Audio "I am the Wendigo" Is Here...

Like horror? Like audio-books? In that case, you should check out the audio version of my short horror story "I am the Wendigo" on Amazon, Audible, and on iTunes.

Awhile back, I posted about how I might Kickstart an audio-book, specifically "Wendigo" since it was my best-selling story at the time. Not a lot came of it for awhile, until I decided to just shell out the cash myself and put together an audio version. After all, according to science-fiction legend John Scalzi, a significant chunk of his income comes from audio books and according to some of the writing podcasts I listen to, not having audio versions of one's books is "leaving money on the table." In addition to being my top seller it's fairly short, so it'd make a good test project for audio books.

My friend Loren narrated, while Dudeletter Podcasting handled the production over Christmas. After some tinkering so it matches Amazon's quality standards, it's available today.

If this is a success, I'm considering an audio version of my short Viking horror story "Nicor," which you can read online for free here. I've got the audio rights to "Nicor" and "Melon Heads," since the former was published three years ago and "Melon Heads" exists solely in independent Kindle form. My other short stories I'll be able to put in audio format when their exclusivity period with (Digital Fiction) ends.

So watch this space. I'll keep you all posted about future audio projects here.

The Geekly Oddcast On Reboots, Cartoon or Otherwise

In case you haven't heard, I'm in the new The Geekly Oddcast podcast with my friends Thomas, Nick, Daniel, and some other people I don't know as well. The second episode, which covers cartoon reboots, is the first episode I'm actually in.

Here you go!

Most of the programs we discuss on the podcast are shows I didn't regularly watch as a child, like Reboot or The Powerpuff Girls. However, I do remember regularly watching DuckTales despite, even as a preschooler or early elementary schooler, I found the theme song incredibly annoying.

(When I dropped that bomb that got a lot of people on the podcast aggravated. However, to prove my DuckTales cred, I will cite a VHS tape "Lost World Wanderers" Mom got me, which had "Dinosaur Ducks" where the gang visits a prehistoric lost world and "The Curse of Castle McDuck" where they encounter the Hound of Baskervilles. I also remember watching episodes featuring a robotic killer whale and Donald Duck in the Navy, as well as Magica de Spell and creatures that remind me a lot of Sirens from Greek mythology. My grandmother Quinn even took my little brother and I to see DuckTales The Movie: The Treasure of the Lost Lamp, which the Myopia podcast discussed here.)

The podcast got derailed some into non-cartoon reboots like Michael Bay's Transformers and Ninja Turtles films, which I enjoyed but the others didn't particularly like. That was probably my fault, since I didn't watch the main shows being discussed to the degree the others did. However, it did generate some good conversation and jokes. :)

However, there was one cartoon property I do have some familiarity with, and that was Thundercats. I remember watching the original show when visiting my grandparents, which would have been in the late 1980s, and I saw some of the Thundercats reboot on YouTube. Those episodes seemed a lot more thoughtful and sophisticated in terms of characterization and storytelling than I remember the original show being. Unfortunately, it didn't attract the attention of today's kids (despite being more anime in visual style), nor did it bring in the fans of the original. So it ran for only one season. :(

So if you like animation in general or you're a fan of the Myopia episodes dealing with animated movies, come check this episode out!

The Geekly Oddcast Is Here!

There's a new film and culture podcast out there in the world. It's called The Geekly Oddcast and was put on by the good people from The Brothers Herman and The Dudeletter. The first episode, dedicated to the subject of spoilers, premiered on Podbean a few days ago and further episodes will appear every two weeks. This episode features Daniel from The Corner Critic, a Myopia regular, as well as Myopia: Defend Your Childhood and Dudeletter overlord Nick and the merry Hermans.

The podcast is dedicated to "geeky" topics (hence the name). I'm in three episodes that I can think of--one dedicated to Star Wars, one to Harry Potter, and a third to the realities of working as an Internet writer. The first two have companion blog posts I've already written that will appear here once the podcast goes up.

So enjoy!

A History Podcast You Might Enjoy...

My friend Tom strongly recommended I listen to podcasts to make my lengthy work commute tolerable. I'd only listened to a few podcasts before, but given how listening to writing-related podcasts when I'm half-asleep in the morning is rather wasteful (I risked not remembering useful advice), I soon found comedy podcasts like Myopia: Defend Your Childhood were the ticket.

