UUUUUUUGGGGGGGGGGHHHHHHHHHHH!!!!!! Super Mario Bros. is one of those movies where you have to question your existence because it is just that terrible. Some movies are so bad they’re good, others are bad but make you laugh. Then we have those special pieces of garbage that give you headaches with how nonsensical they are. The type of movie that stirs an unbridled rage deep within that will remain with you for the rest of your life. Maybe you think I’m exaggerating or taking my disdain for Super Mario Bros. the movie too far but I beg to differ! This movie is one of those special kind of films that I truly and sincerely hate. They destroyed any connection to the source material and removed any hope I had left for a movie adaptation of any of my favorite videogames. Mortal Kombat helped heal that wound a bit and that’s saying a lot, but there is still a gapping hole. Enough of this emotional soliloquy, now to the review of a timeless classic in the bad movies genre, Super Mario Bros. the movie!

The movie begins with a narration over graphics of dinosaurs talking about the extinction level event caused by a massive meteorite which destroyed all dinosaurs; except in this universe the dinosaurs were just transported to another dimension…..welcome to Super Mario Bros. the movie. We are then brought to a cathedral where an egg is dropped off that hatches a baby. The queen of dinosaur world drops off the egg who turns out to be Peach…I mean Daisy, and a human baby is hatched….a human baby from an egg because dinosaurs learned to change their DNA to human over millions of years. How is that possible? I have no idea but this is a movie so let’s go with it for now.

A piece of the meteorite that crashed into the Earth contains the power to merge both worlds; that is your McGuffin or plot device for the movie. That piece hangs from Daisy’s necklace and stays with her because she is the only one who can withstand the power of the merger. Bowser needs to find Daisy and use the rock on her neck to open a portal and merge both dimensions. I need you to understand that I understand how ridiculous this sounds, even for a videogame movie, but this is the plot.

Our introduction to the Mario brothers begins with a slow camera pan of their apartment where we see 3 different sized plungers hanging on the wall. Just in case you the viewers weren’t sure if this was a movie about two plumbers, we get a slow pan across three plungers hanging on the wall. I know a few plumbers and none of them actually hang plungers from their walls as if they were a collection of swords. Anyway, let’s fast forward to the first time we see Peach….I mean Daisy, sorry.

*On a side note, I realize Daisy was a character in Super Mario Land for Gameboy but Peach was the original damsel in distress and fans recognize her more than Daisy.*

Daisy is a University student who is the head of an excavation team on a site where a construction company is attempting to put up a new building. Scapelli Construction is not too happy about being held up by some students who want to dig up bones. This subplot has no factor on the movie other than a plot device was needed to put the Mario Bros in the sewer even though they’re plumbers and could find themselves in a sewer or underground for numerous reasons so why would this matter!?! I remember, so Daisy could meet Luigi and we could have a forced romance between the two. They even go on a double date with Mario and his girlfriend Daniella. Mario is the original pimp juice in this movie, I’m serious, he is a ladies man that is irresistible to women.

After the date, Daisy takes Luigi to the dig site where they discover Scapelli’s goons have tried to flood everything. Instead of attempting to stop it themselves, Daisy and Luigi go all the way back to his place to get Mario and then return to the site. I’m no time master but I am pretty sure the site would have flooded in the time it took them to get to the house and back.

Bowser has two cousins in their world looking for the princess and they kidnap Daniella earlier, thinking she was Daisy, after Mario drops her home. The cousins then turn up inexplicably at the dig site, after Mario and Luigi fix the leak, in order to knock out the plumbers and kidnap Daisy. Our heroes wake up and find the screaming voice of Daisy to a portal hidden in an underground wall. Between the ledge both brothers stood on and the portal, is a space of about 5 feet with a 100 foot fall in moving water. Daisy comes partially out of the portal trying to escape her kidnappers and Luigi manages to rip the rock of her neck before she’s pulled back but this scene makes entirely no sense. Why? Well, Luigi jumps into the portal without thought because he likes Daisy but Mario is afraid and holds back. Mario reaches over but can’t touch it and pulls back a couple times before allowing himself to fall forward while reaching out and does a full on front flip into the wall portal. He at no point jumps forward into a front flip but falls forward in a way that would have been impossible for him to front flip and end up the same way he ended up. More than likely, Mario would have leaned forward and fell into a wall ledge, banging his head and falling to his death but he is one of the main heroes so he can’t die. When we see Mario next, he is hurtling through a dimension warp and then him and Luigi crash land in the next dimension. How was Daisy able to reach out of the dimensional portal? Maybe she can fly through dimensions? but then that means her captors can as well? Who cares, right?

