POV: Super Mario Bros. Film Because That Exists!
This week I sacrificed my Sunday evening to watch (again) the horrific video game movie that is “Super Mario Bros.”. Directed by Rocky Morton and Annabel Jankel, the film was both atrocious in its directing and actual content, with so much miscommunication between previous directors and Nintendo that the eventual product was a gritty mushroom kingdom complete with strippers (I wish I was kidding). What makes this film even worse is that fact that it features a star-studded cast with Bob Hoskins as Mario, John Leguizamo as Luigi, Dennis Hopper as Bowser - a role that was offered and turned down by both Arnold Schwarzenegger and Michael Keaton - and Samantha Mathis as Princess Daisy. Now you may be thinking that the film surely could not have been that bad, to which I would reply, “the actors actually drank on set in order to get through this movie” and “Bob Hoskin described it as the worst job he has ever done and the biggest mistake of his life”. In both directing and content, the film was awful.
Heaven help me, I was going to write a whole section about the story … but realising how many “crucial” details I would leave out has led me to advise you to read the plot from the wiki page – it paints a better picture of the film’s LSD-esque nightmare then I will ever be able to achieve, literally one of the lines from the wiki reads “Koopa informs Daisy that she descended from the dinosaurs, believing only Daisy can merge the worlds because of her royal heritage”, which is completely accurate to the film. Allow me to provide you with further examples of how poorly things crossed over from the game to the movie, for starters, Goomba are now 7 feet tall monstrosities that are built like a brick shit house and have heads the size of an 8 ball, Yoshi is a small but somehow creepily adorable velociraptor, the entire city of Dinohatten- I kid you not, that they actually called it that- is coated in white fibrous material which is apparently the remains of the king that has been turned into a sentient fungus. Last but not least the film features Mario teaming up with a tight leather clad dance floor queen named Big Bertha – that’s not a crossover I just thought I’d mention that. The wonders of Hollywood continue to amaze me! If you’re going to watch the movie (which I advise you do), watch it like the actors: drunk.
