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I know I haven't done a Big Awful Friday in a while, but I had a realization. That realization was I can't track down my favorite terrible movies without dropping $20-100 a pop.
More importantly, you can't plan to see a truly bad movie. Like flunking out of school, truly bad movies just happen, which is why I was delighted the other day to find my friend had bought one of the many things that murdered my childhood, 1993's Super Mario Bros.
Bob Hoskins (as Mario) and John Leguizamo (as Luigi) are behind on the rent, but that's small potatoes after they're hauled into a parallel dimension where dinosaurs survived to become sentient. These dino-men are ruled by Dennis Hopper (as Koopa), who wants nothing more than to merge his dimension with ours and rule us uppity mammals like a king.
Super Mario Bros. should have been a raging, box office-destroying success. It had a built-in audience of every man and woman of my generation, a Mario-frenzied demographic that would marry Yoshi if only the Supreme Court weren't a bunch of sissies.
So what happened? How do you blow that franchise love into a million fragments, feed it to the tumorous family dog, and then take that dog behind the barn and shoot it? By making the movie adaptation have absolutely nothing to do with the video game.
It's true the Mario games didn't have much of a back story at that point. Still, that's no excuse for an insane redux where the meteor that killed the dinosaurs actually pushed them into another world where they evolved not into talking lizards, but into humans except with goofy haircuts and also rocket-boots.
Then again, there probably wasn't much budget left for creature design after blowing it all on a spectacularly ugly set. For reasons that surely rhyme with "mocaine," designers from the late '80s/early '90s thought it was the height of cool to make genre movies look like they were filmed inside a garbage bag. Trust me, it's not as pleasant inside one of those as you'd think.
Super Mario Bros. could have salvaged some fan cred with the smallest of touches, like, say, using the fireball sound effects from the game when somebody's shooting fireballs, but why not come up with some wacky new nonsense instead?
That's pretty much the guiding philosophy of the movie's three writers and four directors. There's something admirable in taking an established classic in a bold new direction, but that takes vision, not weak dialogue, horrendous exposition, and an ugly-ugly world. The video game franchise went on. Despite a "Hey, who wants a sequel!" ending, Super Mario Bros. didn't.
