Product: Super Mario Bros. [VHS] (1993)
Rating: 4.0
Mario Mario, His Brother Luigi and the Parallel World
I saw this when I was a kid, and though I wasn't exactly a huge fan of it, I did collect quite a few of the trading cards. Saw it again just recently. Though it augments a couple of the ideas from the Super Mario series (Thwomp Stompers, Goombas, etc), Super Mario Bros is nothing like those early Nintendo games. Rather than being a colourful, cute and varied fantasy, the world of the "Mushroom Kingdom" is trashy and dirty, full of crime, cars, cages and sci-fi explanations. Still, I found it entertaining enough, I loved Bob Hoskins as Mario, particularly his scenes in New York as a plumber and his banter with Luigi. Plus, the film captures a style and an era that is thoroughly interesting.Mario and his kid brother Luigi are plumbers, and after finishing a job run into Daisy, a student archaeologist who is digging up a site in Brooklyn which may be where the meteor that wiped the dinosaurs out is buried. Luigi falls for Daisy, and takes her on a double date with Mario and his own girlfriend. But things go wrong that night when Mario's date is kidnapped and the site where Daisy and her team are digging is sabotaged. While fixing up the damage with Mario and Luigi, Daisy is also kidnapped. Mario and Luigi follow the echoes of her screams down a tunnel and find a gateway into a parallel dimension, where dinosaurs evolved into human beings, and live on a world short of resources and all desert, save for a city run by a man named Koopa...If you're after a more accurate adaption, I'd recommend checking out the cartoon series, or the old "choose your own adventure" style books that were made of the Mario series, if you can manage to find them.