Nevermind, I managed to squeeze all that drinking into a few hours. I’m back. I’m okay.

As we leave our heroes, Koopa walks into a room occupied only by a chair, a computer, and a large fungusey growth. He embarks upon what appears to be a brief soliloquy, before addressing the growth directly. He explains that he’s moving on to bigger and better things, expressing his contempt for the world and his eagerness to be rid of its troubles. At this point, obviously, I could only assume that Koopa is off-his-balls insane.

The Mario brothers are hilariously dumped out of the truck they’ve hitched a ride with. They find themselves in front of Door 23, at the bottom of Koopa’s tower. I am going to pretend I didn’t notice that the truck dropped off the garbage at the tower instead of picking it up.

Meanwhile, Koopa is ordering a pizza. I wish to relay the ingredients requested, verbatim:

The Koopa Special

… with pterodactyl tail, dino, lizard…

… hold the mammal…

worms, and, uh, spicy.

From this, I can derive one of two possible conclusions: Koopa is not especially concerned about the risks associated with cannibalistic practices, or the mentioned risks magically do not apply to species other than humans. Mm, delicious sponge brains.

The Mario brothers find themselves in a maintenance room; Mario quickly deduces that they’re at the heart of the tower’s heating system, and suggests that they shut it down to create some havoc. Luigi stupidly grabs a pair of incredibly hot knobs, and Mario lectures him about tools and shit for a moment before an alarm sounds. Distraught, the two scramble to find an escape route.

Mario ambiguously states that they shall ascend the tower ‘like Marios’. Given no particular context, the audience has no idea what to expect. What we get is the plumbers, in an elevator, in these fantastically familiar outfits:

WE IS TEH SUPAR MERIO BRUDDERS

The brothers begin their ascent; on the first stop, a pair of Goombas walk onto the elevator and Luigi quietly bitches about what a stupid idea this was. On the next stop, the brother shuffle around as the opposite doors open for even more Goombas.

Like drinking on a Tuesday, we leave those problems behind.

Iggy and Spike have been brought before Koopa; Lena deigns to inform him that they’ve been “preaching (his) overthrow”. The idiots throw a few highbrow words for asshole in his direction, and he reminds them that it doesn’t really make a difference whether or not he’s a nice guy.

Lena chooses this inconvenient moment to stammer out that the “wants” Koopa; what she means is that she has the meteorite piece, and she has decided to assist Koopa in dominating the human dimension. What falls out her mouth is insufficient to distract Koopa from the alarms going off all over his residence, and he gets pretty snippy with her. She gets pissed, presumably because she’s on her rag or something.

Meanwhile, the Mario brothers crawl around on the floor to avoid a continuing influx of Goombas. Once the doors close again, Luigi devises a brilliant plan: Get the Goombas dancing to the elevator music! Somehow that will be a useful distraction. Mario is initially distraught, but calms down when it turns out this stupid idea is actually working.

We cut to Daisy fucking around in the same room she occupied previously. Toad the Goomba waltzes in, offering her a deliciously enormous steak; here, we discover that Daisy is a picky bitch and a vegetarian, claiming not to “eat anything with a face”. This scene actually made me like Samantha Mathis slightly less as a person and an actress. She requests vegetables; Toad’s hysterical excitement at being able to do something for the pretty lady is almost touching.

So Lena walks in, orders Toad out of the room, and acts pretty neurotic. Daisy, being a perceptive young lass, observes that Koopa’s mistress is displeased with the princess’ presence; she pleads with Lena to help her escape. Lena, being a cold and aggressive bitch, momentarily pretends to consider before pulling a knife.

"I cut you soooo bad!"

Before she can finish the job, Yoshi grabs her with his tongue; Daisy escapes, and Lena stabs the dinosaur. She follows the princess.

We return to the Mario brothers; they climb out of a door in the elevator’s roof as the Goombas dance obliviously. The carriage reaches the 63rd floor, the door opens, and an incredibly douchey Goomba yells at everyone for dancing. He was kind of a prick about it, frankly.

Daisy runs through the halls, apparently not pursued. She takes a corner, and runs into Toad – bearing a plate of admittedly delicious looking vegetables.