When Mario and Luigi land in the other dimension the movie really goes off the rails in the most illogical way. The city they’re in is a subterranean urban landscape where fried lizard hot dogs are served and the cars run on an electric power grid like bumper cars. Mind you, there is no explanation as to where this electrical power comes from. The city or Dinohattan, is also completely covered in fungus because the former King is now a giant fungi ball hanging from a ceiling and spreading himself throughout the city in a form of rebellion. I had to re-watch this twice to make sure I wasn’t going crazy but no, it really is that silly; even for a movie that was released in 1993. Speaking of 93′, The dino dimension in Super Mario Bros looks exactly like the underground city in Demolition Man starring Sylvester Stallone and Wesley Snipes. Since SMB came out in May and DM premiered in October, I would say Demolition Man copied Super Mario Bros but Demolition Man did it so much better. I’ll just attribute it to the year being 1993 and many movies released around that time had a grimy feel to them. But the resemblance is so closely related, I find it hard not to wonder if both movies shared a producer or concept artist. Just check this out:

(Dinohattan is on the left and Underground City is on the right)

Toad is introduced as a homeless guitar singer who doesn’t like King Koopa/Bowser and is arrested for singing about his dislike. That is the first and last we see of Toad in his human form but we’ll get to that later. Mario loses the meteorite necklace to a woman named Big Bertha, a big black woman wearing a bright red top with spikes on it because…..I don’t know and no longer care to figure it out.

Mario and Luigi get arrested by the police and are introduced to Koopa posing as their lawyer in the police station. He reveals himself and brings them to his de-evolution machine to coax the brothers into telling him where the meteorite piece is. As an example of what he will do to them, Koopa puts Toad in the machine and we are officially introduced to goombas. Goombas in this movie have tiny lizard heads and giants bodies, as opposed to giant heads and small bodies in the game. Goombas are supposed to resemble giant mushrooms brought to life but instead we get this:

Anyhow, The brothers manage to make a daring escape as they glide through the prison hanging on to chains, past walls of literal cages holding prisoners. Would it surprise anyone that the prisoners the camera chose to show singularly cheering on the brothers escape were black? 1993, am I right? am I right?

When Mario and Luigi make it out of the police station the fungus gives them a bob-omb; yaaaay! a bob-omb like the game.

They steal two police cars and are chased through the city by two other police cars shooting fireballs at their car but their car doesn’t blow up. The Mario bros are then sandwiched by the two cop cars while still being fired at, so Mario slams on the brakes and the other cars keep driving, shooting fireballs at each other and blowing up. They blew up but the Mario brothers car didn’t. I know I shouldn’t be thinking in to this so deeply but I considered these factors while watching this movie as a child and they have only grown more illogical as I got older. I should really apologize to my mom for spending money for me to see this in theaters all those years ago.

Mario and Luigi escape but drive off a road still under construction and fall to what should be their end. Luckily for them the fungus covering the city is alive and saves the brothers. They run into the cousins at a dump and capture them, so they agree to help the brothers find Big Bertha who is a bar bouncer. We then come to one of my favorite scenes in the movie at the bar, not because it’s good but because I laughed for the first time since it started. Before that though, princess Daisy is trapped in Koopa’s castle and she meets Yoshi the royal pet, for the first time. Believe it or not, Yoshi is an actual dinosaur in the movie so kudos to the filmmakers for getting that correct.

Pimp juice and Luigi stroll into the club wearing bright, all red and all yellow suits respectively, with low hanging chains. Now I know where Puff Daddy got the idea for the suits he and Mase wore in the Mo’ Money Mo’ Problems music video.

