Live action fever dream Super Mario Bros may be one of the best-worst movies of all time. How well do you remember it?
In the pantheon of bad movies, the live action Super Mario Bros stands out as a special sort of awful. From its absolutely nonsensical plot to its baffling choices in adapting one of the most popular video game franchises in the world, there isn’t much about the movie that can be redeemed in a purely cinematic sense–but here in 2020, 27 years after the movie’s release, we can appreciate it for the cult classic it is.
Does it make any sense at all? Absolutely not. Do we find ourselves constantly questioning our own sanity as we try and process what we’ve watched to write about it? Of course. Is it all worth it anyway? Debatable. But here we are, regardless. And to make matters even more bizarre, there are currently no ways to stream or purchase the movie digitally in the US. If you’re hungry for a rewatch, you’ll have to dust off your DVD player and find a copy–or, you could search out a clandestine copy uploaded to a video sharing website like Vimeo. Just a little suggestion. Either way, the lack of accessibility really ups the movie’s fever-dream-like aesthetic, which can be either a feature or a bug, depending on who you ask.
So, without further ado, we present 27 things that definitely, actually, really happened in the Super Mario Bros movie, ranging from Nintendo Easter eggs to absolutely inscrutable lines of dialogue and everything in between.