VEGAMABOLS!

Hesitating only a moment, Daisy makes a run for it; followed by Toad, she crosses paths with the Goombas escorting Koopa’s idiot cousins. They beg for assistance in making an escape, but Daisy ignores them and turns to leave.

The escorts light Toad up with a flamethrower, nicely searing his dinner. Distracted, they allow their captives to escape. Daisy, being emotional and decent, insists upon grabbing the nearest fire extinguisher and saving Toad from his burneous demise.

Spike commandeers the extinguisher, and with Iggy they grab the princess and dash, leaving a thick cloud of delicious white vapour. On the way, they explain (or at least claim) that they have been royalists in support of her family since the beginning of Koopa’s reign. Daisy demands that they tell her about her father, this being a particularly inopportune moment. With the Goombas thoroughly distracted and none too bright, they drag her into a side chamber.

This is the same room in which Koopa talked to some fungus, an activity not normally associated with the sane. It seems that the room, or the presence of the fungus, must produce some madness in its victims. In fact, this would explain why the citizens, constantly in contact with the fungus, don’t behave like good, God-fearing white Americans. It even addresses Koopa’s megalomania, making it possible for this to be a dreamy story in which even the bad guys turn out to be pretty cool dudes with some fucked up problems, who ultimately triumph over their brain-chemical diseases.

Iggy and Spike debate over who should tell her the truth about the fungus, obviously, then

for fuck’s sake. So the fungus is her dad, the old king, and all that shit. This whole fucking time they had me excited about the Fungus Conspiracy and the true fate of the king. It turns out the answer to those questions totally fucking suck. Fuck.

She… eh… it… they have a moment. She actually touches the disgusting atrocity which is apparently the heart of the king’s fungus. She talk to it for a while. I twitch, and my erection disappears. Samantha Mathis is anathema to my libido now; she has betrayed me for fungus, and I hope she fucking dies in this movie.\

Iggy and Spike fuck off, making up some bullshit about fighting and running away on a certain day or something. Fuck it. Princess Cheap Trick Worthless WHORE BITCH

sorry, i got out of line. I’m over it, I’m okay. I can handle this.

It's, like, totally an Oedipus complex or something.

We finally get to see the Marios again, running into a set that looks like the innards of an unfinished building. They stop abruptly at the edge of a pit; knowing somehow that they have to get to the vent on the other side, Luigi foolishly attempts to make the jump. His brother, of course, loses his shit.

Getting his belt caught on an overhanging hook, Luigi then proceeds to convince Mario that he is flying; amazingly, Mario actually goes for it, and makes the leap. Suffice it to say, there was only one hook.

Rest In Peace, Mario. Toad wrote a new song for the funeral.

Duh duh dun, dah doo

When an angel falls on you,

From way up in the sky,

You just got to hold on to that-ah

Kickass pizza motherfuckin’ pie

Oh yeah

Oh yeah

Mario was my best god-damned fucking-guh…

Friend and Luigi too

Here is my favourite screen capture from a part of the movie you know nothing about, because I abruptly and trickily ended this review early. Were you seriously still reading this? Just go rent the fucking movie, for the love of Vishnu.

Can you find something wrong with this picture? If so, please post it in the comments. It's a highly sought-after government secret.

This article has viciously abused a grand total of nine thousand seven hundred and ten words; this count includes pictures, presuming that size has no effect on their word value. Also, I was ignoring their decidedly non-corporeal nature.

The amusing thing is that, even without this additional sentence, the above count would have little chance of being correct; the number of words required to write the number didn’t match up, so I really have no idea. I erased the calculator memory and I don’t have time to deal with this trivial shit right now.

We left our heroes dangling from an enormous fungi-booger in some God-forsaken desert. With similar carelessness and disinterest, the film does much the same as we witness Iggy and Spike interrupting Koopa’s mud bath to inform him of the Mario brothers’ location. Koopa inquires, justifiably, as to why they would waste time reporting the facts when they’re supposed to be out capturing the brothers anyway.

The extent of their mental ineptitude is thoroughly demonstrated:

"My legs seem to have met with unexpected resistance!"