My friends Jon and Nick recommended a history podcast called The Dollop, in which comedians Dave Anthony and Gareth Reynolds discuss American history. I started listening and soon I was hooked. The very best episode I've listened to so far is entitled "Disco Demolition Night" and describes this incident in Chicago in the late 1970s. It is absolutely, positively hilarious. Of particular interest is Steve Dahl, a radio DJ and current podcaster who organized the event and was willing to make parody songs about darn near anything, including serial killer John Wayne Gacy.

Another episode of interest is "The Jones County Deserters," who focuses on a group of white men from a largely anti-slavery county in Mississippi who deserted the Confederate army and became a band of Unionist guerrillas. This band was the topic of the book The Free State of Jones, whose movie adaptation comes out this summer. The episode "Oil Boomtowns of Texas" is full of useful information I might apply to later installments of my Wastelands novel series. I also liked the "Battle of Brisbane" podcast Anthony and Reynolds did live in Australia--seriously, the two of them went to Australia and did a podcast that seriously mocked Australian men during WWII. That takes guts.

I'm often not fond of the duo's politics (one of them is convinced Bush didn't actually win Ohio in 2004 and one or both of them mocked Cold War union opposition to Communism in the "Hard Hat Riot" episode, forgetting that Bolsheviks aren't fans of independent unions), but they do point out in the episode "The Racist Record-Keeping Of Virginia" how government gathering information on citizens can be abused even generations later. That's something to keep in mind, especially in the age of Trump.

In any event, they're both pretty darn funny and I recommend this podcast for those who like good comedy, who like history, etc.

LEGEND OF TARZAN (2016) and THE BFG (2016) Trailers

Here are a couple more interesting movie trailers I found in the last couple days.



I first heard of The Legend of Tarzan courtesy of a comment a fellow writer made online. I forgot about it for a bit, then remembered it and hit YouTube to learn more. As far as I know it's been a long time since there's been any live-action Tarzan material--Casper Van Dien was in the box-office bomb Tarzan and the Lost City and there was a live-action WB television series featuring an American teenage heir to a corporate fortune instead of a British nobleman that if I remember correctly got canceled pretty quickly.

Based on the trailer the movie looks really cool. It seems to be set in the colonial era with all the steamships and Maxim guns (and even features the British Punch magazine from that era), but it also has all the unknown-civilizations stuff from an old-school Edgar Rice Burroughs story. Not sure when precisely it's coming out, but it certainly looks fun.

And now for the next one, which I was alerted to the other night by my friend Nick. It's a film adaptation of Roald Dahl's novel The Big Friendly Giant, which I remember reading in the third grade.



I like the trailer's style--they basically introduce the idea of giants and giants abducting people and end with the little girl saying that this is how the story begins. It's a good way of hooking the audience and getting them to want more.

Thinking of Starting a Newsletter...

I've been reading some advice on writing and marketing's ones books (like Your First 1,000 Copies) and listening to the Sell More Books Show podcast. Something that's come up a lot is to have an e-mail newsletter. My writing-group cohort Alex Hughes has a newsletter, as does small-press rock star (I didn't come up with that moniker) William Meikle.

I worked with MailChimp for a film-company internship and later for a client not long ago, so I've created an account with them. However, I have not yet sent anything out via said newsletter, in part due to a bunch of real-life obligations.

(I had the first inklings of the idea months if not years ago, but never got around to it. Let this be a life lesson--if there's a period in your life where you've got a lot of free time, don't waste it. I could have had the template set up by now and just plugged in new stuff as I went along.)

So, dear readers, I've got a question. What kind of content would you like to see in a hypothetical e-mail newsletter from me? The only ideas I've got so far are news articles gleaned from Twitter or from my blog (probably lots of movie reviews), and links to the film podcast I'm part of when new episodes appear. Alex has included original short fiction in her newsletter, which is certainly an option. Your First 1,000 Copies recommends I focus on what's in it for the reader, but a lot of the ideas there (like free workout tips) don't seem relevant to the content I can easily produce or the audience I'd like to build.

Let me know. I can take suggestions via comments on this post or via Twitter at @MatthewWQuinn.

Kickstarting an Audio "I am the Wendigo"?

