Extended cut makes a bizarre movie even more bizarre...

I still have a soft spot for this film as a cyberpunk adventure if you can just completely remove from your mind any association with the video game series.

However, now that the Snydercut has opened the door for filmmakers to re-release their "extended cuts" it seems like we're getting lots of talk about movies having extended versions that maybe didn't even need them... like this film.

There's like 20 extra minutes of footage in the freely available extended cut of the Super Mario Bros., film and I can't for the life of me think as to what made the writers/directors think this would translate to being a good film based on a popular video game series that was mostly associated with kids under 10?!?!

The extended cut features some bizarre scenes, such as more of a focus on the scantily clad dancers in the Boom Boom Club, an extra kissing scene between Luigi and Daisy, and a few more extended cuts of some action and chase sequences. But I don't get how any of the extended scenes make the film better.

The car chase has a few extra crashes and a fairly cool shot of Mario and Luigi surveying the damage they've caused by their pursuers, but beyond that it's not like the film was served better by having those scenes in there.

The rap sequence with Iggy and Spike was fairly superfluous, but it did help explain why Koopa saw them as traitors, and their "enlightenment" to his despotic ways did help illuminate their switch to the "good" side.

In this case, I think that the movie worked better with the original theatrical cut. It's still terrible as a Super Mario Bros., film, but serviceable enough as a cyberpunk adventure film. I think the extended cut just kind of blurs the already messy direction of this cult classic into various areas where it didn't really need to go.