Super Mario Bros.

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Written by KTP

Super Mario Bros:  It’s like watching a plane filled with Christmas toys crash into a fire truck that’s putting out an orphanage fire in July.

Super Mario Brothers was the game that put Nintendo in the spotlight and helped the company dominate the video game market. 1990 saw the release of Super Mario World for the SNES that was better in every way than the three NES games before it. It was only natural that someone would want to cash in on that shit in the film industry. This eventually led to Nintendo placing the trust of handling their prized mascot into the hands of two music video directors and a screenwriter that wrote about 2 million people getting killed in Cambodia. It went as well as you would have expected. Super Mario Bros. became one of the worst reviewed films of all time and caused Nintendo to never release a movie since its release. While the movie is seemingly the final nail in the coffin for Mario in film, it sure as hell wasn’t the first.

I can't imagine where it all went wrong for Mario. Hmmmm....

Kids growing up in the late 80’s might remember the Super Mario Bros. Super Show where the cartoon characters Mario and Luigi went off to save the Mushroom Kingdom from….whatever. You probably also blocked out of your head the cringe worthy segments with wrestling legend Captain Lou Albano playing as a live action Mario in Brooklyn with his brother Luigi. If you never saw it, you missed out on the Captains public service announcements telling kids to not do drugs or they will go to hell and Luigi telling someone to fuck off with the chin brush off. There was also that time that he said “Fuck you, Luigi.”, but that could be him saying “thank you” and the audience laughter mixing things up. Apparently Lou was fucking pissed he had to shave his beard off for the role of Mario, so I’ll set this in the category of “I want to believe”. To be fair, any show that guest starred Elvira can’t be that bad. It wasn’t. So the Trojan horse rolls through Nintendo’s corporate offices giving them false security that a film could have potential to take off.

Whenever you fuck up really bad, I want you to look at this picture. You will never fuck up as bad as the guy that thought small-headed goombas were a good idea.

The script is legendarily horrid, but what make it even more fascinating was this was picked from four drafts. The other three should be taught in universities as cautionary tales for screenwriters if this was the best they could produce. I will say that the story does include Mario and Luigi, Princess Daisy, Bomb-ombs, Koopa, and magic mushrooms. Thumbs up for at least getting that shit right. The rest of the movie centers around a magic crystal, dinosaurs, and an invasion of Brooklyn. It tests my patience trying to explain this horrible piece of dogshit. I don’t know. I’m under the impression that behind the scenes of this movie there was some back and forth between the writers and directors. It's like they wanted to include Nintendo references and make it fun while the directors tried to make it too dark. The Mushroom Kingdom was even set in some industrial shithole of a city that was a film cliché at the time. Goombas were freakish small-headed lizard men. Yoshi tried to eat a woman alive until stabbed in the side. The Mushroom King has been devolved into a fungus that permeates through the city as ooze. It’s like the directors are trying to turn this happy though stupid script into some sort of shitty super 90’s doom and gloom film with Nintendo references.

At least they both got to drink on the job.

This was basically “Miss the Mark: The Movie”, that had an amazingly talented cast. You have Bob Hoskins, John Leguizamo, and Dennis Hopper who each have had great films under their belts failing to hold up this titanic of a film once it hit the iceberg of the script. Leguizano and Hoskins admitted to being drunk through some of their scenes Bob Hoskins who played Mario pointed to this film when he asked what was his biggest disappointment. This was a guy that was in Spice World and still hated this fucking film. If you really want to point a finger, you can do that with everyone in prodcution. Who the fuck would think that a game where an Italian plumber eats magic mushrooms so he can break bricks with his head and stomp on turtles would be a good idea to make as a live action movie? Lance Henriksen who you remember as Bishop from Aliens got it the easiest. For about 15 seconds the only lines he utters are, “I’m back. Love those plumbers.” We do too, Lance. We just are wondering what the fuck they are doing in this movie.