The other day, my friend Nick suggested I use a crowd-funding mechanism like Kickstarter or Indiegogo to fund audio versions of some of my short stories. It would be (relatively) low cost and provide an additional source of funds and exposure. He also suggested I fit the stories into a singular universe, much like how the X-Files managed to fit mutants that ate people's livers, a living garbage avatar enforcing HOA rules, werewolves, a humanoid fluke creature, a shape-shifter who abused his powers for sex, and various other critters into an overarching plot involving a coming alien invasion.

This might not work for all of them, but since many of them are scattered throughout time (Nicortakes place during the Viking Age, while Melon Headstakes place probably around 2003-4), it's surprisingly doable. And there wouldn't even really need to be an overarching plot like the X-Files alien colonization thing--it's just that there's a lot more weird stuff going on the world than we're aware of. Stories that are part of a larger plot of their own like Illegal Alien would need to be left out, but it's not like I'm lacking for material.

My first thought was to do "Nicor," because it's one of my more thoughtful stories and because it has already been professionally published. However, then I did some research about recording audio fiction and came across ACX, which is basically the audio version of Amazon KDP that resulted from Amazon acquiring Audible. I created an account and did some poking around on the main page. ACX will get people in touch with voice-actors, after which one can negotiate a fee-for-service arrangement or royalty split. For the latter, having the sales to attract voice-actors is especially important.

That forced a revision of the plan, as "Nicor" has been a poor seller (probably due to still being available on the Heroic Fantasy Quarterly website and being part of Flashing Steel, Flashing Firecollection). Furthermore, creating an audio version would require either a large cast to play multiple roles or a smaller number of people doing many different voices.

However, I am the Wendigois my single best seller and requires only one voice actor, to play the wendigo itself. Hell, I could narrate it myself rather than hiring a professional voice actor. I could set a "stretch goal" to include a longer project like "Melon Heads" or The Beast of the Bosporus.

Possible incentives to give to people include a PDF of FSFF, print copies of FSFF, signed and personalized copies of FSFF, prints of the cover art, signed prints of the cover art, getting listed as a producer in the credits, etc.

So, my loyal readers, do you think crowdfunding an audio production of "I am the Wendigo" is a good idea? If it is, you'll probably see me digitally panhandling pretty soon...

Blast from the Past Movie Review: Lost In Space (1998)

Last night I went over to my friend Nick's for another movie screening for the podcast Myopia: Defend Your Childhood. That night's entree was Lost in Space,the 1998 television adaptation of the classic TV show in which the Robinson family, thanks to the treacherous saboteur Dr. Smith, ends up, well...look at the title. Here's the actual podcast.

So how did it hold up?

The Good

*As I said on the podcast, they tried to make a much more coherent space-opera universe. I remember the original series featured the Robinson family going on a "five year vacation," although some fact-checking online indicates that they actually were part of a serious colonization mission. Instead we have a dying, resource-depleted Earth and different political factions (the Western-dominated United Global Space Force and the Global Sedition, which comes off as some kind of Third World group) trying to take control of the Earth-like world intended as humanity's second home.

*There are some good callbacks to the original series, including the robot being voiced by the same actor and Dr. Smith getting Will Robinson's attention by tapping out "Danger Will Robinson" in Morse code. Several actors from the original show play different roles in the movie--mother June Lockhart plays the young Will Robinson's school principal, for example, while the original Major West plays the commanding officer of the new one.

*Although it took awhile to actually get into space, once the mission actually begins things are entertaining for awhile. The robot, sabotaged by Dr. Smith, goes on a rampage and wrecks the ship, and in order to avoid being pulled into the gravity of the sun, Professor Robinson and West have to trigger the hyperdrive even though, without the hypergate, they could end up anywhere. Well, alive in the middle of nowhere with a slim chance of getting home is better than being incinerated by the sun, so off we go...

*The Robinsons seem a lot more Genre Savvy than they were in the TV show. Professor Robinson can't bring himself to shoot the man who'd tried to kill them in front of his children, so they keep him locked up and only let him out when they explore a derelict ship (more on that later) because leaving him aboard the ship without supervision is more dangerous.

*I liked the depiction of middle daughter Penny as a rebellious semi-Goth who resents having to abandon her life on Earth to go on a decades-long space mission. Will apparently acts out in school (albeit in nerdy ways like hacking school computers for his own projects, not by being violent or obnoxious) due to his father never being around. This does deconstruct the whole "family gives their all for the species" angle because, let's be blunt, most people aren't that noble and self-sacrificing. Mother Maureen, although being more mature about the situation, makes her dislike clear in two scenes with her husband.

