A high-impact fusion of martial arts mayhem, fantasy spectacle and video game mythology, the Mortal Kombat films brought arcade combat to the big screen with bone-crunching action, iconic characters and pure 90s attitude, helping turn a controversial fighting game into a global pop culture phenomenon. And hey — this set is just in time for the release of Mortal Kombat II!

Mortal Kombat (1995): The premise of the original 1992 Mortal Kombat arcade game was essentially Bruce Lee’s Enter the Dragon with a heavy dose of sorcery, severed spines and color-swapped ninjas. So, it stands to reason that the 1995 film adaptation should follow the exact same blueprint: a grueling martial arts tournament to the death with the literal fate of the cosmos hanging in the balance. Against all odds, the movie absolutely delivers the goods.

Director Paul W. S. Anderson (Soldier, the Resident Evil films, the Death Race remakes) was the perfect director for this film — it feels like the ’90s in concentrated form. You’ve got your hard techno beats, your neon colors, green screen early CGI and plenty of quips during the Kombat.

The realms of Earth and Outworld come together for the Mortal Kombat and create a battle to the death, with the provision that if Outworld wins Mortal Kombat ten consecutive times, its Emperor Shao Khan may invade the Earth realm.

Standing in his way are Shaolin monk Liu Kang, Hollywood action star Johnny Cage and a military officer named Sonya Blade (Bridgette Wilson, I Know What You Did Last Summer). Cameron Diaz was originally up for the Sonya role but got hurt during filming. Helping them is Raiden (Christopher Lambert, Highlander), the god of thunder and the defender of the Earth realm.

Along the way, we meet Princess Kitana (Talisa Soto, License to Kill), Kano, Sub-Zero (François Petit, who would go on to be the head trainer for the WWE in the mid-90s), Reptile (who is played by Robin Cooke, who is also in Picasso Trigger and China O’Brien), Goro and Jax. They’re all here to be part of Shang Tsung’s tournament.

The tournament itself delivers a superb rhythm of action, but the plot kicks into overdrive when Johnny Cage pulls off the impossible and defeats the monstrous Goro. Sensing total defeat, Shang Tsung abandons the rules. He kidnaps Sonya Blade—who up until this point had been a fierce, take-charge heroine, only to suddenly succumb to the “helpless girl in distress” trope of 90s cinema—and drags her into the desolate, hellish wasteland of Outworld to force a final confrontation.

Liu Kang and Johnny Cage pursue them into the dark realm. In a climax that heavily leans into the game’s lore, Liu Kang must overcome his inner demons, embrace his destiny as the Chosen One, and face Shang Tsung in a brutal, final duel. With a spectacular bicycle kick and an iconic “Flawless Victory,” Kang sends the sorcerer plummeting onto a bed of spikes. As Shang Tsung dies, the thousands of souls he had consumed over centuries are liberated, including the spirit of Liu Kang’s brother, finally bringing peace to the Shaolin monk.

Everyone goes to the Shaolin temple to celebrate, but the skies turn dark, and Shao Khan appears. With the voice of Frank Welker, he screams, “You weak, pathetic fools! I’ve come for your souls!” All of the good guys show their fighting stances, cue the Mortal Kombat theme, and we’ve set up the sequel.

Where this film truly gets it right is its unwavering respect for the source material. Better yet, it actually expanded the franchise’s lore. The movie introduced and popularized narrative concepts—like the explicit hierarchy of Shao Kahn, the distinct visual identity of Outworld, and the deeper backstories of Kitana and Jax—that the video game developers would actually adopt into the mythology of future games.

It is genuinely baffling that mainstream critics savaged this movie back in 1995. It is fun as hell, unapologetic and completely true to its inspirations. It operates as a video-game version of a classic Hong Kong martial arts flick: a glorious mixture of bastardized pop culture that serves as the ultimate guilty pleasure. Furthermore, it doesn’t look cheap; despite being decades old, the practical sets, rich atmospheres, and intense choreography still hold up remarkably well.

