Product: Super Mario Bros. [VHS] (1993)
Rating: 4.0
"Trust the fungus, Mario."
While I can't argue that Super Mario Bros. is "misunderstood," the way one Amazon user does, It's better than its reputation. Although it may be -- sorry, is -- a terrible adaptation of the video game, it's a fascinating train wreck of the license, the directors' vision, and filmmaking by committee.A few thoughts about the movie:- People like to call movies like this "incoherent" or "convoluted," and there are stories of last-minute rewrites that Hoskins and Leguizamo would become so frustrated with, they eventually started ignoring them. However, the movie's meteorite plot is actually pretty straightforward, and there aren't any useless, dead-weight scenes where the characters are all distracted by some other goal. Even if detours with "Big Bertha at the Boom Boom Bar" and some of the characters' paths to the finale could've been smoothed out by a better script, the movie makes sense and doesn't drag.- The film's bizarre Blade Runner-meets-Jurassic Park production and costume design is overlooked. Spark-spraying vehicles with motors on the outside and bulldozer-style shovels on the front! Huge propaganda-like billboards for Koopa loom over the city! There's even some thought in the pointy walls of Koopa's tower, which evoke the castles from the game, plus more direct references like Bullet Bill, the Bob-Omb, and Yoshi (an impressive animatronic creation). There's not much internal logic (no idea why it'd be efficient for cars to be powered by cables and have no internal braking system), but it's memorable.- The cast is actually phenomenal. Super Mario Bros. may not take advantage of it, but the idea of Bob Hoskins of The Long Good Friday facing off against Blue Velvet's Dennis Hopper is great all by itself, and John Leguizamo, Samantha Mathis, Fisher Stevens, Richard Edson, and Fiona Shaw are no slouches either. The performances are limited by the needs of the script, but for an action film / a kid's film / a stupid film / a troubled film, all of their work is decent.Really, the worst thing about Super Mario Bros. is that it's a terrible adaptation of the video game, but that's more like "a fascinating lack of resemblance to the video game." Hollywood's history is littered with astonishingly bad ideas that died in development, and yet Super Mario Bros., in all its bizarre glory, was actually produced and released into over a thousand movie theaters, a fact that is never more apparent than the prologue by Dan Castellaneta, which describes the entire dino-universe concept using bad CD-ROM-game cartoon graphics, before ending with "and hey...what if they found a way back?", which is a finish I'd like to believe was lifted directly from the pitch meeting with Hollywood Pictures executives.When Buena Vista released the DVD of the film way back in 2003, I was just relieved it was in widescreen. These days, the non-anamorphic, completely bare-bones disc could really use an upgrade. Although it seems unlikely that Disney (or whoever it is that controls the film now, in case it was sold off with the Miramax and Dimension libraries) would ever grant the movie a special edition, the Super Mario Bros Archive website has compiled a pretty impressive amount of material on the making of this bizarre creation. Should the film be released on Blu-Ray, I hope whoever releases it considers asking for the folks at SMBA to participate; I'd love the opportunity to see some deleted scenes or even interviews on the making of this, one of the most bizarre movies of all time.Super Mario Bros. may not be a traditionally "good" movie, but it has a special place in my heart. In terms of doing justice to the source material, I understand why people call it the worst video game movie of all time, but it's more than watchable, and it's just fun to marvel at the fact the movie even exists. Not to mention, Street Fighter is way, way worse.