Abraxas, Guardian of the Universe is a Magical Cult Treasure That Lives Up, and Down, To Its Name

Abraxas! Secundus!

According to the trivia section of The Internet Movie Database Arnold Schwarzenegger was offered the lead role in 1990’s Abraxas, Guardian of the Universe, but turned it down to make Terminator 2: Judgment Day instead. 

I can’t imagine Schwarzenegger even contemplating making Abraxas, Guardian of the Universe for as long as a millisecond. For starters, it’s called Abraxas, Guardian of the Universe.

I chuckle just looking at that fun series of words and the word “Abraxas” in particular. It’s just fun! To paraphrase The Sound of Music, it’s all the beautiful sounds of the world in a single word. Say it soft and it’s almost like praying. 

Abraxas! 

Abraxas! 

Abraxas!

I’ve derived joy from the word Abraxas long before I watched Abraxas: Guardian of the Universe because I am a big fan of the We Love Movies podcast and its hosts never tire of yelling those words in Jesse Ventura’s deeply imitable upper Midwestern accent. 

You know what other word is fun to say? Secundus. 

Go ahead, say it. Fun, huh?

Instead of making a surreally terrible, low-budget knock-off of The Terminator with a title just begging for the Mystery Science Theater 3000 treatment Arnold made an actual Terminator movie that ranks as one of the greatest sequels and science fiction movies of all time. 

I think he made the right choice.

The only possible thing that could have attracted Schwarzenegger to material this dodgy would be an opportunity to work with his good friend and colleague Sven Olse-Thorsen, whom he had previously collaborated with on Conan the Barbarian, Conan the Destroyer, Red Sonja, Raw Deal, Predator, Running Man, Red Heat, Twins and Total Recall.

Olse-Thorsen might have hoped that he and his somewhat more successful contemporary were a package deal, and that where one went the other followed. That did not prove to be the case with Abraxas: Guardian of the Universe, however. 

Instead of landing one of the biggest movie stars in the world for a low-budget Terminator knockoff Abraxas: Guardian of the Universe scored a substantially cheaper Predator star in wrestler turned actor turned politician Jesse “The Body” Ventura. 

Ventura plays the title character, ABRAXAS! ABRAXAS! Sorry, I can’t help it. I’m just in love with the name Abraxas. 

Abraxas is a “Minder”, a space cop from the planet Sargacia who has been on the job for about ten thousand years. He was once space-partners with fellow Minder Secundus (Sven-Ole Thorsen) until SECUNDUS went rogue and started pursuing an Anti-Life Equation he believes will render him all-powerful as well as immortal. 

Writer-director Damian Lee essentially stole the concept of the Anti-Life Equation from Jack Kirby and his Fourth World universe. EVERYBODY stole from Jack Kirby. No one pilfered quite as ineptly as Abraxas, however. 

That isn’t the only idea Lee stole from Kirby, however. The Minders have small, super powerful, seemingly sentient computer helpers that are essentially the Mother Boxes by another name.

Abraxas borrows equally from Jack Kirby and James Cameron, with a little Rambo thrown in for good measure. Yet all of these respectable influences resulted in something hilariously incompetent. 

In his eternal search for the solution to the Anti-Life Equation Secundus travels to an obscure planet called Earth, where he impregnates an Earth human named Sonia Murray (Marjorie Bransfield) just by placing his hand on her belly. 

A few minutes later she gives birth to a boy she names Tommy (Francis Mitchell) who is mute and possesses telekinetic powers. Tommy is the Culmator, a super-powerful being able to solve the all-important Anti-Matter Equation. 

When Sonia tries to explain to her parents that she does not know who the father of her son is because she’d never seen him before and they didn’t even have sex, or even kiss, they understandably do not believe her. I will be the first to concede that her explanation seems a little far-fetched and hard to believe, particularly the part about experiencing the evil space version of a virgin birth. So they kick her and her offspring out of the house. 

James Belushi, who was married to Bransfield when Abraxas was made, contributes a cameo as Principal Rick Latimer, his character from The Principal that is either brilliant or incredibly stupid. 

In it, the Principal warns Sonya that her son is being bullied at school. He says that kids are making fun of him, and calling him names, and pushing him, and beating him up and that it is a problem. 

Sonya asks the Principal why he doesn’t just ask the other kindergartners to stop terrorizing her son and he replies, with hilariously clueless earnestness, that he hadn’t thought about it but he definitely would ASK HIS STUDENTS TO STOP ABUSING the mute five year old with telekinetic powers in their midst. 

Abraxas’ space bosses order him to kill Sonia before she can give birth but he cannot murder an innocent woman, even if doing so might save the universe. He’s a big softie, or at least he’s extremely large. 

Abraxas: Guardian of the Universe is one of those adorable science-fiction movies that try to tell an epic story that spans galaxies and worlds with less than no money and nothing in the way of resources. 

Abraxas’ conception of an alien command center, consequently, is a dimly lit room with a bunch of random lights blinking on and off in the background. Its idea of alien warfare, meanwhile, entails having two exceedingly large men chase one another through the white, dispiriting, Arctic Canadian winter. 

The hero and villain both have strong accents that make them all wrong for science fiction unless you assume that Thorsen is from the Swedish part of Sargacia while Ventura is from its answer to Minnesota. 

This low-budget, low-energy, low-ambition vision of intergalactic warfare takes place not in the farthest reaches of space but rather in a sleepy small town not unlike the one Rambo visits/destroys in First Blood. 

Abraxas could have ended the threat Secundus represents by killing the mother of his child but he has a moral code that will not allow him to do something like that. Instead of killing the terrified single mother, and eliminating the threat within her womb, he instead acts as her protector against his partner-turned-enemy. 

Tommy is a weird kid who is able to make a bully piss himself using only his mind, a nifty party trick for the first grade and under crowd. Tommy has just about the worst deadbeat dad in the universe but he has an unusual father figure in Abraxas. 

This mirrors Arnold Schwarzenegger’s Terminator acting as a protector to Sarah Conner and her juvenile delinquent offspring in T2: Judgment Day, which actually came out a few months after Abraxas: Guardian of the Universe. 

The big difference is that Arnold Schwarzenegger is a goddamn movie star. Arnold possesses qualities such as handsomeness, charm, charisma, humor, magnetism, presence, a light touch and likability that Ventura does not have. 

Oh sweet lord is Jesse Ventura not a movie star. It took actually starring in a movie that barely qualifies as a movie to make that screamingly apparent. He doesn’t have the looks. He doesn’t have the charisma. He doesn’t have the voice. He just plain doesn’t have it. 

Ventura is a remarkable human being who can be very entertaining and colorful in other contexts and is perfectly suited to playing supporting roles in movies like The Running Man and Predator. 

But Ventura is not a leading man. Neither is Thorsen. That leaves a charisma void at the film’s center that it never fills. 

Late in the film Secundus has an opportunity to kill his rival but instead graciously lets him live so that he can witness him taking over the world. That is very gracious of him but in a shocking turn of events it backfires when Abraxas kills him. 

Abraxas decides that he likes Earth and would like to stay around for a while so he ignores orders to return to his home planet. To fit in better, I’d like to think that Abraxas changed his name to something less alien, like Bob or Billy or Butch. 

Ventura’s ill-fated vehicle is legendary in bad movie circles for a very good reason: it delivers the goods. It’s a kooky campy cult classic for the ages with a lead performance that is unforgettable in all the wrong ways. 

It is truly a movie that lives up to the title Abraxas: Guardian of the Universe. Or down to its title, depending on your perspective. 

Up Next: In keeping with the Arnold Schwarzenegger theme, Red Heat.