THE SUPER MARIO BROS. MOVIE (2023) *** ½

I got a Nintendo for my tenth birthday, and from then on, I was a die-hard video game nerd.  Much of the reason for my gaming addiction was because of Super Mario Bros. (and then later, Super Mario Bros. 2 and 3).  After the disastrous 1993 adaptation starring Bob Hoskins, I didn’t think anyone would attempt to make another movie based on the property again.  Thanks to Illumination Entertainment and directors Aaron Horvath and Michael Jelenic, The Super Mario Bros. Movie should be a blast for fans of all ages.  

Now, anyone who wasn’t practically born with a Nintendo controller in their hand or isn’t under the age of ten will probably remain befuddled by all this.  The Super Mario Bros. Movie isn’t out to court new fans or win over critics.  It’s a nostalgic, fast, and fun tribute to one of the greatest video game icons of all time.  

Mario (the voice of Chris Pratt) and Luigi (the voice of Charlie Day) are a pair of plumbers who start their own business.  On their first day on the job, they are sucked down a pipe and wind up in the Mushroom Kingdom.  The evil Bowser (the voice of Jack Black) wants to marry Princess Peach (the voice of Anya Taylor-Joy) and take over the kingdom.  When he kidnaps Luigi, it’s up to Mario and the Princess to rescue him.

The only real change from the video games is that Luigi is the one who is captured by Bowser instead of the Princess.  I guess they had to make at least one 21st century concession.  Fortunately, turning the Princess from a damsel in distress to a capable badass who teaches Mario the ropes of the Mushroom Kingdom wasn’t such a bad idea.  The only problem is that it keeps the brothers apart for the bulk of the picture.  This is really my only qualm about the movie.  Thankfully, once they are reunited, they kick ass like only the Mario Bros. can.  

One of the best sequences is when Mario is forced to fight Donkey Kong (the voice of Seth Rogen).  It’s scenes like this that breathlessly capture the fun of the games and remind us why we fell in love with them in the first place.  My favorite part though was the extended Mario Kart sequence that plays like a kid-friendly version of Mad Max.  The action in this sequence is fast-paced and fun.  If you’ve ever played Mario Kart, you’ll enjoy seeing it fleshed out and projected bigger than life on the big screen.  The score is great too as the orchestrated versions of the familiar and beloved Mario themes sound like a million bucks.  

The film is also rife with Easter eggs and in-jokes for Mario fans.  Horvath and Jelenic were also the ones responsible for the terrific Teen Titans GO! series, and this flick shares a lot of that show’s anarchic DNA.  Hopefully, they’ll return soon with a sequel.  I can’t wait to see what they’ll have up their sleeves next time.

TUBI CONTINUED… THE AMITYVILLE MOON (2021) ** ½

A church in Amityville runs a halfway house for wayward girls.  When the various delinquents, runaways, and junkies begin disappearing, a detective (Trey McCurley) is called in to investigate.  He figures out all the disappearances have occurred during a full moon.  Could a werewolf be responsible for the missing girls? 

Other than the opening title card that states the location of the church, there’s nothing here connecting The Amityville Moon back to the other Amityville movies.  Really, it feels closer to an unrelated Howling sequel than an unrelated Amityville sequel.  If we were judging this on the merits of an unrelated Howling sequel, it would earn relatively high marks (as far as Howling sequels go, that is).  The central premise is similar to Howling V (it’s a whodunit movie where a werewolf is the culprit), and the effects aren’t too bad.  While the werewolf make-up isn’t exactly great, I always prefer seeing a guy running around in a scruffy wolf suit rather than some shoddy CGI shit, so I’ll take what I can get.  We only get one werewolf transformation scene (which makes sense since the werewolf’s identity is kept secret until the end), but it’s a decent throwback to the old school days of werewolf filmmaking.  Crepe hair grows, rubbery fingers stretch out and extend, ears become pointy… shit like that.  The gore is OK too. 

The acting ranges from passable to solid.  The actresses that make up the residents of the halfway house do a fine job, especially in their group therapy scenes.  McCurley makes for an acceptable hero too, all things considered. 

