They're absolutely right. This seems far more like a bowel obstruction than a game.

Donkey: There is no shortage of things from my childhood that were blatant examples of rampant merchandizing, and I never really had a problem with that. After all, as I have previously mentioned, I grew up loving Transformers and Star Wars. The former being little more than a twenty minute advertisement for toys, so much so that I actually got just as excited seeing a Transformers commercial as I did watching an episode of the cartoon, and the latter quite possibly being the king of merchandising. Hell, I remember the days of getting out of my Return Of The Jedi bed sheets just to eat my C3P0’s cereal before brushing my teeth with my Chewbacca toothbrush. However, there’s one other company from my past that not only rivals George Lucas when it comes to whoring out their intellectual property, but was also the first company to burn me with its indiscriminate cash grabs, and that’s Nintendo. Super Mario Bros was one of the most beloved games from my and damn near everyone’s childhood, and Mario has truly become a cultural icon. When the first Nintendo-based movie, The Wizard, hit the theaters in 1989, I happily sat through it because even though it was little more than a ninety minute commercial for Super Mario Bros 3, it at least had the thin veneer of a semi-coherent plot. I even watched Captain N: The Game Master on television every Saturday morning, forgiving it of the fact that all of its characters resembled their video game counterparts about as closely as a they did the defensive line of the 1974 Chicago Bears. But in 1993, Nintendo released something that not even the baby Jesus could forgive: the live action version of Super Mario Bros. And this is how you make even the most forgiving of nerds cry…

The Plot:

Donkey: Before watching Super Mario Bros, it’s helpful to stop and reflect on the video game on which it was based. A game that involved a plumber, and to a lesser extent his brother, running or swimming across a series of locales while stomping on mushrooms and turtles, repeatedly attempting to save a princess from a dragon whose deadly arsenal including breathing tiny balls of fire and jumping. That’s it. Now compare that to what you’re faced with: a pair of washed up Italian plumbers meet a secret princess from an alternate dimension inhabited by dinosaurs whose leader, King Koopa, plots to merge the two dimensions and enslave the Earth using technology that’s as laughably ridiculous as it is nonthreatening. If you’re wondering how those two are even remotely connected, the answer is Nintendo giving you a giant middle finger. Suck on that.

The Case for Greatness (aka The Lowlights):

Donkey: To lube us all up for the clusterfuck that we’re about to grope our way through, the original music from Super Mario Bros chimes in while showing the production company logos, which is probably as close to the game as you’re going to get. But you can almost hear them begging: Remember that game? It was a good game, right? A true classic? Try to remember that for the next hour and a half while we take a piping hot piss in your mouth.

Apparently the special effects deparment of this movie was forced to use Mario Paint.

With that initial soothing throwback out of the way, the movie wastes no time in disregarding every other impression of Super Mario Bros you’ve ever had and replacing it with something that a backwater hillbilly who was sired by an irregular can of Spam would call retarded. It jumps right into a prologue that looks astoundingly bad, bad enough that it could have been made out of rejected programming code snippets from Keith Courage in Alpha Zones for the TurboGrafx 16, which theorizes that when a meteor struck the Earth 65 million years ago, it didn’t actually trigger the extinction of the dinosaurs but instead opened a portal to a different dimension where dinosaurs were banished and continued to evolve. Wow. An inter-dimensional portal was created simply from a large impact? What a great theory. I guess the moral of the story here, kids, is that if you’re ever on trial for hitting someone in the head with a hammer, you should just argue that you weren’t killing that person so much as just opening a mystical portal to another dimension inside their brain, allowing their consciousness to be sucked into it. But once that iron-clad hypothesis is stated, the story’s setup takes us back to Brooklyn, 20 years in the past, where a woman drops an egg off at a convent before fleeing back down into a sewer, presumably to deliver pizza to four men in green rubber outfits and a muppet rat. And her timing is spectacular as within of few minutes of the nuns pulling the bundle inside, the egg hatches to reveal a baby girl. But just as you ask yourself how anyone could bring themselves to abandon their fucked up lizard baby abomination, our answer comes when the woman is grabbed by Dennis Hopper, playing the evil Koopa, as she makes her way through the dark sewer. That’s right; the dragon that kidnapped Peach and had you drop its ass into lava repeatedly is being played by Dennis Hopper.

