Product: Super Mario Bros. [VHS] (1993)
Rating: 5.0
Don't listen to the naysayers...
A lot of people say "Super Mario Bros." is a bad movie, because it wasn't a faithful adaptation of the video game. Well those people can go suck an egg. I loved this movie when I first saw it in theatres way back in 1993, and I love it now. It's a lot of fun.As for the story, it's essentially the same as the video game; the Mario Bros. try to rescue the princess from Koopa. But instead of a brightly lit Mushroom Kingdom full of walking mushrooms and flying turtles, we have a dark and gritty dystopia.Koopa is after a piece of rock that is part of a meteorite that struck the Earth some 65 million years ago and thrust the dinosaurs into a parallel dimension, where the dinosaurs eventually took on a humanoid form, in much the same way that Earth humans evolved from apes. Uniting this piece of rock with the rest of the meteorite would unite the two dimensions, and allow Koopa to enter into our dimension, devolve humans into apes and take over, because our world is cleaner, has abundant food and clean water. And the Mario Bros. ain't having none of that and try to stop him. Throughout the movie there are references to the video games (Big Bertha, B-bomb, etc.), so it's all good.And you really can't blame the writers for wanting to try something different with the Marios, since a literal live action adaptation of the video game wouldn't translate well to film. Imagine a fat guy squashing mushrooms for an hour and a half. I rest my case.