I can’t quite go to bat for this one.  That’s mainly because it runs out of steam before it crosses the finish line.  I do have a tendency to grade these fake Amityville movies on a curve.  If it was a “regular” horror flick, it probably would’ve gotten **.  When watched within the confines of a month-long fake Amityville sequel marathon, you realize it’s not too shabby.  Since it’s certainly more competent than your average Amityville rip-off, a ** ½ rating is more than justified.

TUBI CONTINUED… AMITYVILLE IN THE HOOD (2021) * ½

A couple of gang members find a stash of possessed weed in the old Amityville Horror house.  Dollar signs in their eyes, they sell it on the street, and their customers soon become kill-happy possessed zombies.  Now, this certainly sounds like a can’t-miss scenario.  Somehow, writer/director Dustin (Zombi VIII:  Urban Decay) Ferguson manages to screw up a potentially great idea (Okay… “great” for a fake Amityville movie) in record time.

The set-up is silly, but fun, which is really all you can hope for from a fake Amityville movie.  Although some of it feels a little rushed, there’s no denying the potential of a plot about weed that’s been laced with Amityville evil and turns its users into zombies.  The problem is that once the boring detective character is introduced, everything stops on a dime(bag).  By the time he starts interviewing suspects and witnesses and they start relating flashback after flashback, it just sucks all the fun right out of the picture.  It takes seemingly forever for the film to get back on track with the killer weed plotline, and once it finally does, it craps the bed in spectacular fashion.  To make matters even worse, the editing during the final confrontation is nearly incomprehensible.  

I didn’t realize it when I put this on, but Amityville in the Hood is actually a sequel to Amityville Toybox and Amityville Clownhouse.  If I had known that beforehand, I would’ve watched them in order.  Scenes from both those films are recycled and reused as flashbacks to fill out the second act, and one clip even includes a cameo by A Nightmare on Elm Street 2’s Mark Patton.  If you ask me, the flick needed less scenes from other movies and more of the Amityville ghost ganja shit.  

Despite the plethora of missed opportunities, I still say that any movie that features a homage to the awesome Amityville 3-D poster in the pre-title sequence can’t be all bad.

TUBI CONTINUED… AMITYVILLE IN SPACE (2022) ** ½

A priest performs an exorcism at the Amityville Horror house.  When he realizes he can’t destroy the evil, he banishes it “away from the Earth”, which causes the house to uproot itself and fly off into outer space.  Prospective filmmakers take note:  THIS is how you start a movie!  

A thousand years later, a spaceship stumbles upon the house floating in space.  The crew boards the ship and find the priest who performed the exorcism centuries ago still alive.  They bring him aboard their ship, but the evil entity that possessed the house also sneaks on board and begins to play mind games with the crew.

Amityville in Space is proof that the spirit of Ed Wood is alive and well.  Writer/director Mark (Amityville Island) Polonia didn’t have a dime to make this movie with, but he made it anyway, and some of his… shall we say… “inspired” methods of creating futuristic art direction are downright hilarious.  For example, the walls of the spaceship are nothing more than trash bags that have been spraypainted with glitter.  Also, the “cyborg” wears a costume that looks like it came directly from the Halloween clearance rack at Kmart.  The dialogue is rather choice too.  When the crew finds a Satanic pentagram floating in space, one astronaut quips, “I almost got a tattoo of that!”

Essentially, Amityville in Space is like a no-budget riff on Event Horizon, which was already kind of like a haunted house movie in space.  The opening strikes the right balance of tongue in cheek camp and outright goofiness.  However, things are noticeably less successful whenever Polonia tries to play it straight.  While he wrings as much from the premise as he can with the limited means available to him, the fun does dry up around the halfway mark.  

Although this was leagues better than I expected, I still can’t quite recommend it.  One of the biggest stumbling blocks is the villain, whose voice is so overly synthesized it’s hard to make out what he’s saying half the time.  (He sounds like Darth Vader speaking in slow motion.)  On the plus side, the final monster is quite hilarious looking.  After sitting through Polonia’s Amityville Island and Amityville Exorcism, I never would’ve guessed he could’ve made a movie called Amityville in Space this almost-but-not-quite worthwhile.  Hats off to him for proving me wrong.  