World 1-1: Less Jumping And Coin Blocks, More Crushing Consumer Debt And Corporate Sabotage.

With that bit of exposition done, we arrive in modern day Brooklyn where we are introduced to the stars of the picture, Mario and Luigi, played by Bob Hoskins of Who Framed Roger Rabbit and Unleashed fame, and the irrepressible John Leguizamo, or Johnny Legs. Much like the game, they are a pair of struggling Italian plumbers. Only instead of struggling to make it through an onslaught of Bullet Bills while jumping across tiny platforms, they’re struggling with creditors, constantly losing jobs to the ruthless Scapelli Company, what I guess is a large corporation of plumbers. While bumbling their way through a day and just generally being Italian, they meet a college student named Daisy, who instantly gives Luigi tingly feelings in his trousers that he’s never had before. She takes them up on their offer to give her a ride, disclosing to them that she’s the head of an archeological dig that’s being done on a construction site, which the evil Scapelli Company is trying to intimidate into leaving early so that it can get on with its development. Of course, she doesn’t realize that a far bigger threat is lurking in the shadows, as she’s being watched by two of Koopa’s men. But since none of this is as interesting as burying his little bread stick and two meatballs into her pasta boat, Luigi isn’t nearly as concerned with that as asking her to dinner that night. Finding his greasy awkwardness charming, she accepts.

Say lady, do you want to join me and my creepy molester uncle for dinner?

I'm doing some research into whether the meteor killed the dinosaurs as fast as this movie is going to kill my career.

We flash forward to later that night to see that Luigi and Daisy decide that the best way to get to know one another is to go on a double date with Mario and a call girl. Over the course of dinner, which is Italian of course, Daisy reveals that the purpose of the archeological dig at that particular site is to find the meteor that killed the dinosaurs. Since a concept like that is clearly about 52 IQ points out of Luigi’s league, they instead bond over the fact that they were both abandoned as children, her being an orphan and him having only Mario to raise him. But as their dinner comes to an end and Mario realizes that buying shitty pasta for a pro isn’t going to get him a back alley handjob, he leaves Luigi to walk Daisy home as he runs his call girl back to the brothel. As Daisy offers to show Luigi around her worksite, so to speak, Mario drops off his trick only for her to be promptly nabbed by Koopa’s goons, whom mistake her for Daisy.

Once the awkward virgins arrive at the dig site, which much to Luigi’s disappointment is not in her panties, they wander down into a tunnel where she shows him a dinosaur skeleton that’s formed perfectly in the ground, pointing out its opposable thumb and speculating that it’s like they were monsters trying to be human beings. But just as she’s delivering her doctorate level thesis, two of Scapelli’s evil plumbers burst out of a side room, running like hell as a sabotaged water pipe erupts. In a clear show of competence that proves why Mario was always the star of the games, Luigi runs back to find his brother at home and cries for help rather than attempting to fix anything himself. But once they get back to the site, Koopa’s goons finally realize that they have mistakenly grabbed yet another innocent girl and finally return to nab Daisy after clubbing the Italian duo over the head.

Save me, Luigi! And for the love of God, bring moisturizer!

Not ready to give up on the one woman who might have been willing to scrape the cheese off his tortellini, Luigi and his brother run after them, only to find themselves faced with a narrow but exceptionally deep cavern and an image of Daisy yelling for help at them through a wall and some bad special effects. As Luigi reaches forward to help the sandy image of her face, he grabs an amulet from around her neck, which she had previously mentioned that she has worn since birth. Once she disappears back into the rock, Luigi sees his chance for glory and jumps into the wall himself, disappearing into it, and leaving Mario to eventually follow after some silent film era comedic apprehension. At this point I was quietly hoping that they had found the secret entrance to World -1, where they would find themselves doomed to swim through the same area over and over until you just want to kill yourself. And in a way, that’s not far from the truth.

