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Principal photography is just getting underway in Scotland on the Annabel Jankel-directed Tell It To The Bees with Anna Paquin boarding to star opposite Holliday Grainger. The period romance is based on British author Fiona Shaw’s novel that Jankel (Max Headroom, D.O.A.) calls “an unholy mash-up of 1950s social and magical realism.” Paquin plays Doctor Jean Markham who returns to her hometown to take over her late father’s practice. When a school-yard scuffle lands young…...

Our look at underappreciated films of the 80s continues, as we head back to 1988...

Either in terms of ticket sales or critical acclaim, 1988 was dominated by the likes of Rain Man, Who Framed Roger Rabbit and Coming To America. It was the year Bruce Willis made the jump from TV to action star with Die Hard, and became a star in the process.

It was the year Leslie Nielsen made his own jump from the small to silver screen with Police Squad spin-off The Naked Gun, which sparked a hugely popular franchise of its own. Elsewhere, the eccentric Tim Burton scored one of the biggest hits of the year with Beetlejuice, the success of which would result in the birth of Batman a year later. And then there was Tom Cruise, who managed to make a drama about a student-turned-barman into a $170m hit, back when $170m was still an...

The name Rocky Morton may not be familiar with many of today's film fans, but in the late 80s he was the co-creator (along with Annabel Jankel) of the cutting edge and hugely popular transatlantic satirical television series, Max Headroom (1987-1988). Martin and Jankel went on to co-direct Denis Quaid and Meg Ryan in D.O.A (1998) before being offered the chance of a lifetime directing the video game adaptation of Super Mario Bros. (1993). Unfortunately the film failed to impress critics, bombed at the box office and became renowned for its tumultuous behind-the-scenes exploits. Now re-released on DVD and Bu-ray (you can read our review here), we recently spoke with Morton about his experiences on the film.

★☆☆☆☆One of the earlier attempts to forge a creative and commercial symbiosis between the gaming and cinematic world, Super Mario Bros (1993) still stands out as a prime example of what not to do when trying to construct a watertight feature-length narrative on the foundations of a simplistic platform game. Effectively killing the filmmaking career of husband and wife directorial team Rocky Morton and Annabel Jankel (known for 1985's Max Headroom), the duo's approach of throwing everything at the screen and seeing what sticks results in a bloated, headache-inducing mess with little to engage anyone, even the intended demographic.

Stars: Bob Hoskins, John Leguizamo, Samantha Mathis, Dennis Hopper, Fisher Stevens, Richard Edson, Fiona Shaw, Dana Kaminski, Mojo Nixon, Gianni Russo, Francesca P. Roberts, Lance Henriksen | Written by Parker Bennett, Terry Runte, Ed Solomon | Directed by Rocky Morton, Annabel Jankel

Let’s be honest, Super Mario Bros: The Movie is not a great movie. It’s not even a great video game adaptation. As a movie-loving teen the film was high on my must-see radar, so imagine my disappointment when I eventually saw the film on VHS… However since then I’ve come to appreciate the film for the bizarre Sf-tinged adventure movie that it is, rather than an adaptation of my all-time favourite video game franchise.

A critical and commercial failure on it’s original 1993 release, Super Mario Bros: The Movie has, in the intervening years, become something of a cult classic. So much so that the out-of-print DVD...

Ryan Lambie Nov 15, 2017

As news of a new movie hits, we look at the remarkable things to spot in the infamous Super Mario Bros movie...

Adapting any art form into a movie presents a tricky proposition. It is, after all, easy to fall into the trap of being too reverential to the source material - whether it happens to be a play, novel or old television show you're making into a feature film, there has to be an element of invention, of reworking the source material into something that stands on its own as a piece of entertainment and - dare we say it - art.

This would go some way to explaining why Super Mario Bros., the 1993 feature-length adaptation of Nintendo's hit videogame series, only vaguely resembles the property on which it was meant to be based. Released in a busy summer season - one dominated by another flick with dinosaurs in it,...

In 1993 Super Mario was bigger than Mickey Mouse, and so Hollywood decided it would be a good idea to make a Mario Bros film. It wasn't

In the early 90s, Mario the plumber was more famous than Mickey Mouse. He was so famous he got his own film, and while the Super Mario Bros movie was the first-ever videogame adaptation, it was so bad it was almost the last. The game's hallucinogenic, 8-bit world of piranha plants, pipes and mushrooms made it an unlikely property for a live-action adaptation, and so it proved. Super Mario Bros has gone down in legend as the Heaven's Gate of the videogame movie, nearly destroying the entire genre singlehandedly.

And yet it all began so promisingly. In 1991, producer Roland Joffé, best known as the director of The Killing Fields, made a trip to Japan to secure the movie rights to Super Mario Bros. Tea...

Simon Brew Aug 14, 2017

Is the named director of a film the one who's actually been calling the shots? Here are 11 where a 'ghost director' may have been involved.

It's not that uncommon for a director to take their name off a film, and to leave the moniker Alan Smithee or whatever the current equivalent is behind. However, what's considerably rarer is when a film is released under the name of one director, but it's later revealed or rumoured that, actually, other hands were at work, either for a solid chunk or even the entirety of a production. That a film was, for want of a better phrase, 'ghost directed'.

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Granted, some of these stories that we're about to tell have little chance of ever being fully confirmed, but here are some examples of where the helmer...

Ian Scoones was a leading British special effects designer who began his career working for Hammer horror films in the early 1960s. He was also frequently involved with the long-running Doctor Who series, and supervised the effects for the first season of the sci-fi series Blakes 7 in 1978.

Scoones was born in London on 1940, and studied painting, photography and set design at the Medway College of Art. He began working in films in the early 1960s, joining Les Bowie’s effects team at Hammer. He was an assistant effects artist on such films as Scream of Fear (1961), Shadow of the Cat (1961), Night Creatures (aka Captain Clegg) (1962), These Are the Damned (aka The Damned) (1963), Kiss of the Vampire (1963), She (1965), Frankenstein Created Woman (1967), The Mummy’s Shroud (1967), and Five Million Years to Earth (aka Quatermass and the Pit) (1967).

He began working in television with the BBC later in the decade, where he...

Palisades Tartan is poised to release P , the company's first Asia Extreme release since acquiring the Tartan Films library in May 2008. The film streets on October 20th. P is directed by Paul Spurrier, a former child actor who appeared in popular Us television shows Max Headroom and Anna Karenina. While growing up in rural Thailand, a young and beautiful orphan girl is taught the mysterious art of dark magic by her grandmother. When her grandmother falls sick, young Dau travels to Bangkok looking for work in order to earn enough money for medicine. She lands a job as an exotic dancer at a go-go club. Hesitant at first and ridiculed by the other dancers, circumstances force Dau to become an adult before her time and ultimately becomes the most popular and eerily seductive...