Toss in his portly stature and Hoskins was a perfect choice for the heroic plumber Mario, the avenging angel who stomps through worlds of evil turtles and living mushrooms, even if the actor was neither Italian nor American. For the film’s producer Roland Joffé, ethnicity was clearly less crucial than vibe. Hoskins and his Latino costar John Leguizamo (playing Mario’s brother, Luigi) excelled at playing men with permanent chips on their shoulders. How else could one explain a plumber daring to challenge the reign of a massive fire-breathing dinosaur dictator, armed with only a prodigious gift for jumping?

It’s not the casting of Super Mario Bros. that startled me when rewatching the film (which is incredibly hard to do unless you own it on DVD). It was the recognition that nothing in this movie, which was rated PG, could really appeal to children. The world of the Mario video games is colorful and cartoonish, almost friendly—enemies might hurl fireballs at you, but they do it while riding in a cloud decorated with a smiley face. The design of Super Mario Bros. the movie, which was directed by Rocky Morton and Annabel Jankel (the team behind the cult TV series Max Headroom), is dank and dystopic, a cyberpunk city on a desert planet overrun with a mysterious brown fungus and policed by bipedal lizards in Nazi-like trench coats.

Only a few years later would come blockbusters like Joel Schumacher’s Batman & Robin (1997), a film that was designed expressly with toy sales in mind (whole scenes were constructed with an eye for how they might later be rendered in miniature, plastic form). Nothing in Super Mario Bros. feels “toyetic.” Instead, it borrows from the washed-out visuals of early ’90s sci-fi films like David Fincher’s Alien 3 or David Cronenberg’s Naked Lunch that predicted a rotting sewer of a future.

It’s strange, then, that the plot of Super Mario Bros. is incredibly faithful to the basic concept of Shigeru Miyamoto’s platform games. There is a princess (Daisy, played by Samantha Mathis), who’s held prisoner by a villainous tyrant (King Koopa, played by Dennis Hopper) in a world unlike Mario’s own. Super Mario Bros. posits an alternate dimension called “Dinohatten,” where humans evolved from reptiles rather than apes; that’s where Brooklyn plumbers Mario and Luigi have to go to save Daisy and prevent a hostile invasion from the cold-blooded Koopa and his troop of turtles.

“It was a very fun project that they put a lot of effort into,” the famously sunny Miyamoto said in a 2007 interview with Edge magazine. “The movie may have tried to get a little too close to what the Mario Bros. video games were. And in that sense, it became a movie that was about a video game, rather than being an entertaining movie in and of itself.” That is about the kindest way to put it—though Super Mario Bros. looks nothing like the video game, the film’s strangled attempts to transmute the games’ elemental storytelling into a Hollywood narrative just make it even weirder.