World 1-2: Down The Warp Pipe Of Abject Failure

A sneak preview of Super Mario Bros XXI: Mario Goes To Hell For Touching Children

After a considerably asstastic warp scene that could have only been improved if they had passed Alex Winter, Keanu Reeves, and a phone booth, the brothers find themselves in another cave where they again hear Daisy being hauled off by the goons. But when they run after her, they emerge from the tunnels and find themselves in a crowded city that is clearly not New York. After a lot of frustrating and pointless yelling, Daisy is finally taken away in a cab, leaving the brothers stop and notice that they are surrounded by lizard people. Cheer up, boys. Maybe you just warped to Miami.

Now that our fish-out-of-water-and-into-perpetual-stupidity tale has been set up, the movie returns to King Koopa himself, Dennis Hopper, as he bleats on to a female companion named Lena about how horrible the world that they have been exiled to since the great meteor strike is while complaining that the humans have it too good. He laments that once he gets his hands on Daisy and the rock fragment hanging around her neck, which is a small missing fragment from the original meteor needed to “activate” the meteor again, he’ll finally be able to merge the two worlds together and rule for all time. Just as he finishes his oratory masturbation and searches for a mental tube sock to clean it up with, his two thugs arrive, reporting that they’ve brought back Daisy only to then realize that they lost the rock. When they report that it’s in the possession of “the plumbers”, like that should mean a goddamn thing in an entirely different dimension, Koopa puts out a public bulletin declaring that he needs all plumbers.

Despite seeming gloriously moronic, this is actually brilliant casting. I find Dennis Hopper far more disturbing than a dragon.

Back in the streets, Mario and Luigi do a fine job of returning to form, swiftly losing the valuable stone in their possession when it is first stolen by an old lady mugger only to then be confiscated by a big chick in absurd red suit who takes off in ridiculous rocket boots. And their luck doesn’t improve as moments later the cops show up to arrest a busker named Toad for singing an anti-Koopa song on a street corner, only to notice that Mario is a plumber and arrest the two brothers as well. As they’re processed back at police headquarters, the single moment of shining glory that breaks through the monotony comes when they state their names for the record: Mario Mario and Luigi Mario. You read that correctly. According to this movie, one of the most beloved mascots of all time, has the moniker of Mario Mario. But after a brief stay in an overcrowded jail where Toad conveniently explains that they are in an “alternate dimension”, Mario and Luigi are taken to an interrogation room where they find Koopa waiting for them.

If you thought this was a bizarre way to see one of America's most beloved mascots, just wait for the "tossing the salad" scene.

Goombas: in the game, they're turtles, but in the movie, they're an insult to even the intelligence of a four year old.

Posing as a lawyer, Koopa demands to know where the meteorite piece is only to be met by faces every bit as stupid as you would imagine. Tired of his own ruse after keeping it up for a massive 37 seconds, Koopa then reveals his true identity and sentences them to be taken to the de-evolution chamber. The sentence is to be carried out immediately, but as they trot into the facility, they discover that their fellow criminal, Toad, is already there. As a convenient way of showing how the device works without actually using it on either of them first, the brothers watch as Toad is de-evolved, a process which essentially expands his overall body size while simultaneously shrinking his head and reverting it to reptilian a form, thus making him a ‘goomba’. But rather than face their fate, the brothers take advantage of an apparent severe lack of security and rather easily trap King Koopa in his own machine, sending him in to be de-evolved himself while they escape. While basic logic may dictate otherwise, the movie decides at that point that turning its principal villain into a Pez dispenser in a jacket might kill the infinitely small amount of tension in the story, so when the de-evolution process complete, Koopa simply has slightly more reptilian eyes. Maybe the brothers accidentally turned the machine to its “annoying Goth kid contact lens” mode. Running free and virtually without opposition, the brothers manage to escape on a zip line that runs the length of the prison ceiling before hijacking a police car and embarking on a coma-inducing car chase scene that we have seen far too many times by this point. Once they lose the massive fleet of two cop cars chasing them, Mario and Luigi dart down a tunnel where they end up spit out into a desert. And just in case driving out a tunnel that ends in a sudden drop off down a mountain wasn’t enough of a kick to the balls, the car ends up being gently caught by a cluster of fungus before hitting the ground.

