SUPER MARIO BROS
US, 1993, 14 minutes, Colour.
Bob Hoskins, John Leguizamo, Samantha Mathis, Dennis Hopper, Fisher Stevens, Richard Edson, Fiona Shaw, Dana Kaminski, Lance Henrikson.
Directed by Annabel Jankel, Rocky Morton.
This is one of the earliest films based on computer games, released in the early 1990s. Soon it became something of a trend – especially with the popularity of such films as the Men in Black series.
There is an animated opening about dinosaurs and their disappearance from the world, then a look at Brooklyn in the 1970s, a woman leaving a waif at a convent door, the sisters finding an egg, bursting and a child within. Into the 1990s, a focus, somewhat comic, on two plumbers, Mario, Bob Hoskins, and his adoptive brother Luigi, John Leguizamo. They are not particularly successful at getting jobs. They are cut off by a powerful businessman who is controlling excavations for finding dinosaurs under Brooklyn. And the person in charge is Daisy, Samantha Mathis, who turns out to be the young child left at the doorstep, therefore a princess from another world.
When Daisy is kidnapped as well as Mario’s girlfriend, the two plumbers take the leap into the alternate universe. Audiences were familiar with this kind alternative universe (even from Blade Runner a decade earlier). It parallels Brooklyn but it is quite different, with bizarre touches and is ruled over by a variation on an American power hungry businessmen, played by Dennis Hopper. And there are two oddball henchmen, continually getting things wrong, played by Fisher Stevens and Richard Edson. It is interesting to see Fiona Shaw, given her subsequent career on stage and screen and television, Killing Eve, as the rival to Dennis Hopper.
Which means then that all kinds of adventures, mishaps, the two henchmen ruining things at times, the search for a piece of powerful stone worn by Daisy then lost, Hopper and his bringing a kind of Wall Street greed to end to an alternate universe.
Special effects, all kinds of transformations, dangers, cliffhangers… And, course, a happy ending.
Super Mario Bros was not particularly well received at the time – but, in looking at the IMDb, one sees that there is some kind of rehabilitation of its popularity.
