Button Mash!

I've never been a very good video game person. I like playing them, but I'm really quite terrible at them. Whenever I played Golden Eye on Nintendo 64 with my neighbors, I would be routinely killed in multi-player because I just couldn't master the whole camera movement vs person movement aspect. I couldn't even beat levels in Zelda and the Ocarina of Time without major assists from a step by step guidebook telling me exactly how to do certain things, and even then I got frustrated and just quit. Maybe the buttons on the controller and I just don't connect.

And, like most kids born in the 80s, I played Super Mario Brothers on Nintendo (my house) and Super Nintendo (my neighbor's house). And like most kids, I came across the Super Mario Brothers movie at some point in my life.

Super Mario Bros is not a good movie. Even Bob Hoskins, respected actor and star of the movie, came out and said it is hands down the worst thing he's ever done.

I'm not sure exactly when I saw this movie, but I know I saw it on cable. Ah, the perks of being a kid with cable and lax parents. You can watch just about anything (Tank Girl anyone?).

I remember being a little confused and a little bored by the whole thing. And also a little scared by Dennis Hopper. He was super creepy in the film, with the weird white-blond sort of corn rows, not to mention the lizard tongue they gave him.

I think, the better question might be, when is Dennis Hopper not creepy and/or scary?

The other thing I remember, and probably the weirdest part, was not the lack of cohesion in the movie, or how terrible it was as a video game adaptation, but the fact that I had a little crush on John Leguizamo.

Yes, this guy.

Now, allow me to explain myself. In the movie, he was young, cute, and he seemed so nice and genuinely concerned about rescuing the girl. To my seven year old brain, I was thinking "Wow, what a nice guy. I really like him. He's so nice!"

He saved the princess!

Overall though, it's still a terrible movie, John Leguizamo crush or no. There is so much weirdness running through the whole movie, from lizard people led by Dennis Hopper to something about fungus taking over the city, that even as a kid, I remember thinking "There's no fungus in the video game, what is this?" It was not, as so many other movies in my childhood were, one that ended up with a lot of repeat viewings.

I think the look on his face here kind of sums up the viewing experience as a whole.