Back at the palace, Koopa’s goons interrupt his mud bath to report their continued failure. Well, I think that’s supposed to be a mud bath. Either that or he took one hell of a shit in that tub. Hearing that the brothers have managed to escape into the desert, Koopa takes his two thugs for yet another visit to the evolution machine, choosing to evolve them instead of de-evolving them, which basically just makes them smart. There’s no physical transformation that goes along with the change though. The two thugs just talk like they’re auditioning for an episode of Frasier. Of course this begs the question of why he waited all this time to perform that procedure on these dunces, but this movie manages to dodge the bullet since nobody gives enough of a shit to bother asking.

Lady, you've got to get me outta here. You have no idea where Koopa makes me lick peanut butter from.

The assault of wackiness stops for a moment at this point, instead turning to creepy affairs of the boner variety. After Lena helps Daisy freshen up for a meeting with Koopa, revealing for no particular reason that it was Daisy’s mother who sacrificed her own life to hide her on Earth at the beginning of the movie, Daisy awaits her royal visit in a chamber where a little dinosaur named Yoshi, the pet of the royal family and a character that servers absolutely no purpose in this movie other than to remind you of the game series that this movie otherwise ignores, appears with Koopa following soon after. He rambles briefly about how the planet consists of the one city and endless desert, before trying to seduce her. When she puts up mild resistance to his ham-fisted advances, Koopa applies as much conviction to finishing that task as he has every other one up to this point, backing off and ordering goombas to take her away.

World 1-3: Wait…What The Fuck Is Going On?

You wouldn't hurt the delightfully stereotypical East Indian guy from Short Circuit, would you?

As the movie shifts focus back to the desert, the new and improved goon geniuses manage to fuck up their apprehension of the brothers once again, leaving themselves stuck in mud in the process. And once restrained by Mario and Luigi, they make the completely unmotivated and unexplained decision of switching allegiance. They explain Koopa’s plan to invade the Earth in its entirety before agreeing to exchange the meteorite fragment for Daisy. When the plumbers explain the fucktarded rocket boot circumstances of losing the stone, the two goons immediately identify the woman who took it as Big Bertha, the bouncer of a nightclub. With their powers of brilliant uselessness and inexplicably fortunate idiocy combined, the four of them manage to steal a nearby garbage truck before dressing the brothers up like two like two pastel colored poster children for roofie awareness and heading to the Big Bertha’s bar. But just as they walk inside and see all the bar’s patrons doing a god awful dinosaur dance that makes the Macarena looking as elegant as the Waltz, the coat check girl recognizes the plumbing duo from nearby wanted posters and calls them in. Once they spot Bertha, whom apparently only owns one outfit which I’m imagining smells like a combination of barbeque sauce and loneliness, Mario tries applying his famed Super Greaseball Charms to her only to get the punch in the face he sorely deserves. Taking a new approach, he goes back just to ask to be hit again, and somehow ends up dancing with her to a slow song clearly from the early 90′s. Apparently Color Me Badd is from another dimension, but then that would explain a lot. As they dance, he steals the necklace back from around her neck and sneaks away, leaving her to wonder why the hell anyone would ever trust an Italian. As our heroes try to make a hasty exit from the club, I damn near have a seizure as the club’s DJ starts spinning Walk The Dinosaur, the greatest song to blow its load into human ears since Spin Doctor’s Cleopatra’s Cat, and Lena arrives with a squad of goombas and manages to steal the rock from Mario. In a completely unexplainable change of character, which is beginning to become a staple of this shitty film, Bertha decides to help the brothers escape, giving them a pair of her rocket boots before laying a smooch on Mario that I’m fairly sure just gave her pepperoni flavored herpes. Armed with equipment as shitheaded as they are, Mario and Luigi jump through the roof of the club and land on the street before jumping again into the back of a passing garbage truck to avoid arrest.

