The film was dead: to begin with. Mortal images are captured, projected onto a wall for a time, and then forgotten about. What else should the life-span of a film be? A film may only be alive during production. In distribution, life may take the form of a festival run, or a heavy marketing campaign. It dies when the conversation does. Occasionally, a repertory screening, or a boutique Blu-ray will memorialise, and hope to pass a film’s spirit to the other side, its absence reckoned with through the wish of canonisation. The final resting ground can only be on your shelf.
A changing home video market seized upon this. Since the pandemic era, there has been increased interest in special edition releases of restored and rediscovered films on physical media. Often, these are presented in 4K (claimed as the highest resolution the human eye can register), and presented alongside a host of features, housed in expensive packaging. These sets become a crypt for a given cult object. In this respect, the archivists, remastering authors, and boutique distributors are psychopomps, who do not judge as they guide a film from distribution hell to a nerd’s shelf. Between established labels like Arrow and Indicator, and upstarts like Radiance and the many ‘partner labels’ on Vinegar Syndrome, the time is ripe to summon ghosts. Effectively, any old shit can warrant a special edition release. And why not? Does a pauper not merit a tombstone?
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These premium packages become a stand-in for communal moviegoing. They totemise, for example, ritualised screenings of The Rocky Horror Picture Show (1975) in which audiences would participate in the film by quoting and singing along, dressing up. Even a corny Emma Watson-Ezra Miller staging of this phenomenon in The Perks of Being A Wallflower (2012) couldn’t lay it to rest. It has taken Disney’s crackdown on repertory screenings of the Fox catalogue, along with the persistent popularity of cult contenders The Greatest Showman (2017) and The Room (2003), to slow down Richard O’Brien’s creation. A cult hit is forged, instead, in 2024, through clipping, meme-ing, or word-of-mouth posting, such as in the digital-nightmare-horrors of Skinamarink (2022) or We’re All Going to the World’s Fair (2021). Cult films seem ever more omnipresent because they are readily available, leaving a residual feeling that the ‘underground’ is no longer a prerequisite for cult status. Is Shin Kamen Rider (2022) a cult film? It’s so accessible, on Amazon Prime, that the danger of discovery is lost. If last year’s Blackberry or Bottoms constitute the mainstream, then perhaps cult objects should be considered those which reside on the depths of streaming services. Think Confess Fletch (2022), rather than a ready-made film maudit like Babylon (2022), whose paltry fanbase invariably describe it as ‘ahead of its time’. Is this as close as we can get to the Showgirls (1995) trenches?
And no trench is as deep as Super Mario Bros. (1993). This year, it was given the deluxe treatment in what may be the ultimate example of re-release as psychopomp: an elaborate 4K UHD re-release aimed to stage manage a film’s reputation to the other side of ‘Cult’. Can it be seen as a new Showgirls? Can the force of packaging take it there? The box might sit open in a forgotten browser tab. A voice calls to buy it. Perhaps purchasing the box will release the cenobites. Opening it certainly will.
The arguments against Super Mario Bros. are well-trodden: the dated sets; the weird obsession with dinosaurs; how it’s nothing like the Nintendo game character or its Sunshine world; how Mario and Luigi’s surnames are Mario, meaning Bob Hoskins plays someone called Mario Mario. Eventually, these flaws become features. There is so much sensual pleasure to be found here. The establishing shot of the brothers’ apartment gives a King Vidor pan past a photo of an old Italian man (Cranky Mario?), across a wall adorned with three plungers proudly mounted like swords, past a surreptitiously open bathroom door revealing the perfect porcelain throne, past a television blaring an abduction conspiracy doc, and settling eventually on Mario, hard at work in his office.