The Bad

*The movie is, simply put, incredibly boring. It's not as aggravatingly dull as Spawn was the other night, but it's still pretty darn slow. Nick said it's a "chamber drama" and given the amount of family issues they all have to work through, that is somewhat appropriate. However, the way it's done is booooring...

*The CGI has not held up very well for the most part. The opening space battle between the United Global Space Force and Global Sedition looks like a video game. Things get better when the lost Jupiter 2 encounters a derelict human ship with more advanced technology that's got a cute obvious toy tie-in monkey-like creature and a swarm of space-dwelling spiders (that presumably came off an alien ship found alongside the derelict that nobody really comments on), but they still don't look that good.

*The science doesn't make a lot of sense. The Jupiter 2 has a faster-than-light drive of some kind, but apparently without a completed hypergate the drive transports the ship to a random location. It seems rather hard to swallow that humanity at this point has figured out how breach the light-speed barrier but can't actually guide the ship anywhere. The end of the film implies that with the star-maps retrieved from the Proteus (the derelict ship apparently from the future) the Jupiter 2 will get to Alpha Prime well ahead of schedule, but that doesn't really make a lot of sense. We already have star-maps! Figuring out how to travel faster than light is the hard part!

It would've been better if the Jupiter 2 had an FTL drive that works as advertised and the robot's rampage caused them to jump to a random location before crapping out completely (if it uses space-folding, which the time-travel story later in the movie implies) or drop out of hyperspace someplace random (if it moves them in and out of some kind of parallel dimension).

*The acting is, as a general rule, not very good. The most egregious offender is Jared Harris, who plays the future adult Will Robinson. I liked him as Moriarty in Sherlock Holmes: A Game of Shadows, so I'm guessing he got better. Matt LeBlanc--yes, Joey from Friends plays West--also has some issues with his delivery as well.

*Dr. Smith has a lot of wasted potential. He starts out as a mole who programs the robot to destroy the Jupiter 2 for Global Sedition for money and then is nearly killed by a rigged communicator now that he's served his purpose. He's knocked unconscious long enough for the ship to blast off and when the robot goes on its rampage, he's forced to awaken the Robinson family to save his own skin. He talks about how it's in his self-interest in help Our Heroes because he wants to survive to return home, but he's pointlessly treacherous in two different scenes (trying to persuade West to help him take control of the ship, playing on their shared military backgrounds, and later taking several characters hostage). He's also a massive downer claiming they're doomed all the time, which in a situation like this is outright dangerous, not just annoying. He'd have been better as a Token Evil Teammate who's useful (and actually does useful things rather than being The Load) because it's in his interest but definitely not trustworthy.

*The story is too complicated. I'd have dumped the time-travel issue and had them simply forced to fight the aliens to salvage the derelict human ship to repair their own. Of course, the only reason said human ship is there is because of the time-travel plot, so maybe they come across the wreckage of a previous expedition or some Global Sedition explorers in the same boat. The latter could be really interesting--they either have to fight them for the parts to repair their ship or they have to team up like how the Federation and Maquis did in Star Trek Voyager to make it back home or fight off aliens. Given how Global Sedition tried to kill Dr. Smith after he wasn't useful to them anymore, there could be hostility from that quarter, which given how in the show Smith's various shenanigans made life more difficult that makes sense. Plus, if one of the Sedition men gets older daughter Judy's Bad Boy Syndrome going (she apparently sacrificed a lot of her personal life to the project and might resent that, even if she's not as vocal as her siblings), we could have some kind of love triangle involving him, her, and the flirtatious West. A Global Sedition true believer might also give some back-story as to what the group actually believes--the only time their ideology is discussed is that they apparently are planning to build their own hypergate and leave the "Western devils" on Earth to die.

*The friendship between Will Robinson and the ship's robot that plays a critical role later is really, really sappy.

The Verdict

Not as abysmal as Spawn, but still pretty darn bad. So much potential wasted by a mediocre script that, as was pointed out in the podcast, needed some major rewrites. 5 out of 10.

Blast from the Past Movie Review: Spawn (1997)

Last night I went over to my friend Nick's to watch Spawn for his podcast Myopia: Defend Your Childhood. It's was slated for October as part of a Halloween-themed month and behold, here it is!