TUBI CONTINUED… AMITYVILLE COP (2021) **

What do you get when you cross Beverly Hills Cop with Maniac Cop?  You get this odd horror comedy from Gregory Hatanaka, the director of Samurai Cop 2:  Deadly Vengeance.  In fact, I’m pretty sure the production company wanted to call this Beverly Hills Maniac Cop, but they probably didn’t want to get sued.  Instead, they just slapped the public domain “Amityville” label on it and called it a day.  (Although there’s nothing that connects the plot back to the famous haunted house as everything takes place in Los Angeles.)  

Miller (Jason Toler) is a wisecracking cop who has a habit of getting in trouble with his superiors.  His latest assignment finds him investigating a series of homicides where all the victims have had their throats torn out.  Turns out, twenty years ago, a devil cult imbued a rookie cop with supernatural powers.  Now, he’s back on the streets killing people.  Eventually, the psycho supernatural cop crashes the New Year’s party at the stationhouse and starts picking off the detectives one by one.  

Since Hatanaka is drawing from such diverse inspirations, the film never quite gels overall.  That said, it isn’t boring, and it’s certainly a lot more fun than his recent spate of Emanuelle rip-offs.  The scant running time (it’s only sixty-nine minutes) also helps things go down smooth.    

Toler’s Eddie Murphy Lite antics aren’t exactly laugh out loud funny, but he has a reasonable amount of charisma, which compensates for some of the jokes that fall flat.  (Sample dialogue:  “You have the right to remain dead!”)  I’ll admit, it was fun seeing Laurene Landon (who was also in the Maniac Cop movies) popping up as the leader of the devil worshipping cult, even though it’s more of a glorified cameo.  Hatanaka regulars like Nicole D’Angelo, Chris Spinell, and Lisa London round out the cast, all of whom do what they can with the uneven, yet fitfully entertaining material.

TUBI CONTINUED… AMITYVILLE CHRISTMAS VACATION (2022) ** ½

Amityville Christmas Vacation is barely a movie.  It’s only forty-seven minutes long.  It’s shot in mostly one location using only a handful of actors on the lowest of budgets.  There’s almost enough of an idea here to fill a fake three-minute Grindhouse style trailer, and even then, that’s being somewhat generous.  

Some fake Amityville movies play it straight.  Some intentionally go for laughs.  Most of the time, the ones that play it straight end up getting more laughs than the ones that intentionally go for them.  This one has charm to spare, and even an occasional (intentional) laugh or two.  I guess what I’m getting at is that it’s far from the worst fake Amityville movie out there.  

Wally Griswold (writer/director Steve Rudzinski, the man who gave us CarousHELL) is a cop who wins an all-expense paid vacation to a B & B in Amityville.  The only other tenant is a ghost who must haunt and kill him.  Naturally, they wind up falling in love, because, after all, it’s Christmas.  

I’m kind of a fan of Rudzinski’s films.  If we are setting the bar at CarousHELL, then Amityville Christmas Vacation falls short of that marker, but it’s about on par with CarousHELL 2, which isn’t too shabby.  Sure, it has its fair share of gags that fall flat.  However, it remains relatively entertaining throughout, especially during the scenes that parody Hallmark Christmas movies. 

Rudzinski is basically a one-man show in this.  He gamely carries the movie while tossing off one-liners to no one in particular.  He kind of has a Bruce Campbell quality about him.  You know, the ability to be the only one on screen, and while utilizing little more than his plucky spirit, is able to successfully sell the cheesy dialogue and effects and make them work.  While I can’t say this is overall his best effort, I will be the first one in line should he choose to direct and star in Amityville Vegas Vacation. 

AMITYVILLE APRIL

Hey, Vacuumers!  This month’s theme is going to be Amityville April.  My task is to watch as many fake Amityville movies Tubi has to offer (and maybe even one or two “official” sequels).  I know I’m already running behind schedule, but I hope to post all my reviews by the end of the month.  So, pack your bags, folks!  We’re going to Amityville!