Greater Fallout Universe in general. For a Ripley Jean, I'm father alone. I'm gonna keep scaring folks nightly so you try to enjoy the daylight.

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