Trust me, lady, unless you have a mushroom power-up handy, he'll bring you nothing but disappointment.

Just to spit Tabasco sauce in our eyes after punching us in the sack, the movie shifts our attention back to Koopa, who visits Daisy’s father to gloat over his self-assumed victory. It turns out that her father is the King of the Mushroom Kingdom, and in this case quite literally as he is the fungus that’s swept out all over the city. I’ll say that again. Daisy’s father is fucking fungus, somehow getting that way after he was put into Koopa’s de-evolution machine. If you’d like to know how a goddamn fungus could be sentient, don’t bother asking because any answer would undoubtedly make you mad enough to punch the nearest baby in the face. After that brief and pointless visit, Koopa then orders pizza. Yes, pizza. But not just any pizza; this is pizza with all kinds of crazy shit on it that a lizard would want, which I guess is supposed to be funny, but just makes me question how they honestly expected anyone to watch this.

I could not have guessed that this was the Mushroom King even if I were actually on mushrooms at the time.

Bro, we look like crippled riders of the slow bus. High five!

Prepared for the final conflict, Mario and Luigi arrive at Koopa’s high rise. As they break in and begin to make their ascent, they open a series of pipes to shut down the building’s heating system. They don’t actually sneak up the heating pipes, though, so I’m not really sure what goddamn purpose that served other than saving King Koopa on some utility costs. As they journey through the building from that point, they find and change into outfits which are supposed to match their outfits from the game, although at this point I’m not really sure why they bother. In case no one involved in the costume department of this production noticed, plumbers and other tradesmen wear overalls all the damn time, and it wouldn’t have been much of a stretch to have these two assholes in red and green overalls from the beginning of the movie. Finally having them kind of look like their video game inspirations at this point adds less to the movie’s credibility than a cameo by Steve Urkle. To get up the building as quickly as possible, the brothers naturally take an elevator, realizing moments later that even a dying fern would have the common sense to be more discreet as a squad of goombas piles after them. As the elevator climbs, either traveling six hundred stories or set to elderly motorist speed because they’re in it for far too long, Luigi gets a random idea and begins to rock the goombas standing in front of him from side to side, forcing him to sway to the elevator’s musak. Once all the goombas in front of them are doing likewise, the bothers escape out the elevator’s top hatch, leaving the squad to dance with one another. As they flee the scene, Mario asks why the hell Luigi did that. His brother’s response is simply, ” because everyone loves to dance”, leaving me both speechless and wondering what the statute of limitations is for charging a movie company with raping my will to live.

While the brothers continue to approach the ultimate showdown, Lena reports back to Koopa with his two favored goons in custody, explaining that they have swapped allegiance. But after Koopa sentences them both to death, he indignantly storms off, dismissing Lena before she has a change to explain that she managed to obtain the meteorite shard that he has been so desperately looking for. She decides that his slighting of her is enough to justify her betrayal as well, running off to find Daisy before planning to continue on to activate the meteorite herself. Of course, she may as well have just skipped the visit and gone straight to the meteorite, as upon approaching Daisy in her cell, Lena decides to kill her, making a half-hearted attempt before being stopped by Yoshi and allowing Daisy to flee from captivity.

Whoa...does anyone else smell burning turd?