I don’t even want to tell you how many hours I put into the last Mortal Kombat game. Or brag that I know the difference between babalities, fatalities and friendships. The thing is, even if you haven’t played a single game of Mortal Kombat, you can still enjoy the movie. And if you love the game, unlike so many video game adaptations, you won’t feel let down. That’s actually high praise.

Mortal Kombat Annihilation (1997): Ed Boon, one of the creators of the Mortal Kombat video game, calls this the “worst moment” in the history of the franchise. Coming from someone who loved the original film and has played every game, I agree.

Christopher Lambert was seen as one of the highlights of the last film. He’s gone, replaced by James Remar (The Warriors). I always dislike whitewashing in movies, but Lambert was so game in his scenes and such an integral part of getting the last film made (Lambert’s great attitude calmed director Paul W. S. Anderson as he worked on his first big movie. While he had the highest salary in the film, he paid his own way to Thailand and shot all his own scenes there for basically free, just to ensure the movie looked better. Plus, he paid for the wrap party.) that this feels like a major loss.

In fact, only Liu Kang (Robin Shou) and Kitana (Talisa Soto) are played by the same actors from the previous film. Robin Cooke, who played Reptile, plays Sub-Zero here, with that fighter gaining a much larger role.

Did you like Johnny Cage last time? Lots of people did. Bad news — he’s killed seconds into this new film to get over the new bad guy, Shao Khan. He’s opened a portal from Outrealm to Earth (hey, wait — didn’t we just fight a tournament to stop that from happening?) and has brought back his queen (and Kitana’s mother), Sindel, from the dead.

Sonya Blade (now played by Sandra Hess, who played the cave girl in Encino Man) brings in her partner Jax, and they immediately battle Cyrax and Mileena. Then there’s Nightwolf (played by Litefoot, the Native American who also portrayed Little Bear in The Indian in the Cupboard), a shaman who will guide Liu Kang and Kitana toward defeating Shao Khan. Another fight between Smoke and Scorpion, with the help of Sub-Zero, happens, and Kitana gets kidnapped.

Raiden meets with the Edger Gods, who don’t really give any answers. I have several questions for them. Like, why are we fighting Shao Khan when we won a tournament to stop things like this from happening? And why is there a fight every ten seconds instead of character development like the first film? Or why didn’t you bring back the actors we liked in these roles? And why doesn’t the “Toasty!” guy show up?

Nightwolf makes Liu Kang pass several trials to gain the power of Animality, which allows him to shapeshift into a new form. He must pass the self-esteem and focus trial. The trial of temptation, where Jade tries to get into his karate pants. And there’s a third test, but we never get to it!  One assumes that he passes it, as we’ll see in the finale.

Raiden gives up his immortality to fight for Earth, which means that he needs to cut off his hair. Jade is a double agent, and while the good guys rescue Kitana, they still face tough odds. Raiden reveals that Shao Khan is his brother and their father, Shinook, is favoring his evil sibling. After a big battle, Raiden is killed at the hands of that very same brother.

Another lengthy fight sequence happens, with Motaro, Ermac, Sindel and even Noob Saibot all showing up.

Liu Kang then shows what an Animality is by turning into a poorly rendered dragon, a scene that makes this movie seem even more dated than the 1995 original. Luckily, the Elder Gods discover the shenanigans afoot and declare another round of Mortal Kombat.

Aren’t you glad we have Liu Kang on our side? He defeats Shao Kahn, allowing Raiden to return, as the Earth realm wins again.

Director John R. Leonetti would go on to be the cinematographer for The Scorpion King, I Know Who Killed Me, The Conjuring and the Insidious series before directing Annabelle: Creation and Wish Upon. He’s done great work in those films, but this film feels so much cheaper than the original. It’s weird because that film succeeded by transcending its junk-food origins, while the sequel just piles on way too much.

Originally, Paul W.S. Anderson decided to do Event Horizon instead of this film. He hated the results, and that’s why he’s stayed close to the Resident Evil franchise throughout its sequels.

It’s hard to hate a movie where alien monsters battle ninjas, so if you accept this one as goofy chop socky fun, it’s fine. But compared to the original—and with the rich mythology of the Mortal Kombat video games at its fingertips—this one really suffers. 

