Product: Super Mario Bros. [VHS] (1993)
Rating: 4.0
Underrated!
In 1993, Hollywood Pictures released the much-anticipated Super Mario Bros. film, based on the SNES video game of the same name. The movie stars Bob Hoskins (Who Framed Roger Rabbit) as Mario and John Leguizamo (Regarding Henry) as Luigi.We start off with a poorly-animated sequence depicting dinosaurs in Brooklyn before a meteorite hit. After the meteorite hit, it spilt our world into two dimensions. In our dimension, we evolved from apes. In the second dimension, humans evolved from dinosaurs.We are told that a princess from the other dimension was brought in an egg to our dimension by her mother. That's a little weird. The princess is named Daisy, and she's raised in a Brooklyn church by some nuns.She becomes an archaeologist, and she has a rock that she keeps around her neck that belonged to her mother. She's digging up dinosaur bones at a cave in Brooklyn, and a company called Scapelli comes and sabatoges the site basically, after she refused to leave the site.Mario and Luigi meet her, and she goes out to dinner with Luigi, Mario, and Mario's fiance. She shows Luigi where she works (the cave) and they discover that Scapelli has flooded the place with water. Luckily, Mario and Luigi are plumbers so they come to the rescue.Some idiot scouts for King Koopa, Spike and Iggy, kidnap Daisy and take her to the other dimension using a portal that is conviently in the cave where she works. Mario and Luigi go after them and end up in Dinohattan, or is it Dinotopia? I can't remember.Koopa, who's just a man with spikey hair and not a dinosaur at all, rules this fungitated New York City place and he has henchmen called Goombas. They don't look very much like the Goombas in the videogame, though. They're more like lizard men with small heads. Anyway, it turns out that the rock that Daisy had around her neck was actually a piece of the meteorite. Why does Koopa want it? To take over both dimensions. Of course.The meteorite piece is in the hands of Mario and Luigi and Koopa offers a 5,000 Koopa Coin reward for them. A crazy old lady who wants the reward starts to beat them with her umberella, but Big Bertha comes to the rescue. Remember the Pine-Sol lady? "That's the power of Pine-Sol, baby." Yep, that's her! But here, she's just a fat woman dressed in red leather. She's also got these cool boots that make her jump. Well, she throws down the old lady and takes the meteorite for herself. She comes back later in the movie.Mario and Luigi get arrested and put in jail with a drunk musician. Believe it or not, this is Toad. Yeah, I know. They escape in a police car, and drive into the desert.Daisy is locked in Koopa's tower, and we actually see her wearing something reminiscent of Princess Peach (who's not present in the movie). She meets Yoshi, a small dinosaur chained up by Koopa. He doesn't look too much like himself either, but what can you expect from a live-action 90's movie?Toad gets turned into a Goomba, and Mario and Luigi head back to Dinohattan to save the day. There are a bunch of weird scenes throughout this part, like dancing in the elevator, and some strange shots of Big Bertha's chest. They get the meteorite back from Big Bertha at some kind of nightclub in Dinohattan, and plan to save Daisy. Bertha gives them pairs of rocket boots, which explains how they can jump so high in the video game, and we finally see them wearing their traditional green and red outfits. The only thing that is similar to the video game in this part, are the bomb-ombs.There's a fifteen minute action scene, that's really pretty dissapointing for an ending, where they go back and forth from New York to Dinohattan. They eventually use de-evolution guns to turn Koopa into a dinosaur, and then to nasty gooey stuff. They save the princess, Dinohattan is restored (no more fungus, woo-hoo!) and Daisy's father is restored.