Thanks to the awesome people who donated to Extra Life, y’all will now be treated to a retrospective on the 1993 classic movie, Super Mario Bros. When I took on this milestone, the first (and only) person I messaged for ideas on terrible (but wonderful) films based on video games was my friend Max, who has a history of viewing and talking about bad movies. He suggested this, and while I was aware of this magnificent piece of cinema history, I had not had the pleasure of viewing it myself. He hooked me up with a copy, and to say this film lived up to my expectations would be an understatement.
I couldn’t help but be charmed by this movie. It is filled with so many questionable creative choices that were fucking ridiculous. Mario and Luigi not being blood related? Sure. Cheesy Italian accents replaced with a New York ones? Yeah, why not? Having all the enemies in Super Mario Bros. be canonically dinosaurs? I mean… It’s a choice informed by the great media dino wave of 1993, but whatever. Yoshi is a dinosaur, if we want to extend that to goombas and Koopa for whatever reason, I’m down. Having these dinosaurs live underneath New York City in a parallel dimension? It’s based on a video game, why the fuck not? Everything is so goddamn bonkers.
The opening credits roll, and we’re told that 65 million years ago, a meteor created said underground parallel universe dinosaur land. We witness a human-looking woman, who is really a dinosaur, leaving an egg baby on a church doorstep. Don’t think about it too hard, the logistics of a human giving birth to an egg that size are just… it’s gross to think about.
We’re then introduced to the titular characters, Mario Mario and Luigi Mario. Yes, their last names are Mario. Making them the Mario brothers. Because this movie is interested in answering the important questions. Mario is the owner of a failing plumbing business, while Luigi is a conspiracy theorist who would have really enjoyed modern-day YouTube.
While they’re out trying to find work, they run into Miss Amy March herself, Samantha Mathis, who plays our Daisy. She is somehow an archeologist in charge of digging up dinosaur bones from a New York City construction site. Daisy’s being forced off the property by the mob, who apparently are annoyed that a blonde lady in cargo shorts is coming between them and whatever the fuck they’re building.
They try and intimidate her, she storms off to use a payphone to call for security, and is almost picked up by two inconspicuous bozos in a cab who apparently are stealing Brooklyn women off the street for no reason. Their plan is quickly thwarted by a random moving pane of glass.
Instead, Daisy runs right into Luigi, who forgets how to human once he sees her pretty face. He asks her on a date, where she reveals even more exposition. She believes the meteor that destroyed the dinosaurs landed in New York City. Oh, and also, she’s the abandoned egg baby. Luigi is also an orphan, and this shared trauma apparently gets them both hot and bothered. They wander off to the dig site, because an underground pit attached to a sewer is so romantic, and it is also where Daisy feels the most comfortable.
What if we made out by the bone pit?
Their touching moment is cut short when the mob sabotages the plumbing in the sewer and water starts flooding the area. They run to get Mario to fix the pipes because he is a plumber, which is so fucking clutch, I love it so much.
While the Mario brothers are distracted, Daisy is captured by the weirdo twins and dragged into the alternate dinosaur universe. Mario and Luigi follow, and we’re treated to the most fucking amazing transition scene of Bob Hoskins spinning wildly through colorful rocks.
dlkljlkjlkjljurns out, parallel dinosaur world, or Dinohattan, is fucking lit as hell. I am convinced that Futurama based their sewer city on this movie.
King Koopa, a dinosaur with badly bleached hair gelled back in an effort to look like Michael Douglas in Wall Street, has taken over Dinohattan. He is the one who asked the goons to kidnap Daisy because of the tacky crystal necklace she wears. Apparently, it is a piece of the meteorite that crashed into earth, and once he puts the piece back into the original space rock, the dinosaur world will merge with the mammal world after 65 million years of his people being sequestered underground, and Koopa will have endless resources at his disposal. Also, Daisy is a princess and her dad is a giant fungus taking over the city, so that’s totally normal and not at all weird.
