Every movie is someone’s favorite movie. That’s why I don’t call these reviews. They’re me exploring films, trying to figure out how they happened and what they are about. How do I do that about this film without feeling like I’m kicking a limbless child?

Edward Carnby (Christian Slater, Heathers) is an occult detective and the star of the video games that you may or may not have played. As a child, he was subject to some intense experiments as he grew up in an orphanage where Sister Clara raised him. As a result, he has a sixth sense and has increased strength and agility. He also used to work for Bureau 713, which protects the world from the paranormal.

We learn about Bureau 713 from a long scroll in the beginning that is also read to us. It goes on way longer than it needs to. And then it goes on some more. It may still be running as you read this.

He’s also investigating the disappearance of the Abkani, who worshipped demons from another dimension, demons who are coming back to ours. His girlfriend Aline (Tara Reid, American Pie) is the curator of a museum which happens to have artifacts from the Abkani. There are also some paramilitary guys who are legitimately wearing paintball armor led by Commander Burke (Stephen Dorff, Blade).

The writer of the film, Blair Erickson, summed up the changes Uwe Boll made to the script: “Thankfully Dr. Boll was able to hire his loyal team of hacks to crank out something much better than our crappy story and add in all sorts of terrifying horror movie essentials like opening gateways to alternate dimensions, bimbo blonde archaeologists, sex scenes, mad scientists, slimy dog monsters, special army forces designed to battle slimy CG dog monsters, Tara Reid,  Matrix slow-motion gun battles, and car chases. Oh yeah, and a ten-minute opening backstory scroll read aloud to the illiterate audience, the only people able to successfully miss all the negative reviews. I mean hell, Boll knows that’s where the real scares lie.” 

Yes, the bad guys look like aliens and basically tear everyone to pieces, other than Slater and Reid. That is — if you get that far. This is a film packed with continuity gaffes, appearances by camera people and even Reid being unable to say the word Newfoundland. For a film set in California, Canadian signage appears throughout. When Agent Cheung’s dead body is found, she visibly moves before the scene ends. And perhaps most amazingly, the creatures in the film? Their main weakness is light. Yet they show up in broad daylight to attack the two main characters at the end of the film.

I know Uwe Boll likes to punch critics, but I can handle it. Seriously, if you love a video game, there’s the worry that this man has made a movie of it. I’d do an entire week of his films on this site, but I don’t even know if I have that kind of guts.

My wife has never played Super Mario Brothers. She first saw this film at the now Hollywood Theater in Dormont as a child and it became one of the many films she rewatched over and over again as she grew up.

I’ve never seen the movie Super Mario Brothers, but the Mario character was a big part of my childhood and I played every one of his games as I grew up.

Together, we watched the film and came at it from two very different perspectives. Imagine, if you will, someone who has no bias toward this movie for how different it is from the property that inspired it and only sees it as a film about two adopted plumber brothers battling a parallel world ruled by dinosaurs.

When seen through those eyes, perhaps Super Mario Brothers is a good movie. To everyone else, it’s either a movie they hate — like lead actor Bob Hoskins — or one they can’t even begin to understand.

Producer Roland Joffé pitched the film to Nintendo, telling them that they’d have more control over the film working with his small Lightmotive company. Draft after draft of the film was made with Harold Ramis being considered as the director. Finally, the husband and wife team of Rocky Morton and Annabel Jankel (who created Max Headroom) were selected.

At that point, they jettisoned everything that came before. The original script, by Jim Jennewein and Tom S. Parker, was a more fairy tale retelling of the plot of the video games. Instead, the new directors wanted the film set in Dinohatten, a dark alternate version of New York City where dinosaurs ruled. Here’s the first issue — this world appears nowhere in the universe of the Super Mario Brothers games. The team wanted a dark satire instead of a bright, colorful world. Amazingly, they convinced the producers and Nintendo to go along with their vision.

Over the next year, five scripts were written by nine writers. Sets were built and scripts were even written without the directors being on board that tried to soften their narrative ideas and make a more kid-friendly film. That said — the sets had already been built.

None of the original script remained when filming started. The principal actors, Bob Hoskins as Mario and John Leguizamo as Luigi, began drinking through much of the filming. This led to an incident where Leguizamo crashed the plumbing van and broke Hoskins’ hand (he wore a flesh-colored cast for the rest of the production). Dennis Hopper, playing the lead villain Koopa, had open contempt for the directors, seeing them as control freaks.