The Arrow Video release of these movies has brand new 4K restorations of the two films by Arrow Films and includes a collectors’ perfect-bound booklet featuring new writing on the films by Simon Ward and John Torrani; reversible sleeves featuring original and newly commissioned artwork by Matt Griffin and two double-sided foldout posters featuring original and newly commissioned artwork by Matt Griffin.

For the first movie, there’s a brand new audio commentary with director Paul W.S. Anderson, as well as another new commentary with comic book expert and podcast host Dave Baxter; interviews with Linden Ashby, cinematographer John R. Leonetti, producer Lawrence Kasanoff and designer and suit performer Tom Woodruff; Mortal Kombat: A Journey Behind the Scenes; on-set interview bites with the cast and director and B-roll footage; trailers and an image gallery.

The second movie extras include a new commentary with director John R. Leonetti moderated by filmmaker Gillian Wallace Horvat and a second commentary with comic book expert and podcast host Dave Baxter; interviews with Musetta Vander, composer George S. Clinton and stunt performer J.J. Perry, who played Cyrax, Scorpion and Noob Saibot; pn-set interview bites with the cast and director and B-roll footage; a trailer and an image gallery.

You can get. the 4K UHD and Blu-ray sets from MVD.

Godfrey Ho (using the pseudonym Joe Livingstone) is the only person who could make this, a movie that doesn’t just cross genres. It violently collides with them in a head-on wreck and invites you to laugh at the debris.

Because this is a classic IFD Films production, the plot is actually two entirely separate movies stitched together with Scotch tape and worse dubbing:

The footage Godfrey Ho actually shot) Tom Saunders (Robin Gould) is an American DEA agent. He’s trying to bust a ruthless drug lord named Drug Lord (seriously, that’s basically his vibe) who is smuggling narcotics using Chinese hopping vampires (jiangshi). Tom gets blown up by a rocket launcher. RIP Tom.

The footage Godfrey Ho stole or bought: A Thai action movie, Paa Lohgan (Against the World), about undercover agents, a kidnapped woman and some gunplay.

It all gets mashed together as a plan to save Tom and stop the drug-smuggling undead comes together.

Soldier #1: Now that Tom is dead, I want to use his body to create an android-like robot. I’d appreciate you approving my application.

Soldier #2: You’re assured of success?

Soldier #1: Yes.

Soldier #2: Okay, it’s approved.

The military decides to turn his corpse into a cyborg. Enter Robo Warrior. Instead of sleek, multi-million-dollar cybernetics, our hero is wrapped in what looks like dryer vents, tinfoil and a motorcycle helmet. He walks like he desperately needs to piss and shoots lasers that look like they were drawn directly onto the film strip with a Sharpie because they were.

What follows is an endless barrage of him walking slowly through the woods, hopping vampires exploding for no reason and a ghost bride who tries to seduce our metallic hero. It all culminates in a final battle where logic goes to die and art is born.

Obviously, this was used to rip off Paul Verhoeven’s RoboCop, but following the IFD house style of making a movie come together from tons of other elements, just not what is filmed.

Keep your ears on for the sound design. The hopping vampires make a bizarre, echoing boing-boing noise every time they jump and the gunshots sound like someone hitting a piece of plywood with a flip-flop. As for those vampires, traditional Chinese folklore says you can stop one by putting a paper talisman on its forehead. In Robo Vampire, you can also stop them by shooting them with a bazooka, which honestly feels like a solid update to the mythology.

So many IFD movies feature Toto’s “Robot Fight.” One would think this one should have that song.

Somehow, this film is both the prequel to Devil’s Dynamite and Robo Vampire 3: Counter Destroy/The Vampire Is Still Alive, which is also a Freddy movie. Never change, Godfrey Ho. Keep putting tinfoil Officer Murphy in every movie.

You can watch this on Cultpix.

