Mr. Q said:
I will give you partial points for this review, Jim. If you're able to ignore the total desecration of the Super Mario Bros cannon and get yourself into the right chemically enhanced state of mind, you could enjoy this one.
Having said that, Super Mario Bros truly deserves a much better movie adaptation than what it got in the 90s. With movies like The Avengers and The Lego Movie, there is no fucking excuse for inferior film making in terms of popular properties. There are talented and dedicated people who would give vital parts of their anatomy to make a faithful version of Super Mario Bros a reality. We're tired of the soulless cash grabs being made by people who are just there for a paycheck. That is a practice that needs to die like yesterday.
Well, to be honest I think that's one of Jim's problems with Movie Defense Force in general, when you look back at things like say "Alien 3" and other films he's defended he seems to entirely overlook the decimation of the canon and source material, or how superior versions of something were out there and had been ignored or rendered non-canon by the creation of the movie. For example with "Alien" in particular "Dark Horse" comics did a genius job of keeping the franchise alive and rounding things out after the second movie. "Alien 3" blew chips largely because anyone who was a big time Alien fan (it's core audience) was already following the comics and such, and while nobody expected them to follow the comics exactly, releasing a vastly inferior product like that, which furthermore "officially" killed off two beloved characters (Hicks and Newt, who were heavily used in the comics). It seems that in response to a LOT of his reviews I wind up bringing up the reasons why the movie was bad and deserved the beating it's gotten when it's a matter of what they did with the franchise/IP itself rather than the movie.
To elaborate on my last rambling post which I got sidetracked on, in the 1990s you had a lot of experimental "direct to video" movies being put out. You had things like "Full Moon Entertainment" and "Troma" thriving pretty well in this environment. Cheezy FX, bad acting, over the top concepts and scripts, and yet wildly entertaining, some properties born of the 90s "Direct To Video" movement (which seemed to lose it's soul when censors started paying more attention and things went "Direct To Digital) still have pretty solid followings today. The thing is that when you compare something like "Mario Brothers" to say a Full Moon property like "Puppet Master" (or even weirder things) "Mario Brothers" doesn't actually wind up *looking* all that bad. On the other hand it winds up getting universally panned while something like "Puppet Master" goes on to spawn something like 8 movies, comic series, fringe toy/figure lines, and everything else, largely because "Puppet Master" was doing it's own thing as opposed to trying to be an existing franchise (like the Mario movies) and what's more the people doing those movies new exactly what they were setting out to do, personally I think the guys doing "Mario Brothers" really wanted to be doing more "Max Headroom". Not to mention that they blew like 40 million on the FX for Mario Brothers and to be honest some of it looks every bit as horrible as something churned out by "Full Moon" or "Troma" except without it being part of the intentional charm. Something like most of the Puppet Master movies are "entertaining horrible movies" where I think Mario Brothers is just plain out terrible, lacking even the self-aware quality that can make you go "how did anyone get away with filming this professionally to begin with, never mind make 8 bloody movies out of this... and yet here I am still watching these horribly animated puppets stumble around in increasingly dumber plots with a goofy grin on my face... they obviously got my money and I can't even say why I'm not regretting it...".