Yet there was a great early buzz for the film, with an L.A. Times article comparing the set design favorably to Blade Runner (they share production designer David L. Snyder). Then Disney bought on to the film. And then the directors were shut out of reshoots and lost their final cut.

Everyone believed that kids would love the movie. Mario was such a big deal to them, this was a can’t miss bet. Kids will watch anything, right? Even if what they come to see has nothing in common with the video games and cartoons and the actual property that they loved so much, right?

Let’s get into it. The film starts with a poorly animated retelling of how the dinosaurs died off. I’m not sure if this is supposed to look like a video game or have been created in Mario Paint, but with the budget of the film, it sure feels weird. We learn that the meteorite that crashed into Earth made another dimension where dinosaurs rules.

In present day New York City, Mario and Luigi are struggling plumbers who are getting put out of business by the Scapelli Company. Those guys are also messing with an NYU sponsored dig where dinosaur bones are found under the Brooklyn Bridge by an orphaned archaeology student named Daisy (Samantha Mathis, Pump Up the Volume). While on a date, the villainous Iggy and Spike (Fisher Stevens from Short Circuit and character actor Richard Edson, who was also Sonic Youth’s original drummer) kidnap Daisy and take her to the dinosaur dimension.

This leads to King Koopa (Hopper) and his minions trying to get both Daisy and her necklace so that they can take over our world. Daisy ends up being the princess of the other side, with her father being devolved into a fungus (he’s played by an unrecognizable Lance Henriksen).

Along the way, Spike and Iggy realize that their cousin Koppa is evil and help the Mario brothers, all while Daisy meets Yoshi and Toad (Mojo Nixon!) is introduced as a musician who writes anti-Koopa music before being devolved into a Goomba. And Fiona Shaw shows up as Koopa’s would-be love interest who really wants to show him up by enacting his plans.

The two worlds become merged, with Koopa devolving the owner of the Scapelli Corporation into a monkey before Mario attacks him with a Bob-omb (one of the few video game references that happen in the film). Koopa then becomes a human Tyrannosaurus Rex before getting filly devolved into slime and Daisy’s father being saved. Whew!

Luigi tells Daisy he loves her (you know, Mario’s usual role) but she can’t leave her home behind. But weeks later, she returns, dressed as a warrior and asking them to return.

Want an example of how weird the film is? Hoskins didn’t even realize he was working on a video game adaption until his son asked him what he was working on. When he told him the title, he showed his dad the game on his Nintendo.

Here’s another father and son story: when asked why he did the film by his son, Dennis Hopper replied, “So you can have shoes.” His son replied, “Dad, I don’t need shoes that badly.”

Hoskins further described the shooting of the film in a 2011 interview with The Guardian:  “It was a fuckin’ nightmare. The whole experience was a nightmare. It had a husband-and-wife team directing, whose arrogance had been mistaken for talent. After so many weeks their own agent told them to get off the set! Fuckin’ nightmare. Fuckin’ idiots.” In that same interview, he also used the movie as the answer to the questions “What is the worst job you’ve done?”, “What has been your biggest disappointment?”, and “If you could edit your past, what would you change?”

Ryan Hoss, the webmaster of the Super Mario Brothers Movie Archive, says that the end result of the film is, for some, “an interesting, unusual, entertaining, compelling, and inspired look into this fantastical world. Others have had a hard time accepting the way the 8 and 16-bit games were adapted onto celluloid, calling the movie a complete disaster and disgrace to the video games. The goal of this website is to help its visitors better understand an often misunderstood film. What the filmmakers were trying to do with this movie had never been done before, so we think it’s important to appreciate the immense amount of thought and respect that went into creating the final product. In the end, the filmmakers did something wildly revolutionary—by making the first ever theatrical feature based on a video game property.”

We’ll talk to Ryan soon and learn more about how the site was created and how he was able to transform so many people’s love for this film into a blu-ray release.

As for my take on the film, I think I’d love it if I saw the film like Becca, as a youngster with no idea who any of the characters were supposed to be, just ready to enjoy a world where two plumbers battled evil dinosaurs. Perhaps if we all see it that way, the film is a little but better.

I know someone who said that mother! was a movie that he warned people against seeing because of its subject matter and wondered if it should even be made. And then, I know people who fell in love with the film, lavishing it with praise. Still, others were shocked by its violence or upset by its biblical imagery. Me? I thought it was fucking hilarious.

