Soup-ier Cherio Hoes

Sometimes I'll watch a really awful movie just because I haven't seen it and it has a reputation of being epically bad and I'm super bored and/or drunk. I recently had such a fit of boredom, after starting new files on near all of my PS2 games and watching 3 discs of Burn Notice on DVD. This movie is so profoundly stupid that I couldn't come up with a proper title of the post that's somehow making a clever joke of the film's title or plot. Movies based on video games tend towards the awful enough as recent adventures such as Hitman, Max Payne, Silent Hill, and the Resident Evil movies--and this is ignoring the movies that were based on games that had absolutely no plot that should be auctioned as a movie: Street Fighter, Dead or Alive, OneChanbara, and the upcoming Tekken movie. This film was one of the second films based on games with no discernible good entertaining ideas unless we're controlling the head-stomping.

Super Mario Bros (1993) aims to feed from the fan-base of the video game of the same name from 1985. There are two problems with this movie, before any technical issues are even mentioned. A: the fan-base mostly consists of little kids playing their first video game, or if you're looking for people to be buying the DVD, people who remember playing their first video game. The latter is somewhat possible with the fact that most gamers are nostalgic (aka suffer minor brain hemorrhages) when an classic title is mentioned. I'm guilty of it myself, as I almost paid $150 for Earthbound and the strategy guide before my girlfriend gave me the copy she's had since she was a kid. Anyway...B: the movie completely fails to hit anywhere close to the movie it's premised on. It takes place in a dystopian realm that mentions Mario characters. They explain the existence of dinosaurs and turtle-people by saying the meteor that crashed 65 million years ago created a parallel dimension that reptiles evolved into the intelligent species. Holy crap. Instead of Peach, Mario is enthralled in a Brooklyn chick name Daniella and the quest follows Luigi's interest in Daisy, and Daisy being a princess of the reptile realm. Or something.

Super Mario Bros. was written by the trio of Parker Bennett, Terry Runte, and Ed Solomon--no one's getting away from this movie blame-free. Ed Solomon was also the writer of both Bill and Ted movies, which should tell you there that we are in a lot of trouble and we wish to rethink our decision. Too late, gamerkids. The trio of directors didn't help any with Rocky Morton and Annabel Jankel--both music video directors--and Roland Joffe who hasn't done with anything worth a damn since.

The actors in the film really aren't half bad, so it's odd to see them in something like this. Bob Hoskins and John Leguizamo play Mario and Luigi, respectively, with Dennis Hopper playing King Koopa and Fiona Shaw playing his wife-thing, Lena. The rest of the cast made most of their careers as small-part extras, such as wife-of-sick-guy-on-House and parking-lot-attendant-from-Ferris-Bueler. The only other character that was really in anything was Fisher Stevens who played the Middle Eastern scientist from Short Circuit. Oh, it hurts me.

Nintendo, who usually holds onto their choices and properties in a death-grip, said in a time-line of the Mario series when mentioning the movie, "Yes, it happened. Let us speak no more of it." Later, in the Nintendo Power 20th anniversary issue, they say that the movie is a testament the the pop-culture impact the game series has had. Make up your minds. I personally vote we go Atari-style E.T. with this movie and game series. On a related note, Super Mario Galaxy 2 is a stupid idea.

-Evan "Dez" O'Connor