Lena expresses her discontent with their presence, and Koopa orders them to wait outside. He then instructs Lena to fetch the princess for him; she rankles visibly at this prospect, and makes more obnoxious lizard sounds.

Like a good little lapdog, she goes straight to the holding barracks and provides us with some long awaited plot exposition: Daisy is the princess OMFG! Everyone is really surprised about that shit, except for the audience.

We cut to the devo chamber, where Koopa is bitching about how fucking stupid his cousins are. Simon finally gets to turn the knob all the way to ‘Evolve’; regrettably, we are unable to witness his reaction to this glorious event.  Iggy and Spike come out of the machine still incredibly stupid, with absurdly expanded vocabularies with which to describe their fucking stupid ideas. They try to convince Koopa that they should just hang out at headquarters and ‘devise a plan’, which presumably means ‘go to the bar’.

Koopa is not fooled, but remains fairly apathetic. It’s clear that he wasn’t expecting much return on his investments in the two idiots. He evenly instructs Iggy and Spike to find the plumbers, stating that he will personally kill them both if they fail again. This is apparently all the motivation the retards require.

This gentleman has an oddly asymmetrical face. It makes me think about what a piece of shit my body must be, and I want to gouge my stupid eyes out and replace them with creepy marbles. I found a dog skull one time and it made me feel the same way. Should I see a doctor?

We then get to see Daisy in a hot purple dress, sitting on a chair that appears to be designed to pierce the hymen. Ask the prop department, I don’t fucking know. Lena arrives to be incredibly passive-aggressive; we also find out that the old monarchy was probably a lot more popular than the current regime. Lena establishes herself as a power-hungry bitch who clings to Koopa purely for her own interests.

Lena fucks off, and Daisy sits around for a bit.

For a moment, we join the Marios again as they trudge through the dunes in the heat of the day. Mario bitches and complains about some shit, and then we move on.

Koopa briefly discusses with his police chief how awesome it will be to de-evolve the humans, fiddling with what appears to be a spray-painted SNES ‘rocket launcher’ gun. We are led to assume that this is the ‘hand-held de-evolution gun’.

Then Lena arrives, pissy as usual, and informs him that the princess is ready.

Daisy is just hanging out, and we see a kick-ass dinosaur puppet creep out from behind the couch. I reckon this guy was the most expensive part of the whole fucking movie. Koopa is creeping around in the meantime; as Daisy stoops to pet the plastic dinosaur, he emerges from the shadows and implies that the cute little dude is a vicious killer when provoked. We also find out that this is Yoshi – savour it, ladies and gentlemen. He appears only three times more in this film, and could easily have been left out entirely.

Daisy guesses, correctly, that she has just met “the great Koopa”. He reaffirms this, and explains that he is the ruler of “a few miserable streets and an endless desert”. This is demonstrated as he spins a globe with a single, small city at the pole.

This brings up an important question:

How fucked was dinosaur land before Koopa’s reign? It seems outrageous that he would be able to decimate the entire planet in the twenty years that have elapsed since he took power, so I tend to assume that the previous King was similarly unscrupulous with regards to the environment. To be fair, the dinosaurs would likely have become ‘civilized’ much earlier than humans. It’s possible that the planet was in ruins generations before Koopa was born.

Koopa slams a few shots and gets all creepy on Daisy’s ass; the conversation amounts to “I will trade you sex for a place at my side.” As he moves in for the kiss, his face briefly gets ‘lizardy’, presumably a side-effect of his botched de-evolution. The princess freaks out, and Koopa gets all depressed and orders her away until he has a use for her.

Yoshi!

We move on to Iggy and Spike attempting to spy on the Mario brothers; having spotted the plumbers, they attempt to tail them in a crude-looking dune buggy. Proving that highly evolved brains don’t help with being stupid, they drive it off a cliff accidentally and alert the brothers to their presence. Mario and Luigi, brandishing tools, come upon the pair sitting waist-deep in mud.

Iggy and Spike confidently inform them that they are under arrest by order of Koopa; we instantly cut to the idiots tied back to back, with tiny dinosaurs nipping at their fingers. The Marios threaten to leave them for dead unless they reveal Daisy’s location. The idiots demand the shard.

