We all do stupid things when we’re 18. Some of us make a drunken mess of ourselves; some get pregnant; some get somebody else pregnant.
And some of us, like Chronicle writer Max Landis, write overblown, needlessly convoluted and ridiculously lengthy Super Mario World fan screenplays. Perhaps as penance, Landis has released his 436-page monster to the world, complete with lengthy disclaimer foreword explaining in exhaustive detail how it “really sucks”.
He’s not wrong there:
Yes, that’s Kirby sucking Wario (And his alter-ego-or-something Wallace) into oblivion. It’s stuffed with cameos from other Nintendo favourites as well, such as Samus (who shows up as Luigi’s secretary) as Landis weaves an alternate-universe clusterfuck that Mario succinctly ties up like so:
It’s like Mamet died then reincarnated via John Landis’s wife’s vagina.
You can download the whole thing, along with some old Mario fanart of Landis’s on his site.
Props to Landis for sharing this particular skeleton in his closet. It’s always fascinating to see the greenhorn misfires of high-profile talent, especially in a culture that perpetuates the myth that you’re a lost cause if you haven’t tumbled out of the womb spouting pure genius in every direction. Besides, as conceptually dopey as the script may be Landis’s writing style displays a definte raw talent that, to be fair, wouldn’t take long to sharpen: Chronicle was one of the more refreshing Hollywood genre outings of recent years, so there’s at least the comfort of knowing that he got better.
The funny thing is, with its self-serious tone, over-reliance on spectacle and loredumps and scattergun approach to character crossovers it feels uncomfortably in sync with contemporary Hollywood tropes. It takes only the barest skip of the imagination to see Zack Snyder or the Orci/Kurtzman Atrocity Roadshow coming up with something very similar. Call me cynical, but if Landis had let this thing out claiming it to be a satire of modern Hollywood’s approach to genre rather than the naive teenage fuckaround that it is, we’d probably all be applauding rather than snickering.
