It’s-a-me, Hornio: the two porn movies that Nintendo own the rights to
Thanks entirely to how 1993’s Super Mario Bros turned out, Nintendo became so fiercely protective of its most valuable properties that it would be decades before any of them were placed into Hollywood’s hands again, and even now, it remains a very rare occurrence.
As the first major mainstream movie based on a video game property, it was fitting that Bob Hoskins and John Leguizamo’s stint as the titular plumbers was such an abject monstrosity. For the last three decades, the console-to-screen translation has been fighting against the perception that it’s one of the most reliably terrible genres in all of film and television.
It would be another 23 years before a video game franchise intrinsically linked to Nintendo would serve as the backdrop to a blockbuster, and Rob Letterman’s Detective Pikachu actually turned out alright. It didn’t open the floodgates, though, but The Super Mario Bros Movie just might after it earned well over a billion dollars at the box office and gave rise to an in-development sequel.
Wes Ball’s The Legend of Zelda is on the way, too, but the dearth of iconic Nintendo titles coming to the screen indicates the company is still highly selective over handing over IP to be repackaged into mass-marketed entertainment. And yet, the perils of copyright infringement resulted in the organisation acquiring the rights to a pair of pornographic parodies, if only to prevent them from being released.
It doesn’t take a genius to figure out what Super Hornio Brothers and its sequel Super Hornio Brothers II are ripping off, with both coital copies being filmed to coincide with the release of the aforementioned Hoskins-fronted desire. Because he was a porn star with a moustache, Ron Jeremy invariably played the lead in both as Squeegie Hornio.
Following the template of the games – well, at least as closely as possible when copulation is the name of the game – Squeegie and his brother Ornio Hornio have to rescue a princess from the clutches of the evil King Pooper, who plans to enter the real world from his virtual reality plane of existence by way of some special semen that has mystical properties or something. Why? Nobody knows, and it’s not really something worth trying to figure out when it’s all about shagging at the end of the day.
Having been lost to the sands of time, there was a very long period where The Super Hornio Brothers franchise was believed to be nothing but an urban legend. It was eventually discovered the reason why nobody was entirely convinced they actually existed was because Nintendo had forked over the cash to acquire the rights and instantly buried them both in the vault, never to be seen again. Inevitably, the internet era sought to change that.
Legend proclaims that both instalments can be found in full for those brave enough to dive down a rabbit hole of internet seediness and find them, but the prospect of Jeremy as a sex-crazed handyman is hopefully enough to dissuade anyone from taking that plunge no matter how much of a Mario completionist they may be.