Free from captivity in a building and world that she’s never been in before, Daisy’s emancipation would be assuredly short lived if she had not come across expected and, as always, loosely motivated help. She runs down a hall only to find Toad as well as the two rocket scientist goons being taken away to their execution by a couple of goombas. Through a series of wacky hi-jinks that somehow involve Toad being set on fire without any consequence or even sign of discomfort, Daisy and her three new companions manage to escape together as the goons explain they’ve always been loyal supporters of her father. To make that point clear, they take her to visit him for the first time and discover his primordial state. They leave her to admire the wad of indistinguishable slop that for some reason is dripping slime. After realizing that a mass of dried horse sperm that we’re supposed to believe is fungus isn’t much for conversation, Daisy finds a nearby surveillance system and manages to locate the brothers floundering around in another part of the building, trying and failing to jump across a shaft, only to be saved by the fungus. She gets on the intercom and manages to guide them to her, where she introduces them to the fungal mass that’s been helping them all this time. Once pleasantries are exchanged, she lets Mario know that his call girl, Daniella, and the other missing Brooklyn girls were in a cell somewhere in the building. Hoping to get a quick rimjob out of the deal, Mario takes off to find them, leaving Luigi and Daisy to be arrested by Koopa and his men moments later.

World 1-4: Thank You Mario! But Our Princess Has No Interest In Leaving The Castle With Your Chubby, Dim-Witted Ass!

It may look like fun, but it smells even better. That's actually the building's sewage line.

At this point, the movie starts to break down entirely, collapsing under the weight of its own idiocy. I’ll try my best to guide you through it without blacking out from the pain, so bear with me. Having a special talent when it comes to finding rent-a-vag, Mario breaks into the room where Daniella and the other women are being held. Searching for a way out, he opens a vent, grabs a mattress, and takes the women for frozen waterslide voyage with goombas in hot pursuit. And as much as conventional wisdom or even basic common sense would lead you to believe that the magical pipe that they’re sliding down would likely end abruptly at a grate or sudden turn, what actually happens is far more ridiculous. Mario and his whore-flavored mattress burst out the end of the pipe into mid air and find themselves falling, continuing to fall for about three stories before conveniently landing exactly where Luigi and Daisy happen to be, even though I have no fucking idea how those two got there. Koopa, having recovered the meteorite piece after Lena was recovered trying to use it, is also on the scene and tries to hold our heroes at gunpoint, only to be knocked back by a rocket boot courtesy of Mario. This leads to a minor showdown between the two infamous archrivals, resulting in Mario kicking the meteorite fragment out of Koopa’s hand. This falls down to where Lena is for some goddamn reason, and she catches it just before falling into power lines. You’d think this would kill her, but instead it results in nothing more than a Bride Of Frankenstein make-over. With the rock back in her possession, she takes off to try to use it for the second goddamn time. Luigi, Daisy and the gaggle of Brooklyn girls run after her, leaving Mario to run like hell as he continues to battle King Koopa.

Don't play with power lines, kids, our you may end up with some split ends.

The sequence of events then gets even more preposterous, as Lena makes it all the way back to the meteorite and inserts the fragment, attempting to activate it and merge the two dimensions as Luigi and the women arrive to try to stop her. Seeing that he’s too late, Luigi stead feeds the girls back through to portal to Earth, telling them to warn everyone of the trouble that might come, as if these girls have the slightest fucking idea what’s going on. Moments later Lena is killed by the process that she started, being tossed against a wall by a bolt of energy, which manages to instantly turn her into a perfectly white skeleton embedded in the rock. But the reaction of what she’s done reaches farther than that, as Mario and Koopa, still fighting in the streets where we left them, begin to dissolve and warp across to the Earth. They appear at the archeological dig site, surrounded by a crowd of awaiting media and construction workers. In a show of strength to establish his dominance over the humans in his presence, Koopa fires a de-evolution gun into the crowd, conveniently hitting Scapelli and turning him into a monkey. But rather than being horrified, everyone there just finds this pretty much hilarious. But before the police can show up and prove to Koopa that a monkey gun is a fucking ridiculous threat when faced with much more painful bullets, Luigi and Daisy manage to pry the piece of rock out which reverses the process and causes Mario and Koopa to warp back.