After 2014’s Noah, Aronofsky was working on a children’s film (!) when he came up with the idea for this film. During that process, he came up with the idea for this film, writing the screenplay in 5 days. He claims that the film is “a psychological freak-out. You shouldn’t over-explain it.” But that doesn’t mean that people didn’t fall all over themselves trying to! 

Star Jennifer Lawrence — also Aronofsky’s muse during filming — Lawrence claimed that the film as an allegory that “depicts the rape and torment of Mother Earth. I represent Mother Earth; Javier, whose character is a poet, represents a form of God, a creator; Michelle Pfeiffer is an Eve to Ed Harris’s Adam, there’s Cain and Abel and the setting sometimes resembles the Garden of Eden.”

Sure. That works.

Or it could be about the environment and how we’re killing it.

Or it could be about what it’s like to be a creator and see your work destroyed.

Or it could be a cover version of Rosemary’s Baby that gets way too out of control.

Or you could see it like I did, a movie that somehow got into the hearts and minds of the movie intelligentsia and demanded an explanation when you can see that it wears its narrative beats and allegories on its bloody sleeve. At one point — spoilers if you made it this far — I said, once the baby is born, that’s the end of the Old Testament and there will be a break in the action and then they’ll start eating the baby like it’s Holy Communion. I’m certain that folks were really upset by this scene (my used copy from Family Video has a WARNING – NO RENTAL UNDER 18 sticker), but it’s almost like a punchline. Or I’m insane. Probably.

But then why is Ed Harris a doctor? Why do we spend so much time in the laundry room? Why do vaginal openings show up in Ed’s back (yes, he’s Adam and that could be where his rib was taken from, I get it, I get it) and the floor? Oh the questions mother! will make you ask and immediately regret for putting any thought behind a movie which had to have been a piss take.

This is a movie that wants to be an allegory and then wants to be a narrative film. Like — why does 911 answer the phone like this is in the real world when we’ve already accepted that mother is Mother Nature? And why does God need a starship (sorry, I wanted to get a Star Trek V: The Final Frontier reference into this).

What’s with that yellow water? Oh, that’s just a reference to Charlotte Perkins Gilman’s The Yellow Wallpaper. Of course. We all knew that.

While the film had generally positive responses from critics, it got a cinema score of an F*, which suggests that the film goes out of its way to upset audiences. When confronted by these numbers — and diminishing box office returns — Aronofsky blamed moviegoers’ rejection of science, saying, “You have other people who basically believe in the power of an iPhone that they can communicate to 35 million people in a blink of an eye, yet they don’t believe in science in other ways. We wanted to make a punk movie and come at you. And the reason I wanted to come is because I was very sad and I had a lot of anguish and I wanted to express it.” 

Incredibly, IMDB reports that Paramount canceled the upcoming Friday the 13th film in order to move ahead with this film. I have no idea why both of those movies couldn’t exist in the same universe — other than the fact that this film was originally due to come out on October 13.

I love that the director wrote a letter to audiences before the film came out. With phrases like “From this primordial soup of angst and helplessness, I woke up one morning and this movie poured out of me like a fever dream” and “I can’t fully pinpoint where this film all came from. Some came from the headlines we face every second of every day, some came from the endless buzzing of notifications on our smartphones, some came from living through the blackout of Hurricane Sandy in downtown Manhattan, some came from my heart, some from my gut. Collectively it’s a recipe I won’t ever be able to reproduce, but I do know this serving is best drunk as a single dose in a shot glass. Knock it back. Salute!” this letter is full of as much pretension as the film and made me giggle just as hard.

Has there ever been a film that equates the Great Flood with an improperly braced sink and the struggle of home repair? No. There sure hasn’t, up until now.

In case you didn’t get that Javier Bardem was God when he says, “I am I” and that the end of the world was what we saw at the end by Patti Smith singing The End of the World, well, then now you do.

This is the kind of movie that people will rent on Netflix and tell all of their friends not to watch. Or they’ll be shocked. Or they’ll fall asleep (the last ten minutes of this film were a Bataan death march of me battling against ennui and boredom). Is it the most shocking film ever, one that sends millennials crying into their blogs? Dude. In a world where A Serbian Film, The Men Behind the Sun and Salò, or the 120 Days of Sodom exist — fuck, any number of grindhouse faves like Dr. Butcher, M.D.,  The New York Ripper and Cannibal Holocaust fit the bill — this film is a trifle. I just love that we’re insulated ourselves from culture and art attacking us that we can be upset by such a glancing blow.

