When Bob Hoskins was asked about his involvement in Super Mario Bros., the actor replied: “It was a bloody nightmare. The whole experience was a nightmare.” Dennis Hopper agreed. Today, on the day of the release of the first trailer for Super Mario Bros: The Moviewe will tell you why both artists drew the same conclusion.

Filming the film Rocky Morton Y Annabel Jankel It was a bad dream, perhaps, because Hoskins – our Mario – almost died on set six times: he was stabbed four times, nearly drowned, and was electrocuted once. Also, he broke his finger.

To these statements by Hoskins in The Telegraph we can add the sentences of Giovanni Leguizamo -our Luigi- in his autobiography. On paper, the actor confirms that he was run over on set.

Or it may be because the first film in history based on a video game is also scary from a narrative point of view: its seemingly simple plot hides all sorts of eccentricities, contradictions and arbitrary last-minute decisions.

The sales synopsis used by specialized movie websites, such as Filmaffinity or IMDb, indicates that Super Mario Bros. tells the story of two plumbers who “enter a parallel world to save Princess Daisy from the clutches of King Koopa and his army. of reptiles.

To pick it up with tweezers. When humans appear descended from dinosaurs, shrunken heads, disgusting mushrooms, etc., Super Mario Bros. detaches itself from the video game to get closer – whether deliberately or not – to that of a lysergic fantasy.

In its year, 1993, critics highlighted its visual section, but defended its narrative side. Shigeru Miyamotothe creator of the video game Mario Bros, was benevolent: he said he “liked it” and only criticized that it was too realistic compared to the success of Nintendo.

But for talents there is no doubt that husband Morton and wife Jankel were responsible for making Super Mario Bros. a bad drink (Talking about “bad drinks” gives us the perfect footing to mention that Leguizamo and Hoskins got drunk together to cope with the experience).

We refer to examples: even in his autobiography, Leguizamo wrote that he once saw Morton throw hot coffee on the head of an extra because he did not like her costume.

The back and forth between the duo and the studio on how the tone of Super Mario Bros. should turn the film into a film for both adults and children at the same time, which has bewildered the cast: there has come a point where the protagonists have stopped. to read Morton and Jankel’s constant script rewrites and follows orders like automatons.

Jankel and Morton have been accused of: abusers, bad leaders, bad communicators, hateful, arrogant, controlling beings. The crew referred to them with bad nicknames and many had T-shirts made with rude phrases from both of them to wear with impunity on set.

On this, Hoskins believed that Morton and Jankel were “the bastard and the cow”. Or, simply, “some damned idiot”.

After Super Mario Bros., Morton and Jankel have never made a film together again..

Today, when it is said that Super Mario Bros. is the worst movie in history, we can say that time, word of mouth, has made it a cult movie. The future now belongs to Illumination, the animation studio that will want to make mushrooms from the Mushroom Kingdom their new Minions.

For all of this, for many, Super Mario Bros. was a nightmare.