Gekitotsu! Satsujin Ken is the story of Terry Tsurugi (the legendary Sonny Chiba). Terry isn’t a hero. He doesn’t have a heart of gold. He’s a mercenary, an assassin and a deeply unpleasant human being who lives in a world of pure, unadulterated machismo.

When a wealthy oil magnate dies, the Yakuza tries to hire Terry to kidnap the billionaire’s daughter, Sarai. Terry demands a king’s ransom. The Yakuza says no and tries to kill him instead. Big mistake. Huge.

Terry decides to protect the girl out of spite and greed, leading to a non-stop gauntlet of severed limbs, crushed windpipes and a climax on a rain-slicked ship that defines the word overkill.

The Street Fighter is pure, uncut 1970s grindhouse. It’s loud, it’s sweaty, and it has a fuzz-guitar-and-horn soundtrack that will make you want to buy a leather jacket and punch a wall. Chiba doesn’t just fight; he animalistically snarls, gasps, and hyperventilates before exploding into violence. If you’ve ever wanted to see a man’s teeth knocked out in slow-motion X-ray vision or an actual eyeballs-ripped-from-sockets moment, you are in the right place. In fact, the X-ray shot of a skull being crushed was achieved using a medical skeleton and some creative lighting. It became a staple of the franchise and was later homaged in games like Mortal Kombat.

If Terry Tsurugi sounds familiar, you probably remember Clarence and Alabama watching a Chiba triple-feature in True Romance (written by Quentin Tarantino). Tarantino later cast Chiba as Hattori Hanzo in Kill Bill.

The first film to receive an X-rating in the U.S. for just violence, which led the newspaper ads to scream NOTICE: The MPAA has rated this film unsuitable for viewers under the age of 17 because of its extraordinary fight sequences.

There are two sequels, Return of the Street Fighter and The Street Fighter’s Last Revenge, as well as the Sister Street Fighter spinoff series. There was another spinoff, Kozure Satsujin Ken, released in America by Silverstein Film under the title Karate Warriors.

Beyond its influence on Mortal Kombat, The Street Fighter would obviously be a major source of inspiration to Capcom. Their fighting-game franchise, Street Fighter, was originally going to feature a protagonist named Terry Sugury, but that name was changed in favor of Ryu and Ken. SNK would use the name Terry character in Fatal Fury: King of Fighters and with a character named Takuma in Art of Fighting 2.

This movie has a hero — kinda, we cheer for him — who rips another man’s dick clean off.

You can watch this on Cultpix.

If you ever wanted a collision of two absolute titans of mid-century exploitation cinema, Blaze Starr Goes Nudist is your holy grail.

First, you have Blaze Starr (born Fannie Belle Fleming), the undisputed Queen of Burlesque. Blaze wasn’t just a dancer; she was a master marketer and an American icon who famously caught the eye of Louisiana Governor Earl Long (a romance later immortalized in the 1989 film Blaze starring Paul Newman). She was known for her explosive red hair, her couch routine and a gimmick in which her G-string would literally catch fire, thanks to clever stage pyrotechnics. Blaze’s famous smoking gimmick was achieved using a hidden battery pack and a small piece of flash paper. She actually brought a version of her stage show to the film, giving audiences a taste of the act that made her rich.

Behind the camera, you have the legendary Doris Wishman. A true anomaly, Doris was a female director ruling the male-dominated, sleazy world of 1960s sexploitation. Wishman’s style is instantly recognizable, as she often shot without sound and dubbed everything in later. Watch as her camera stares at ashtrays, feet, light fixtures or the back of a character’s head while they are speaking to avoid having to match lip-syncing! It creates a dreamlike, disorienting and utterly fascinating watch.

Let’s be honest: nobody was buying a ticket to Blaze Starr Goes Nudist for the gripping narrative. The plot is a clothesline — pun absolutely intended — designed to do two things: showcase Blaze’s charisma and fill the runtime with footage of people living the nudist lifestyle.

The film falls squarely into the nudist colony documentary subgenre that was wildly popular in the early ’60s. Legal loopholes at the time allowed for onscreen nudity as long as it was presented as a healthy, educational lifestyle choice. So, Wishman gives us plenty of wholesome, naked activities, like naked volleyball, naked badminton and naked lounging by the pool.

