Super Mario Bros.

Oh Super Mario Bros. How I despise thee. Not the wonderful game that I wasted my youth on, but the 1993 film "based" on the game in question. This is the kind of film that makes me realize how many horrible films that my parents had to sit through when I was younger. Yes, it is that bad. I can only imagine this is just the kind of film that eventually led to Uwe Boll types, making crap adaptations that are not very faithful to their source material.

I personally don’t believe I could own this film, and yet I personally believe that it is perhaps a film that everyone should see at some point in their life. A film to see and relish in its over the top campiness. It is bad, and yet, in many respects I can see where they attempted to make a "good" film.

The film stars Bob Hoskins, John Leguizamo, and Dennis Hopper, so the casting is there. Hoskins plays Mario, Leguizamo is Luigi, and Hopper plays King Koopa. How they were convinced to be in this film after reading the script, aside from a steady paycheck, is completely unknown to me. Oh yeah, Samantha Mathis is in the film as well. However, on second thought I wonder how the script originally read, and if the finished product does not do it justice, or if the production just could not give a faithful adaptation to the script. The film has humanoids with incredibly small heads. Who thought that up?

The movie's story revolves around Mario and Luigi, two New York plumbers. They are contacted by Princess Peach, who enlists their help to help in fighting Koopa, the king of "Dinohattan," a dinosaur version of Manhattan. Get it, "Dinohattan!" The only halfway enjoyable portion of the film is the Bob-omb sequence. If I thought that was the best part, then the film has to be bad!

I'll be interested if Nintendo revisits this franchise, and attempts a more faithful adaptation.

* out of *****