So let me tell you about how I movie I saw when I was in middle school (it came out the month I turned 13) about secret agent Al Simmons who returns from Hell as a demonic uber-warrior to see his wife again after making a deal with the Satan stand-in Malbolgia held up...

The Good

*John Leguizamo plays the demonic Violator, who's the "evil angel" on Spawn's shoulder to speak. And he's clearly having a lot of fun playing this character in all his perverted scatological glory. Among other things he eats a rotten pizza writhing with maggots out of a dumpster (something the actor actually did, according to TVTropes), passes prodigious quantities of gas, and even performs a cheerleading number dressed in drag. Yes, watch it. It's hilarious. But he's not just a purveyor of lowbrow humor and bad advice to our hero--watch out when he gets really mad (it's around 2 minutes into this clip). He's probably one of the best things about this movie.

*The character of Cogliostro, implied in this version to be a Hellspawn from an earlier generation who had successfully rebelled against Malbolgia and now serves Heaven, had a lot of potential to be an interesting character. They didn't touch on it as much as they could have, but then again, it's not his movie.

*I liked how they introduced the evil Jason Wynn (played by Martin Sheen) and his henchwoman Jessica Priest. Jason is smoking prodigiously and putting out his cigarettes in an ashtray crawling with live scorpions, while Priest is getting really friendly with a tarantula.

*The fight scenes--with the exception of the battle between Spawn and Cogliostro and the Violator in Hell--are pretty entertaining. Michael Jai White, who plays Spawn, is a martial artist in real life, so that certainly helps.

*Spawn's widow Wanda and his best friend Terry are in an interracial marriage with a biracial daughter and nobody cares. Not even the villains. It's a non-issue.

The Bad

*How on Earth a superhero movie could be this dull is beyond me. The opening credits (which consist of a lot of stylized fire effects and the names of pretty much everybody involved in the film) take about ten minutes. During the movie and the podcast I joked that this is where a lot of the special effects budget went, considering how poorly the rest of the special effects held up. The movie drags in multiple places, so this isn't just a one-time problem. It is probably one of the most excruciatingly dull films I've seen this year.

*The special effects are abysmal, especially in scenes taking place in Hell. The computer animation sequences in which the characters go to Hell (Al when he's damned as a murderer and Al and Cogliostro when Violator drags them into Hell to fight him there) is really fake. And when we actually get to Hell, it looks like (as TVTropes put it), a bad Playstation One game. Malbolgia is even worse--when he talks his mouth doesn't move with his words. And by that, I mean it doesn't move very much at all. This isn't some 1960s Godzilla movie with poor dubbing, but much, much worse.

Yes, I know the movie was made in 1997, but guess what else came out in 1997? Men In Black.The Lost World: Jurassic Park. And this is after the glories of Jurassic Park (1993) and The Abyss
(1989). This movie cost $40 million to make, so it's not like there wasn't money available.. I've seen much cheaper movies with much better special effects than this. If they made Hell a physical set in the vein of What Dreams May Come and made the Malbolgia a physical puppet monster rather than CGI, that would have been a massive improvement. Sometimes a big puppet really IS better than CGI.

*Here's a really ballsy alternative course they could have taken that would have dealt with the above issue--make the movie animated. There was an an HBO animated series that premiered a few months before the movie did and lasted a few years. The movie could have been a tie-in with the animated series in the vein of Ducktales The Movie or even replaced it completely. The former course makes more sense business-wise even if it means the movie would be released a year later, since a TV show is a cheaper way to build a fan-base. Animation would save money on actors (since it wouldn't take up as much of their time to record lines as opposed to physical acting) and avoid the special effects fails of the live-action movie.

And even though animation for adults is pretty risky in the USA, this would have been a great time for it. This is years before Batman Begins,during which the Batman saga consisted of the much goofier Schumacher films. Hell, this is the year of Batman and Robin, which from what little I know of it was just absurd.

(Seriously, a Bat Credit Card? And here are some really bad Mr. Freeze puns too.)

This is also the age of the dark 1990s antiheroes. Spawn is the epitome of that trend, being an undead assassin transformed into some kind of hell-monster who does really awful things to really awful people. There simply were no films reflecting this trend, so even a riskier violent animated movie would fill a gap.

The Verdict

So much wasted potential. Don't bother with it. 3 out of 10.

