15 Movies You Loved As A Kid (That Are Actually Terrible)

If there's any one thing cinema continually reminds us of, it's the overwhelming power of nostalgia. People love being reminded of the movies they grew up with and cherished in their formative years, regardless of whether or not they're actually any good.

It goes without saying that children have a low threshold for what constitutes entertainment - and that's not an insult, honestly - but as you become an adult and move onto more sophisticated works of cinema, you may not quite appreciate just how rubbish the favoured movies of your youth actually are.

Deciding to revisit those films you watched again and again as a kid is a risky business, because occasionally they'll reveal themselves to be timeless classics like The Princess Bride, but more often they've aged horribly and perhaps weren't really much good in the first place.

15. Super Mario Bros.

An early attempt by Hollywood to cash-in on the video game industry, 1993's Super Mario Bros. is what you get when a movie studio has zero respect for an IP and its fans.

But back when we were all kids, didn't this movie actually seem pretty awesome? It featured Mario and Luigi (Bob Hoskins and John Leguizamo) in live-action form for the first time, Dennis Hopper was a cartoonish hoot as the villainous King Koopa and the visuals were impressively elaborate.

Back when nobody expected anything from a video game film other than its mere existence, Super Mario Bros.' admittedly imaginative production design and off-the-wall visuals were like catnip to young Mario fans, but with age comes the wisdom that, of course, it's a rancid mess of a film.

The aesthetics are still interesting when viewed today, if entirely inappropriate for a live-action Mario movie.

Gone are the bright colours associated with the property in favour of dark, "gritty" visuals, not to mention a mind-numbingly stupid script, awkward visualisations of several classic Mario characters (especially Yoshi), annoying supporting players (Fisher Stevens!) and an hilariously bad sequel-bait ending.

It isn't some big secret that Super Mario Bros. sucks, but if you were a youngster in the early-to-mid nineties, it seemed a whole lot cooler.