My short* review of The Super Mario Bros. (1993)

Just seen "The Super Mario Bros." Better than I remembered, and I liked it the first time I saw it. The main takeaway is that watching it feels like tripping on acid, specifically in the mkultra scenario where you've been dosed unwittingly.

The movie blasts you off right from the beginning, as a narrator with an accent that sounds halfway between Russian and New Yorker Italian rambles about a parallel universe where dinosaurs never went extinct, accompanied by a horribly drawn cartoon reminiscent of the infamous CD-i legend of Zelda cutscenes. This is the central conceit of the movie, which kind of makes sense- since the villains of the Mario franchise are "dinosaurs" that would be too hard/expensive to recreate with 90s vfx, they are reimagined as 'spiritually" dinosaurs, evolved into human form. Now, koopas and Bowser etc are obviously turtles in the game, not dinosaurs. But prehistoric turtles are basically dinosaurs so I'll let that inconsistency slide, because the end result of this plot point is Dennis Hopper as Bowser, without any stupid makeup or prosthetics getting in the way.

Which brings me to the first reason this movie rules. The casting and acting is unreal. Im not going to do a point by point on the plot, because this is already too long. But after the bizarre opening (which ends in a mad max looking foid burying Dennis Hopper under rubble in a ny sewer and then screaming at the rubble, I guess sending him back to the dino dimension) the movie takes a hard turn into gritty realism, with Mario and Luigi as highly relatable blue collar laborers just trying to make ends meet in the big city. You see, it's really a movie about family. But too soon, Marios big titty girlfriend and archaeologist/princess Daisy, who Luigi is trying to frick, are kidnapped, and the bros chase them through a portal to the mushroom kingdom. Quick aside, I don't know why it's not Peach. I looked on the Mario wiki and apparently Daisy is princess of the sarsaparilla kingdom in Mario land 2, and if you think this plot is weird, that game was about an alien Invasion. In the intro of the film, Daisy is revealed to have been brought to ny from the dino dimension as an egg by mad max lady. So I guess she's a dino-oid. But her father, the king, is a mushroom humanoid, which makes you think. Hes Played for 2 seconds in human form by lance Hendrickson, more awesome casting although I'm not sure he even has a line so kind of wasted.

Anyway, the brothers are thrown into the mushroom kingdom which is a fricked up blade runner dystopia, Bowser is the mayor and has a machine, and guns, that can devolve people into whatever animal they evolved from (remember in this universe nobody evolved from monkeys, which means every other animal is fair game as an ancestor), and has turned the mushroom king into a massive slime mold which is disgustingly growing everywhere. This naturally takes the movie from relatable blue collar NY to "holy frick im peaking" instantly, during the transition where Mario goes thru the dimensional portal he does the super-star yellow flashing Vfx which is one of very few literal callbacks to the games. You go hey I recognize that, and then you land in dino-york (pretty sure they call it dinohattan) which is a horrific rube goldberg nightmare of shit sparking and catching fire for no reason, glass breaking, people crashing cars and bikes, dino-rats eating garbage,and weird butt fungus everywhere. It's like someone read the part of fear as loathing where Duke trips in the casino and all the patrons turn into lizards, and thought "this is what was really going on in super Mario world, it's just that video game technology wasnt advanced enough to properly tell the story."

I've already spent too much time on the plot which I said I wasn't going to do, but that's the setup, after which it just turns into a goofy slapstick caper movie, with the bros being basically just chased around by Nazi dinofascist stormtroopers with flamethrowers (another game callback, remember bowsers castle?). There's clearly an effort to reproduce the physical feel of the games, if not the aesthetic. The bros slide through pipes, bounce around on springy boots, do a Mariokart by way of stealing a police car and driving it off a cliff, trampoline on fungal outgrowths. Much like the concept of making Bowser and his minions "human, but spiritually dinosaurs" it almost makes sense on paper. But combined with the blade runner aesthetic, and the naturalistic acting, the end result is just incredibly bizarre. It isnt totally alien to the Mario franchise, in fact it's oddly familiar, I hate to go back to the same analogy but it's really like experiencing Mario through the lense of a shamanic datura ceremony.

It's always recognizably 'mario' but something off, for example the go-kart scene, since dinosaurs never went extinct there's no oil, so the karts are electrically powered like trolley cars, and their engines throw off massive showers of sparks and smoke as the brothers go on a massively destructive vehicular rampage, wrecking cop cars and civilians alike in giant fiery explosions. From the outset the characters are extremely well established, beautifully acted, and have Evolving relationships with each other. Hoskins is so good as mario I'm convinced his physical acting has been used as reference for the recent cartoon film. Dennis Hopper manages to embody the role of a T-Rex evolved into human form perfectly and somehow subtly.

But the human element perpetually fades in and out, dissolving into slapstick chases, 3 stooges style violence, and wanton nonsensical destruction. As if to sum up the dichotomy, Bowser at one point pontificates while bathing with his queen who I don't remember from any of the games in a mud bath, "you know my favorite thing about mud? It's clean and dirty at the same time." This sums up my feelings about the movie. Evidently the mud bath was supposed to be filled with live worms. Because dinosaurs.