A place for those who "Trust the Fungus"

As my first post and I guess an introduction I thought I'd plug my own review of the movie:

http://www.nes-bit.com/?p=3010

Steve Applebaum managed to find it on my site and dropped a comment asking me to pay a visit. So here I am

I recall seeing it on a sea ferry way before it hit UK cinemas and being a big Nintendo nut I thought it was worth a revisit.

Thanks for re-posting this! It was nice to come across your review when I did, so it's good to see you share it with the rest of the movie's fans. I don't think there's a lot that one could comment on since you covered the film so succinctly, but I can still provide my thoughts on a couple of points.

Lorfarius wrote:The special effects might not be up to much but considering they had a low production budget they did an adequate job.

Super Mario Bros. was actually runner-up nominee for the Special Effects Oscar. Chris Woods and his SFX team utilized state-of-the-art technology to create effects that had never been done before and had in fact been deemed impossible. The CGI model of Dinohattan alone took took over six months of work by one man to complete.

The only reason the movie didn't go up against Jurassic Park as intended was because Disney lobbied hard to have A Nightmare Before Christmas considered in that category despite clearly being better suited under animation. Yes, the special effects may seem a bit dated and cheesy now, but at the time they were groundbreaking work.

Lorfarius wrote:The film isn’t light when it comes to game references with rocking Goomba’s, Yoshi, Bob-omb, Bullet Bills and even a Super Nintendo Scope repainted as a devolution gun. vague references only to the games and from what was finally released I can see them praying it would be a success.

The film really does have a lot of references to the games. It's almost surprising how much thought they put into making the film a full translation of the world and characters we had already played. Check out what we've been able to spot HERE.

Lorfarius wrote:On one hand you have a dark world that the film tries to portray yet the other seems a constant nod to the fact that the whole thing is for kids and maybe if they had concentrated more on the films focus it could have turned out a lot differently.

That really is the problem with the film. It just doesn't know what it wants to be or who its audience is. Even after cutting out over 30 minutes of footage (some that shouldn't) the story still isn't that focused or connected. It would seriously benefit from a re-cut.