Taking a look at the 1993 terrible movie featuring the famous plumber duo in our bad movie collumn.
By Max Brown and Luke Gentle
Staff Writers
Starring: Bob Hoskins, John Leguizamo and Dennis Hopper
Directors: Rocky Morton and Annabel Jankel
Ten years before Uwe Boll’s House of the Dead, Super Mario Bros was pioneering the genre of crappy movies based on video games. It’s confusing, strange, and somewhat discomforting when you think about the plot. While the video game is beloved and wholesome, the movie is a bizarre mishmash of Mad Max, Total Recall, and the Garfield Movie. Although it’s understandable that the directors would need to take some creative liberty when working with a game that involves a semi-mute plumber fighting sentient mushrooms, this movie wouldn’t even be recognizable as a Mario adaptation without the title. Something about the movie does, however, make it oddly fun if you just turn off your brain.
The movie follows Mario (Bob Hoskins) and Luigi (John Leguizamo), two completely regular plumbers living in real world Manhattan. One day, while plumbing, the two plumbers meet Daisy (Samantha Mathis), an archaeologist digging for the bones of strange dinosaurs under the city.
Luigi falls in love with Daisy and immediately asks her out in a very uncomfortable, creepy way. Daisy said yes because the script told her to. A man that looks like John Travolta cosplaying as David Bowie and a guy who looks like the costume department ran out of clothes and had to go to the local thrift store are given orders to kidnap Daisy. The two kidnappers accidentally kidnap Mario’s girlfriend, Daniella, when she is mistaken for Daisy. They then successfully kidnap Daisy and take them in an alternate dimension. This dimension was created when the asteroid that killed the dinosaurs crashed into the Earth: one dimension where Reptiles became the dominant species, called the Mushroom Kingdom and the real world where mammals became the dominant species. Daisy is also a reptile who was hatched from an egg at the beginning of the movie. She also has a shard of the meteoroid that split the dimensions and President Koopa (Dennis Hopper) wants this shard to recombine the two dimensions so he can rule the world. All this in a movie based on a video game where a small pixelated fat plumber stomps on turtles.
One slightly eerie thing about this movie is that it seems to predict Donald Trump’s rise through the character of President Koopa. Appearance wise, they are quite similar (doughy face, badly-styled blonde hair, beady eyes), and President Koopa rules from a large tower in the heart of Koopa New York, much like the Trump tower. His violent rants about the superiority of reptilian-descended humanoids vs mammal-descended humanoids are disturbingly close to Trump’s speeches about Mexicans and Muslims. He is also running for re-election as president of the alternate dimension. Near the end of the movie, Mario uses a de-evolution ray to transform Koopa into his original form: a puddle of primordial sludge. Draw your own conclusions. Perhaps Super Mario Bros was cutting-edge political satire too ahead of its time for us to understand. Or, maybe it’s just a crappy movie whose cartoonish, over the top villain acts like our cartoonish, over the top president. Yeah, that’s more like it.
Due to its confusing plot, terrible dialogue, lacklustre characterization, awful scenery, but an oddly prolific theme, this movie gets 2.5 bad haircuts out of 10