Yep. Dennis Hopper was definitely scarier.

By this point we’re screaming at the television screen for this rectal-shredding bowl movement to end, and the movie finally looks to be obliging as Toad gives Luigi and Daisy de-evolution guns of their own as they run back to find Mario. With a horde of goombas around him, Koopa orders to kill the three heroes when the movie delivers one last roundhouse to our heads. Toad begins to play a song, reaching back to his busker days, and all the goombas ignore Koopa’s order and instead begin to dance. That’s right…the mild swaying that Luigi had a small group of them doing in an elevator somehow translated to all of them having an insatiable love for dance. FUCK ME. Seeing an opportunity to counter, Luigi gets another pair of rocket boots from a nearby Big Bertha, jumping in to join Mario as the two of them now face off against Dennis Hopper. They waste no time in using their guns to de-evolve Koopa, just as a random Bob-omb goes off beneath him, rocketing him up in the air and then back down into a random hanging metal bin. He hides in there for a moment while the brothers wait in anticipation before finally bursting out as a dragon that looks so shitty that it should be fighting Shao Kahn at the end of Mortal Kombat: Annihilation, before the plumbers simply blast him again, de-evolving him further until he finally becomes little more than a pile of dog snot. As all on-lookers erupt in applause, Luigi and Mario jump away in rocket boots, rejoining Daisy as the city celebrates. As a brief aside, Back in the room where the Mushroom King was, he drops from the ceiling and instantly evolves back into…Lance Henrickson. WHAT? If anyone can explain to me not only how defeating Koopa resulted in a complete reversal of his de-evolution, but how you can be reverted to a fucking fungus and back without any discernable side effects, I’d love to hear it.

It's your kids, Mario. Something had got to be done about your kids.

With the day finally saved, Luigi and Mario return to the meteorite cave with Daisy, who tells them that she can’t go while she’s got so much work to do here. Luigi kisses her, realizing that many more nights of sexual frustration lay ahead, and the brothers finally go through the portal, warping back to the Earth. Some time later, back in the real world, we return to the apartment of Italian mediocrity, where Mario and his favorite call girl are preparing dinner for Luigi when Daisy bursts through their front door dressed like Rambo and declares to the stunned brothers that she needs their help, adding that they’ll never believe this. As the boys grab their tool belts, apparently thinking that she has come all the way back to ask them to help unclog a shitter, Mario declares that he does believe and the movie ends. Trust me, Mario, if you’re hinting that you believe there’s going to be a sequel, then I’ve got some rather obvious news to break to you.

The Verdict:

Donkey: To say that this movie is terrible is an understatement. To say that this movie is worse than trying to teach your ninety year old grandmother to fight off dementia long enough to learn how to play the game is close, but still doesn’t quite truly express the pain that awaits you. Not only does this movie’s story have nothing to do with the game franchise on which it was based, but it absolutely reeks of the time period that it was made, which drags it even further into irrelevance. This can be seen in the completely inappropriate dark tone and appearance of the movie, because apparently the popularity of grunge music translated into kids liking absolutely everything in the early 90’s to remind them of cutting their wrists, but also in the soundtrack which they tout so proudly. The very first credit at the end of the movie is for the song Almost Unreal by Roxette. And beyond that gem, the album also features Marky fucking Mark (remember that the next time you actually think to take him seriously), Extreme, and Megadeth. Seriously…Megadeth. That just goes to show how far the makers of this movie went to find ways to cater to the masses while forgetting to make it even remotely enjoyable to watch. I give this movie half an Italian plumber out of five portals to unimaginable boredom.

What We Learned:

Donkey: Had dinosaurs continued to evolve, they would have ended up looking like Dennis Hopper. Who knew?

Don’t forget to check back every Sunday for a new fresh review! Next week shittymovienight.com presents: another journey into the madhouse that is The Asylum, courtesy of…DEATH RACERS.

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