Super Mario Bros. (1993)

Super Mario Bros. never had a kindly reception. Actually, it had a terrible reception, and to this day Nintendo fanboys still bash it on the claims that it's nothing like the games it is based on. Yes, well, I ask them this: How could you make a straightforward version of the Mario games in the first place? It's just Mario jumping on a bunch of turtles and occasionally shooting a fireball. Now, this movie is far from perfect--very far, that is--but it's not supposed to be. It's an entertaining and sometimes creative adventure comedy.

Mario Mario (Bob Hoskins, riding on his Roger Rabbit coattails) and Luigi Mario (John Leguizamo) are two colorful Brooklyn plumber brothers who must save a college paleontologist named Daisy (Samantha Manthis) who Luigi befriended when she's kidnapped. They follow the abductors into an underground cave and through the rabbit hole to a parelell universe where some of the dinosaurs escaped from extinction and continued to evolve into humans in a Blade Runner-esque city. But it turns out that Daisy has more connections to this world then she thinks, and the tyrannic King Koopa (Dennis Hopper) wants the chip of a meteor rock she wears as a necklace because it has the power to merge the human and dinosaur worlds together in order to acheive total domination and...this is all pretty much just the first twenty minutes.

Yes, large chunks of this movie make no sense. Dinosaurs evolving into humans? Are you kidding me? And it's never really explained what all "merging" the two worlds together means. Koopa says that his world is dry and practically out of resources (Preachy Symbolism!!), so what exactly would ccombining it with Earth do? Anyways, that's not important. Just like the Washington Post says in those big orange letters that look even bigger than the title, this movie is a blast. But could it have been more faithful to the games? Probably. For example, King Koopa doesn't look like a huge dragon/turtle, he's more like just Dennis Hopper in some Max Headroom makeup. Oh, and he de-evolves people to become his slimy henchmen called Goombas. Everyone says that the Goombas are funny, but I don't kno, man--they kind of creep me out. And weren't the Goombas in the game just brown and yellow mushrooms?

But Mario and Luigi, despite having a rather awkward 30 year age gap for brothers, are a great comedy duo in all the weird as heck situations they go through. They also have some great one-liners (Mario: (looks at tower coated in fungus) "Great, a building with athlete's foot."). This credit all pretty much goes to Bob Hoskins, who just might be the life and soul of the movie. And speaking of comic duos, there's also Spike and Iggy, who are sort of like the Abbott and Costello of evil henchmen. They're sent by Koopa into the human world to get Daisy and her rock. But that brings up a huge plothole: why kidnap her in the first place if all you need is the space rock? Sure, it adds drama, but "Missing Brooklyn Necklace" is much less suspicious than "Missing Brooklyn Girl". And if you take her, you just might be followed by two squabbling plumbers who will overthrow your whole fascist civilization in just a few days...life is funny that way.

The early 1990s special effects range from good to loathsome, the script has as many holes as Mario's prostate, and several scenes just have the characters walking around with no direction whatsoever, but that's not important. Super Mario Bros. is possibly the ultimate guilty pleasure movie. It's got cool action. It's got wonderfully cheesy humor. And it's got a score by Alan Silvestri that you can never, ever get out of your head. OK, so it's not The Grapes of Wrath. But I definitely would call it underrated. Bring on the Nintendo fanboys' hatemail.