Nudist colony movies are as boring as it gets, but it’s a boredom I invite into my life. A calming, serene boredom, a time when it seemed like all we had to worry about was sitting naked in the grass, which seems like a horrible idea.

This was filmed at the  Sunny Palms Lodge in Homestead, Florida. The same location was used for Doris’ The Prince and the Nature Girl, Diary of a Nudist, Gentlemen Prefer Nature Girls and Playgirls International, as well as E.S. Seeley Jr.’s Shagri-La, which stars Sammy Petrillo!

Blaze herself is incredibly charming here. She possesses a natural, easygoing screen presence that outshines the stiff, community-theater acting of the supporting cast. The story is simple. Blaze is tired of her agent, Tony —who is also her fiancé—running her all over the country doing her act, so she goes to a nudist colony to relax, using her real name—Belle Fleming—as an alias. She soon gets quite close to the director of the colony, Andy Simms, who is played by Ralph Young, the singing partner of Belgian-born Tony Sandler, performing as Sandler and Young. His songs “The Moon Is the Lamp of Love,” “Moon Doll” and “Hideout In the Sun” all appear in Wishman movies.

While the film has that distinct, low-budget Wishman grime around the edges, it’s surprisingly lighthearted, breezy and innocent compared to the darker, sleazier roughies Wishman would direct later in her career (like Bad Girls Go to Hell). It’s basically a 70-minute vacation video with a burlesque superstar.

Like most Wishman films, the audio was recorded entirely in post-production. However, Blaze Starr didn’t dub her own voice! Another actress was brought in to provide Blaze’s lines, giving her a slightly different vibe than her actual Maryland/West Virginia twang.

To keep the film from being seized by vice squads, Wishman had to adhere to the era’s strict censorship rules: plenty of bouncing and bare skin were allowed, but showing pubic hair was a one-way ticket to a courtroom. The cast spent a lot of time strategically standing behind bushes, holding volleyballs or framing shots from the waist up. You do get to see two dudes run, wangs swinging, however.

You can watch this on Cultpix.

This movie centers on a search party looking for a white goddess named Jane (Elisabeth Knowles), who went missing in the deep, dark jungles of Africa. Leading the expedition is Private Detective Hamilton Hornee (“the e’s are silent”; Buddy Pantsari)) who has been hired by the Bank of Wabash to find the lost child of explorers who were slain in Africa by natives 15 years earlier. If the child is alive, she will be 21 and inherit her father’s multi-million-dollar estate.

Hornee leads the expedition to find her, accompanied by his assistant, Jane (Julie Conners, Night of the Witches and the movie that made Lash La Rue undergo a decade of penance, Hard On the Trail). Along for the search are the cousins of the lost girl, Max and Dorris Matthews (John Alderman, who shows up in adult, 80s TV like Dynasty and The Fall Guy, as well as movies like Superstition, Malibu Express and Luanne Roberts, Prison Girls), who want to inherit the money for themselves. There’s also a zoologist looking for a legendary white gorilla named Stanley Livingston (Fletcher Davies). He has no idea that the ape is really a German war criminal hiding out. There’s also gossip columnist Tender Lee (Elizabeth Knowles, using the name Lisa Grant; she was also in Wild Riders, The Dark Side of Tomorrow and Beyond the Green Door).

Hornee hires Kenya Adler (Brainerd Duffield, who wrote The Treasure of Lost Canyon) as their guide. However, Kenya has crawled into a bottle and ends up leading them into the Meshpoka tribe, who instead of eating them end up being led by the lost girl, now known as Algona (Deek Sills; before exploitation czar David F. Friedman found her, she was Deborah Stills and living a double-life: working as a hostess at the classy Hyatt Regency by day and slinging tickets as a cashier at an adult theater by night. Friedman, always a man with an eye for talent and a tight grip on his wallet, peeled off a cool $1,000 bill to cast this gorgeous, lean blonde as Algona, the sweet, innocent, and utterly luscious white jungle goddess. She did the work, she looked fantastic doing it, and she even showed up to hit the premiere circuit in glamorous spots like Columbus, Georgia and Cleveland, Ohio. And then? Poof. She took her one perfect credit, married a guy in the record business and walked away.