Ultimately, the lot find they must come to an agreement. Iggy and Spike explain that the rock is a piece of the dino-killing meteor, and upon being reinserted, the two dimensions will merge and Koopa will annihilate the human race. The brothers admit they no longer have the rock, but Iggy and Spike instantly recognize the thief they describe:

Big Bertha, the red-spike bedecked woman from the beginning of this little misadventure. Apparently she’s the bouncer at a place that is actually called ‘The Boom Boom Bar’. Given how excited the morons are about this revelation, it’s clear they spend a great deal of time at said bar.

Then we cut to Daisy, convincing Yoshi it’s no use to chew on his chains. They buddy up and shit.

Iggy and Spike have devised a brilliant plan; the four shall infiltrate the city with a garbage truck. They kick the shit out of the driver and his assistant in the middle of a huge landfill plagued by trash fires, then make their way to the bar.

Descending the entrance staircase, the Mario brothers complain about the incredibly ugly suits they’re wearing. Iggy helpfully informs them that they belonged to his ex-wife, and Spike proudly admits that they sometimes go out on dates wearing those same outfits. I threw up a little bit, because no clothing should be that loud.

We get our first look at the bar; this place kicks ass. It’s built directly over the streets, with only a grated floor between the patrons and the car accident that occurs as we watch Bertha saunter into the establishment. There are hot bitches in bikinis and whore stockings, tons of weird makeup, and probably a few dudes in drag. In short, I would drink here alone to avoid the company of people who think watching sports constitutes a hobby.

At the coat-check, the brothers surrender their tool belts; unfortunately, this makes their profession quite obvious and the desk girl opts to inform the authorities as Mario and Luigi waltz unwittingly into the club.

We briefly watch the club-goers doing a square dance; this part of the film almost forced me to turn it off, because all the dancers do that lizard-head-shake-thing with a rattlesnake noise in time to the music and I shit my pants instantly.

Iggy and Spike assume that their work is done; they sit at the bar and get trashed, making disparaging remarks about Koopa. Their sudden change of heart seems vastly beyond their intellect, but at this point I had already begun to suspect that their bumbling was an elaborate cover.

Mario suddenly spots Bertha, and moves in for the kill. She decks him and fucks off. Mario, knowing exactly how to treat a lady, grins and jumps right back in there; he asks her to hit him again, complimenting the fluidity of her technique. She gets totally wet, and tells him, “Dance with me – I’ll hit you all you like.” Let me say it now: Bertha is not a woman I would want as a dom. I think the prospect alone would be enough to send me into cardiac arrest.

They dance for a bit, and we get to watch Hoskins go bobbing for meteorite shards in Bertha’s grossly excessive cleavage. I swear you can actually smell the heavy perfume.

"Yarr! I be the cleavage pirate! Fear me swashbucklin' wheys!"

Calamity and woe! Lena shows up with an entourage of Goombas; she places Iggy and Spike under arrest. In the commotion, Mario and Luigi devise a football play to get out without being apprehended. This fails miserably as they toss the meteorite piece around, and it ends up on the floor between the grating and Lena’s boot. Iggy and Spike are dragged off, and the Marios are left alone and short a major quest item.

They run to the coatroom, where Bertha has decided to help out. She puts the desk girl on fist-flavoured ice and then holds the door against a pair of moronically persistent Goombas as they attempt to smash the door in.

Taking instruction from Bertha, the brothers each grab a pair of boots similar to the ones she flew away on at the beginning of the film. Along with a pair of milk crates and a skylight, this makes for a perfect escape plan. With a parting kiss between Mario and Bertha, our heroes are off.

ENGAGE

The brothers are thrilled with their successful evasion of the authorities. Luigi notices another tiny bomb suspended by the fungus. This time, he grabs it for later entertainment. Goombas appear to cause trouble, and the police are apparently on the scene as well. Trapped in the middle of a catwalk over the street, the brothers jump gracefully into another garbage truck. They debate over how to infiltrate Koopa’s headquarters, which amounts to Mario being a pussy and giving up while Luigi maintains delusions that a good attitude is enough to get anything done.

I conclude that I need a week of binge drinking before I continue.

(continued in part FOUR, yes FOUR of three)