They finally run into Big Bertha and Mario decides to deal with her alone to get the rock back because “no woman can resist the Mario charm”. Initially he gets socked in the face but of course Mario manages to charm Big Bertha with his dance moves. He is able to steal the chain off her during their dance and we’re introduced to a song that came out in 1987 but should never have been created. Ladies and gentlemen, boys and girls, I present to you, Was (Not Was) – Walk The Dinosaur.

While this song is playing, police enter the club to apprehend Mario and Luigi because they are wanted fugitives. They lose the rock to Koopa’s henchwoman, Lena but Big Bertha helps them escape. She teaches them how to use the stomper boots she used earlier after stealing the rock off of Mario. By the way, the cartridges used to power the super jump in the boots are ‘Bullet Bill’s’. Bullet Bill is the bullet with a face in the Mario game, that shoots at Mario and is controlled by Koopa. Of course Mario gets a kiss from Big Bertha before taking off because like I said previously, Mario got that pimp juice oozing through his veins in this movie.

One hour and six minutes into the film the Mario brothers find two suits in a locker and lo and behold, they resemble their suits in the game; somewhat but not exactly. In an elevator on their way up to save Daisy, a group of goombas enter with Mario and Luigi so they must devise a clever way to keep from getting caught. How do they do this? They sway the goombas bodies to the elevator music playing to keep them distracted. I don’t understand the logistics of how a plan such as that would work but it did. Meanwhile, Koopa’s cousins save Daisy who is being watched over by Toad goompa who has a harmonica attached to him…(I can’t stand it, I just can’t stand it).

Koopa’s cousins, that he turned into geniuses with his de-evolution machine, help Daisy escape and introduce her to her father, the true king of Dino land, the FUNGUS KING! No, in all seriousness, he has a human form but I don’t think it matters with the way this movie has gone.

Mario and Luigi stumble upon Daisy in the room her father is in and she tells them where to find Daniella. They reach where Daniella and all the girls Koopa’s cousins have kidnapped trying to find Daisy, are being held. Everyone escapes together on a bed, down a pipe frozen-over with ice. Let’s take count, we have Daniella, four other women, and the Mario bros….all on one mattress, but it was a ‘goomba’ mattress so I guess it would have to be oversized. At least the song playing during their escape through the pipe, while being chased by goombas, was riveting.

The group crash lands out of the pipe and onto the streets of Dinohattan where they run into Daisy and Koopa with his troops. Koopa’s troops are useless because they’re dancing to that same song that was playing in the elevator, so Mario and Koopa battle while Luigi helps the girls escape. Koopa loses the rock during the fight and Lena takes it in order to open the portal….somewhere. I don’t know where this place is because it’s never mentioned prior and it’s not the same area where both Mario’s dropped into the Dino dimension originally. Lena is successful in opening a breach but gets fossilized because only Daisy can contain the power.

Both world’s begin to merge and now Daisy and Luigi work together to remove the rock from the larger rock, Lena has placed it in to open the dimensional gateway. Bowser…I mean Koopa, Mario, and a few goombas are transported to Mario’s dimension because of the breach. Koopa uses his ‘devo’ gun to turn Scapelli into a monkey and attempts to use it on Mario after. Mario uses a mushroom from Dino land to block the guns’ ray and then everyone is brought back after Peach and Luigi remove the rock from the larger rock, but it does not make sense. First of all, Luigi uses a tool on a meteorite rock that would not have been strong enough to get through it but on top of that, we see him using the tool, cut to Mario and Koopa in the real world, then cut back to Luigi using the original small tool plus a longer extension to it that wasn’t mentioned and still, would not have worked! You know what?…..

The good guys save the day, Daisy opts to stay in Dino land to help rebuild and there’s a setup for a sequel that anyone in their right mind knew, was never going to happen. Also there is an end of credits scene that is irrelevant. There you go people; doodoodo da dodo, HERE WE GOOOOO!!!!!!

Super Mario Bros. gets a 0!

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