Digital Spy presents Games on Film, a look back at the numerous (and quite often disastrous) movies based on video games. How closely do they stick to their source material, and how well do they hold up on their own merits?
Previous Games on Film: Resident Evil
Super Mario Bros (1993)
How do you turn a wacky concept like Super Mario Bros into a film? That was the conundrum faced by directors Rocky Morton and Annabel Jankel when they inherited the project from French producer Roland Joffe in the early '90s.
Just how Joffe managed to convince Nintendo that a live-action movie about a plumber who stomps on turtles and smashes blocks with his head was a good idea is anybody's guess, but the gaming giant did endorse the venture.
Due to the nature of the source material, a direct adaptation was pretty much impossible, so scriptwriters Jim Jennewein and Tom S Parker were forced to play fast and loose with the concept.
Tom Hanks was originally attached to the role of Mario and Arnold Schwarzenegger and Michael Keaton were both approached to play King Koopa, before Bob Hoskins was cast as the lead and Dennis Hopper as his arch nemesis.
The resulting film bore no resemblance to the much-loved gaming series that inspired it, and went down like a flattened Goomba at the box office.
How faithful is the adaptation?
As stated earlier, Super Mario Bros deviated from its source material at every turn and the end result had about as much to do with the original games as Hoskins's grandmother.
The movie took place against a Blade Runner-esque backdrop and was based around the idea that the asteroid that wiped out the dinosaurs ripped the universe into two parallel dimensions - the Earth we know and a dystopian universe where the dinos evolved into a humanoid race.
Give or take a few obligatory references, the only part of the Super Mario Bros story that remained intact was the basic premise of two brothers setting off to rescue a princess from the clutches of evil in a fantasy world.
Koopa - who was human-like in form, rather than the turtle-dragon hybrid fans were hoping for - was trying to obtain a fragment from the dino-obliterating asteroid so he could merge the two dimensions and "kill the mammals".
Said meteor fragment is in the possession of Princess Daisy, which gives Koopa an excuse to do what he does best and stage an ultimately unsuccessful kidnapping.
The storyline mutated into something far removed from Super Mario Bros somewhere along the way, but that wasn't the only thing that deviated from the original games.
Mario and Luigi have wielded a lot of power-ups over the years, but never a 'devolution gun' or mechanical jumping boots, equipment that gave the movie a distinctly un-Mario sci-fi twist.
And the last time we checked, Goombas had oversized heads and tiny bodies, not the other way around - but it's tempting to overlook this because the creature design was impressive at the time.
What can't be overlooked is that infamous scene with Big Bertha inside the nightclub. Who would have thought the Super Mario Bros movie would include a scene where our hero has his head planted between the breasts of a large, leather-clad woman?
A part of our childhoods died right there.
How well did they cast the video game characters?
Whoever cast the Super Mario Bros movie had probably eaten one too many super mushrooms.
With John Leguizamo in the role of Luigi, we had a Briton and a Latino playing a pair of Italian-Americans, which sounds about right considering Koopa went from being a fire-breathing dragon to Billy from Easy Rider.
Hoskins and Leguizamo did about as well as any actors would have in such difficult roles, hindered by a dismal script comprised of mostly awkward dialogue.
Both actors spoke negatively about the experience in the ensuing years, with Leguizamo admitting in his biography that he and Hoskins would booze on set to get through the shoot. We feel like doing something similar each time we're subjected to the film.
Hopper always had a knack for getting the best out of a bad script, pulling off that quintessential villain act in his sleep. Super Mario Bros was almost another so-bad-it's-good addition to his CV, but it was a disappointment to see how far he was from the traditional Bowser.
Samantha Mathis is unspectacular as Daisy, juggling the roles of archaeologist, kidnapping victim and inter-dimensional princess, while sharing uneasy chemistry with Leguizamo's Luigi.
Is the film any good?
Super Mario Bros holds up about as well today as it did back in 1993... badly.
Disregard for the source material aside, the film's plot is a garbled mess, its script is cringe-worthy and the characters have less depth than their 8-bit incarnations in Mario's NES outings.
There's almost a synergy between Hoskins and Leguizamo, but it shows that they didn't have a great time making the film, and the same can be said for Hopper.
Super Mario Bros was heavily reliant on its special effects budget, and while the result was style over substance, the movie was a visual spectacle back then.
The dino dimension was teeming with life and neon colour, with its weird and wonderful inhabitants going about their daily life everywhere you looked. In spite of its many flaws, Super Mario Bros introduced us to a rich, dystopian world.
While it was far removed from anything fans had seen in the games, to derive this from the original NES and SNES titles took at least some vision and creativity.
Some of the special effects still hold an air of nostalgic charm today, like the mind-bending Goomba transformation sequence and the animatronic Yoshi.
But ultimately, Super Mario Bros was a poor fit for celluloid and the decision to bring it to the big screen in this form was ill-conceived.
Best moment
It's difficult to pick one, but we're going to scrape the bottom of the barrel and say the elevator scene where Mario and Luigi coax a band of Goombas to slow dance to lift music while they make their escape.
Worst moment
Although it faces stiff competition, it's got to be the Boom-Boom Bar scene with Big Bertha, as this is the moment the film veered so far from the original games that there was no going back.
Memorable quote
Bob-omb!