Problem is, the two idiots he sent to grab her didn’t think to check if she was wearing the necklace. Turns out, Luigi has the necklace, or had the necklace, as the brothers are quickly mugged by a granny, who is then robbed by a lady with a bright red spiky latex coat and springy robot feet. The brothers are arrested by the dinocops and are grilled by Koopa for the whereabouts of the rock. When they play dumb he uh… reacts in a proportionate way.
I am not even going to attempt to explain the devo process… It is a combination of insane and fucking disgusting. Whoever in the costuming department looked at the cute fucking mushroom Goombas in the video game and decided to translate them into this scaly, jagged-teethed nightmare fuel deserved to be committed.
Also, there’s only one lizard king, and that’s Jim Morrison, so back off, buddy.
What is hilarious to me is this is the story the screenwriters came up with. Super Mario, as a video game, doesn’t have much lore, right? You slide down pipes, you jump on mushrooms, and you save the princess from a spiky turtle. They took that game and created… This. A parallel underground dinosaur universe that has a sentient fungus as a king, taken over by a human-like t-rex that devolves other lizards into tiny-headed night paralysis demons.
The middle of this movie alternates between a slog of expositional scenes about Daisy being a princess, and pretty entertaining action scenes of the Mario brothers running from Goombas while trying to find and save Daisy. Mario and Luigi steal a cop car and drive it off a cliff Thelma and Louise-style; They cosplay as Ketchup and Mustard to steal the necklace back from Big Burtha while asking her to stomp on them; They jump off a bridge into a garbage truck; They break the pipes in Koopa’s building to freeze everything, and get past an elevator full of Goombas by making them dance.
Watching Daisy damsel-in-distress-it in Koopa’s high rise office building and fend off advances by a long-tongued dude who devolved her father into a mushroom was pretty boring and disturbing. Alternatively, witnessing Bob Hoskins and John Leguizamo pretend to jump on giant sheets of fungus really sold this movie for me. It succeeds when it tries to be ridiculous and fun, and fall flat when it attempts to integrate any sort of drama that I’m assuming was added to make this story more appealing to adults.
Mario and Luigi eventually find Daisy, and she introduces them to her father – a giant dripping blob suspended from the ceiling. Luigi wants in her pants badly enough that he pretends this is a reasonable thing to do. Mario heads further into the building to free the other ladies kidnapped by tweedle dee and tweedle dum that were initially mistaken for Daisy. The newly assembled group are able to escape by sliding down the frozen pipes on a mattress before they are green-screen launched out of the pipe and back into the greater Dinohattan area.
The amount of times Mario and Luigi use their plumbing skills to overcome obstacles may be my favorite part of this movie. The plot goes out of its way to justify a really bizarre character trait for the original game.
Anyway, the end of this movie comes at you fast. First, the sentient fungus king gives Mario and Luigi a bomb, and they decide to wind it up and aim it at Koopa. This takes about 10 minutes of screen time to matter again.
Koopa’s second-in-command tries to merge Daisy’s stolen necklace with the meteor, and instead gets skeletoned to bits, prompting the best line delivery reaction from Daisy, a deadpan “Yikes”.
Because the necklace has now been returned to its resting place, the worlds start to merge Infinity War style.
“Mr. Koopa, I don’t feel so good.”
Koopa and Mario end up back in Manhattan, and Koopa just starts shooting his devo guns at human mobsters, turning them back into primates, and giving their wardrobe a whole new literal definition of monkey suit.
Luigi uses his super plumbing powers to drill the necklace back out of the meteor, separating the worlds again. The bomb finally goes off, they devo Koopa into slime, and the citizens celebrate by immediately painting over his ever-prevalent propaganda.
The king evolves back into a mushroom person or something, and Daisy stays in Dinohattan to get to know her father better. Mario and Luigi return to their lives in Brooklyn as plumbers, and their heroic acts make them conspiracy community famous, as they now refer to our heroes as the Super Mario Brothers. Roll Credits.
Except not, because Daisy returns to ask for the help of a couple of great plumbers, setting up a sequel that will never, ever happen because there is no god and we’re not allowed to feel joy.
Honestly, Super Mario Bros. is great. It owned every bold plot and visual choice it made, and I have to respect it. I could listen to John Leguizamo say Mario like 700 more times. Y’all are missing out if you think you’re too cool to watch this movie.