Should you watch it? Man, don’t ask me what to do. Decide for yourself.

UPDATE: You can watch this for free on Amazon Prime.

*Only 19 movies have received this score so far. They are: Alone in the Dark, The Box, Bug, Darkness, The Devil Inside, Disaster Movie, Doctor T and the Women, Eye of the Beholder, Fear Dot Com, I Know Who Killed Me, In the Cut, Killing Them Softly, Lost Souls, Lucky Numbers, mother!, Silent House, Solaris, The Wicker Man and Wolf Creek.

Feed Shark

Ed Boon, one of the creators of the Mortal Kombat video game, calls this the “worst moment” in the history of the franchise. Coming from someone who loved the original film and has played every one of the games, I agree.

Christopher Lambert was seen as one of the highlights of the last film. He’s gone, replaced by James Remar (The Warriors). I always dislike whitewashing in movies, but Lambert was so game in his scenes and such an integral part of getting the last film made (Lambert’s great attitude calmed director Paul W. S. Anderson as he worked on his first big movie. While the highest salary in the film, he paid his own way to go to Thailand and do all of his own scenes for basically free there, just to ensure the movie looked better. Plus, he paid for the wrap party.) that this feels like a major loss.

In fact, only Liu Kang (Robin Shou) and Kitana (Talisa Soto) are played by the same actors from the previous film. Robin Cooke, who played Reptile, plays Sub Zero here, with that fighter gaining a much larger role.

Did you like Johnny Cage last time? Lots of people did. Bad news — he’s killed seconds into this new film to get over new bad guy Shao Khan. He’s opened a portal from Outrealm to Earth (hey wait — didn’t we just fight a tournament to stop that from happening?) and has brought back his queen (and Kitana’s mother) Sindel back from the dead.

Sonya Blade (now played by Sandra Hess, who played the cave girl in Encino Man) brings in her partner Jax and they immediately battle Cyrax and Mileena. Then there’s Nightwolf (played by Litefoot, the Native American who also portrayed Little Bear in The Indian in the Cupboard), a shaman who will guide Liu Kang and Kitana toward defeating Shao Khan. Another fight against Smoke and Scorpion, with the help of Sub Zero, happens and Kitana gets kidnapped.

Raiden meets with the Edger Gods, who don’t really give any answers. I have several questions for them. Like, why are we fighting Shao Khan when we won a tournament to stop things like this from happening? And why is there a fight every ten seconds instead of character development like the first film? Or why didn’t you bring back the actors we liked in these roles? And why doesn’t the “Toasty!” guy show up?

Nightwolf makes Liu Kang pass several trials to gain the power of Animality, which allows him to shapeshift into a new form. He must pass the self-esteem and focus trial. The trial of temptation, where Jade tries to get in his karate pants. And there’s a third test, but we never get to it!  One assumes that he passes it, as we’ll see in the finale.

Raiden gives up his immortality to fight for Earth, which means that he needs to cut off his hair. Jade is a double agent and while the good guys rescue Kitana, they still face tough odds. Raiden reveals that Shao Khan is his brother and their father, Shinook, is favoring his evil sibling. After a big battle, Raiden is killed at the hands of that very same brother.

Another lengthy fight sequence happens, with Motaro, Ermac, Sindel and even Noob Saibot all showing up.

Liu Kang then shows what an Animality is by turning into a poorly rendered dragon in a scene that makes this movie seem more dated than the 1995 original. Luckily, the Elder Gods discover the shenanigans afoot and declare another round of Mortal Kombat.

Aren’t you glad we have Liu Kang on our side? He defeats Shao Kahn and allows Raiden to return as the Earth realm wins again.

Director John R. Leonetti would go on to be the cinematographer for The Scorpion King, I Know Who Killed Me, The Conjuring and The Insidious series before directing Annabelle and Wish Upon. He’s done great work in those films, but this film feels so much cheaper than the original. It’s weird, because that film succeeded because it transcended it’s junk food origins while the sequel just piles way too much on.

Original directed Paul W.S. Anderson decided to do Event Horizon instead of this film. He hated the results and that’s why he’s stayed close to the Resident Evil franchise throughout its sequels.

It’s hard to hate a movie where alien monsters battle ninjas, so if you accept this one as goofy chop socky fun, it’s fine. But when compared to the original — and with the rich mythology of the Mortal Kombat video games at its fingertips — this one really suffers. There have been rumors of a franchise reboot for years, including two online series. Here’s hoping the next one recaptures the first film’s magic.