Blast from the Past Movie Review: Super Mario Brothers (1993)

Over the weekend, I watched the 1993 film Super Mario Brothers with my friend Nick for his new podcast Myopia: Defend Your Childhood. Here's the actual episode for your listening pleasure...

So how exactly did a video game series with only minimal plot (the plumber has got to rescue the princess from the lecherous turtle-dragon thingie) get made into a film with a plot? Well, the movie starts out with a woman fleeing through New York to deliver a metal case locked with an exotic stone to a convent in the way one generally associates with foundlings being abandoned. She then goes down a subway tunnel, where she encounters Dennis Hopper in a military uniform with reptilian ridges on his head. Meanwhile, the nuns open the box and the egg inside hatches, revealing an infant girl. Twenty-some years later, the struggling Mario Brothers plumbers encounter a young blonde woman who wears the stone from the prologue as a necklace...

The Good

*I'll give them points for trying to create an expanded world/plot based on the game, even if what ultimately emerged was, well...we'll get to that. We have back-stories for the Mario Brothers themselves, both of them clearly have lives outside of being plumbers (the elder brother Mario has a girlfriend of his own, while younger brother Luigi is into sci-fi, unexplained phenomena, etc). The plot also involves people from our own world ending up in the parallel dimension even before the plumbers themselves get involved, which is pretty innovative.

*Dennis Hopper is having a lot of fun as the nefarious Koopa and it shows. He's the best actor in the bunch and the most entertaining with his distinctive voice.

*There's one scene that comes off as a parody of Thelma and Louise. I guess that's a Parental Bonus.

*The ending--a pretty blatant Sequel Hook--did pique my interest. Apparently it piqued enough interest that a comic-book sequel was written, much like what happened with the film Serenity.

*I did like Yoshi, even though he was too small for anybody to ride on. He's a pretty good example of pre-Jurassic Park special effects--a dinosaur puppet that moves by itself.

*There's an inside joke for gamers that I didn't notice at first--Mario, whose girlfriend was abducted by dull-witted minions who mistook her for Daisy, must dance with a very large woman based on the Big Bertha character from the games in order to retrieve Princess Daisy's necklace. Said dancing includes burying his head in her cleavage to try to snatch the necklace with his mouth. The outfit he's wearing in that scene is orange--much like that of Wario, the evil Mario counterpart who first appeared a year or so before the movie came out. Pretty clever.

The Bad

*The wider world they tried to create is ridiculous even by the low standards of children's movies. The gist of it is that the meteor that killed the dinosaurs instead created some kind of parallel world where dinosaurs evolved into a mostly human-like species dwelling in an isolated analogue to New York City in the midst of a vast desert. I'm guessing having "humans" who are descended from dinosaurs was cheaper than having casts of thousands of reptilian-looking creatures--and would allow for a love story between Luigi and Princess Daisy that's not icky. However, given how the The Super Mario Bros. Super Show! that featured live-action sequences in our world and animated sequences in fantasyland had come out years before the movie, it would have been better if they'd done a similar live-action/animation split. The world and characters would be much more faithful to the game, which would help prevent the problem I'll get to next...

*Animation would allow for the Goombahs and Koopas to resemble their video-game counterparts better instead of being huge deformed quasi-dinosaurs. Given the science fiction plot, the Koopas could be human-sized reptilian creatures and the Goombahs could perhaps be humans (or human-like creatures) wearing some kind of armor? The Goombahs and Koopas instead are these ugly semi-retarded things that look ridiculous.

*They made Mario the plumbers' last name, so it's Mario Mario and Luigi Mario. It's so inane. It'd be better if the "Mario Brothers" thing resulted from a misunderstanding, perhaps by the inhabitants of fantasyland when they meet the plumbers.

*Bob Hoskins is Mario and John Leguizamo is Luigi. Bob Hoskins is 22 years older than John Leguizamo. They do explain this with Luigi claiming Mario pretty much raised him--I had the notion they might be from a large Catholic family where the parents married young and didn't use contraception, so the older siblings might be married and have families of their own when the youngest siblings are born and if the parents died, the older siblings would look after the younger ones. However, it'd be simpler if they were closer in age. Luigi makes a joke about how Mario was like a mother to him, so if they made casting decisions in order to justify a joke that really wasn't that funny, well...I really hope they didn't.

The Verdict

Very poorly made and often inane, but it has its entertaining moments. Four out of 10.