Product: Super Mario Bros. [VHS] (1993)
Rating: 3.0
Super Mario Bros.(1993)
The live action Super Mario Bros. movie is 1990's camp. I remember spending Christmas of 1989 playing Super Mario Bros. on the Nintendo Entertainment System! The video game was fun, colorful, and it had some good music. The film does justice to the video game. Italian-American plumbers Mario(Bob Hoskins) and Luigi(John Leguizamo) travel to a parallel dimension to rescue Princess Daisy(Samantha Mathis) from King Koopa(Dennis Hopper). Alan Silvestri's music score for Super Mario Bros. is very loud, epic, and jumpy! Five seconds of the Super Mario Bros. video game music plays over the opening credits. We do have to face some facts. Bob Hoskins considers this one of the worst movies he ever acted in. The late Dennis Hopper felt the same way. Directors Rocky Morton and Annabel Jankel(Max Headroom) insisted on adding a dark, gritty, dystopian feel to the movie.It's difficult to make a movie out of a video game. There is so little source material to work with. Siskel and Ebert gave thumbs down to this film and they thought Tron(1982) was a better movie. There were characters named Mario and Luigi in the 1956 French film The Wages of Fear. William Friedkin remade that film in 1977 as Sorcerer.We do get to see familiar Super Mario characters such as Toad(Mojo Nixon), Yoshi, and a B-Bomb. Mario and Luigi's Devo Guns are actually Super Scope Guns for the Super Nintendo. John Leguizamo does give a sincere performance as Luigi and he keeps his wild brand of humor to a minimum. Samantha Mathis is quite good as Princess Daisy. Dan Castellaneta(The Simpsons) is the film's narrator. Super Mario Bros. is flavored with pop/rock songs that were popular in the 1990's. A Roxette song recorded for Hocus Pocus(1993) is used in this film. Super Mario Bros. (1993) was a critical and commercial failure, but it has gained a cult following.