As he and Luigi (John Leguizamo) bicker through a Laurel and Hardy act down into Dinohattan, a carnivalesque world where Luigi’s new beau Daisy has been kidnapped, the entire cast populate those sets with exuberant gestures that are part vaudeville, part Colombian march. Fisher Stevens and Richard Edson bring a weirdo energy as Koopa henchmen. These two dirtbags, lanky in zoot suits, stick out against the late 1980s Brooklyn sidewalk like Robert Altman figurines. In their dunderhead, hipster acquiescence to the cod-scientific authoritarianism of King Koopa (Dennis Hopper) — resulting in their newfound interest in political theory — they predict the ‘dimes square’ phenomenon. Fiona Shaw minces. Rival plumber Scapelli (Gianni Russo) degenerates until the actor is replaced by a literal Monkey, in a return to the primal simplicity of the ape. Hopper cackles as he chants ‘Goomba,’ his lizard-like poise and bad suit a reflection of Rudy Giuliani’s ‘master of the universe’ attitude towards the city.
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You have to credit the husband-and-wife director-duo of Rocky Morton and Annabel Jankel, two British directors giving their version of an American fantasia in which the maker’s unfamiliarity with the country is apparent, a tradition that stretches from Hitchcock, to Michael Winner, to this year’s Love Lies Bleeding (Rose Glass, directing a wannabe-pre-packaged cult object). No American filmmaker would be brave enough to stage the sequence in which the Marios are dragged through a violent police department, depicted as part office, part science lab, part concentration camp. Thrown before the check-in officer, they look up at him from way below his desk. In the reverse shot, an anonymous shapely leg ending in a black leather heel rests upon the officer’s neck, suggestively pulling S&M aesthetics in conversation with oppressive authority as Helmut Newton or Howard Hawks might.
All of this unbridled creativity was hampered, as ever, by studio notes. Weeks before shooting began, Disney snatched the US distribution rights and rectified the script. Perhaps they envisioned something more like The Wizard (1989), an extended commercial for a Nintendo product they hoped to acquire. As the industrial, dusty sets had already been built, the new elements were staged in a clearly inappropriate space. This conflict is all over the finished product, contributing in large part to its flop status.
In 2021, the ‘Morton-Jenkel cut’ of Super Mario Bros. was uploaded to the Internet Archive. It assembles once-lost VHS sequences alongside a restored version of the film. Perhaps the fact that it was ‘viewed 71,028 times in under a week’ went some way toward convincing the good people of Umbrella Entertainment to invest in creating a new box set. Its contents are a feast of grave goods: the script, a book of essays, a reprinted magazine, stickers, art cards, posters, and, of course, the film restored into 4K UHD alongside more extras and alternate cuts than are worth listing here. Among home entertainment producers and physical media collectors alike there is scepticism as to how much art cards actually provoke a consumer to pick up a Blu-ray, but that point may be moot. Umbrella match the glut of Super Mario Bros. with the ultimate glut artefact. Having the monument on one’s shelf, in one’s home, valued at $150(AU), is a tribute to the notion of cult itself.
In 2022, Korean label Nova released an A.I. upscaled version of another 1993 classic, Green Snake. Tsui Hark’s Wuxia of warring serpent siblings similarly finds ecstasy through actors personifying animals to carnal ends. There are plenty of reasons to fear A.I.’s use in film restoration, but given how unlikely we are to receive a true remastered version of this or Tsui’s other great Hong Kong films, one becomes ambivalent of how else to carry such a film on to its afterlife. Replete with steamy, monsoon-pale watercolours, it’s a film that inspires make-believe. And similarly, from the shambolic car chase, to the liberal use of flamethrowers and literal sparks that fly, to the chintzy depiction of future tech through maps and photo messaging, Super Mario Bros. feels so vividly like the product of human beings. Mistakes were made, but they are so unmistakably human, and if anything is worthy of the box set tombstone, surely it’s something which displays such signs of life.
There’s nothing more self-aggrandising than a critic’s Madeleine moment. With that in mind, Super Mario Bros. is one of the first films I remember seeing, on a VHS in 1997. Its novelisation was the first book I checked out from my primary school library. I don’t know why these are so vivid to me, but the fact that this title stuck around the hippocampus means it will probably be one of the only films still in my mind by the time my brain has succumbed to dementia or whatever in decades to come. Bergman, Fellini, Ozu will be gone. Morton and Jankel will remain. Perhaps the film itself is a psychopomp. Maybe when I finally open the box set, the Mario cenobite will crawl out of my Blu-ray player and drag me through a green pipe into the pits of dino hell. Chance would be a fine thing.
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CINEMA YEAR ZERO 