What follows is an episodic, psychedelic march through the brush that shifts gears from broad, Borscht Belt-style gags to softcore highjinks without a single care for traditional narrative pacing. It’s the kind of film where the jokes land with a thud, but the sheer, relentless energy keeps you staring at the screen. You have to marvel at how a movie this proudly silly managed to get a full theatrical release back when the grindhouses and drive-ins were hungry for anything with a bit of exploitation edge.

Directed by Tsanusdi (Jonathan Lucas, who also has credits for choreogroahy on an episode of The Ghost & Mrs. Muir and directing credits for an adult film, Urban Cowgirls, a pilot for a Dean Martin-hosted series, The Powder Room and A Family Things, a special about pop group The Cowsills) and written and produced by Friedman, this was so popular that it was recut from an X to an R so that couples could see it. And at the First Annual Erotica Awards in 1977, Trader Hornee received a retroactive Award of Merit from the Adult Film Association of America and the award for the Best Adult Film 1966-1970.

Don’t think of this as you would in the adult post-VHS era. Friedman spent money on it, and cinematographer Paul Hipp (who would go on to work on Sunn Classics movies like The President Must Die and The Boogens, as well as classic exploitation fare like Devil Times Five and Grave of the Vampire) makes the Hollywood Hills look like a lush jungle vista. It helps that there are some real animals in this!

We may no longer realize that this is an adult remake of 1931’s Trader Horn, which in turn was remade three years later. The X version has more BDSM; this has the least sex of any Friedman movie, but so much nudity you won’t miss it. Truly, this is what joyous filmmaking looks like.

You can watch this on Cultpix.

ABOUT THE AUTHOR: Joseph Perry writes for the film websites Gruesome Magazine, The Scariest Things, Horror Fuel, The Good, the Bad and the Verdict and Diabolique Magazine; for the film magazines Phantom of the Movies’ VideoScope and Drive-In Asylum; and for the pop culture websites When It Was Cool and Uphill Both Ways. He is also one of the hosts of When It Was Cool’s exclusive Uphill Both Ways podcast and can occasionally be heard as a cohost on Gruesome Magazine’s Decades of Horror: The Classic Era podcast.

Official synopsis: New York nightclub The Matador becomes the site of a high-profile murder that attracts the attention of an obsessive detective, a TV news reporter, and an elusive being living outside the realms of time and space. Their stories converge with that of a new-age cult operating at the command of an ultra-intelligent supercomputer named Bolero. 

Writer/director Jonathan Rosado plans to blow you away all the way back to the halcyon days of seventies and eighties underground cinema with his trippy feature Matador Bolero. Shot on Super 8, the film boasts a cornucopia of exploitation cinema elements and feels like something unearthed when a modern excavation under a former 42nd Street grindhouse theater discovered it in a well-preserved film canister.  

Yes, everything described in the official synopsis takes place in one manner or another, but nothing is as simple or as crystal clear as that synopsis seems to promise. Matador Bolero feels more like a series of vignettes ranging from plot elements to topless peep show performances to blasts of psychotropic visual patterns to . . . well, we don’t want to give everything away. You’ll see, if you choose to take the ride. And you should.

The performances range from head-scratching to good but the cast members are all-in throughout. The three most recognizable names are genre stalwart Kansas Bowling, Jack Irv, and musician Yves Tumor. The Suede Hello provides an excellent score that is heavy on synthesizers and distorted electric guitar. 

Matador Bolero is not for everyone. For some it will be exactly the kind of unusual fare that they seek. For others, it may feel like an endurance test. Adventurous viewers seeking an offbeat slice of weirdness crafted by a filmmaker who made exactly the film he envisioned will want to check this one out. 

Matador Bolero opens in New York on May 22 and Los Angeles on June 11, 2026 with a national expansion to follow.