The transition from the narrative focus of 2021’s Mortal Kombat to its sequel is nothing short of a franchise fatality performed on its own setup. By disposing of Cole Young — the original audience surrogate — so ruthlessly at the hands of Martyn Ford’s towering Shao Kahn, the film effectively signals that the training wheels are off. It’s a bold, albeit polarizing, subversion of expectations: killing the protagonist within the first act is a classic Poochie-died-on-the-way-to-his-home-planet move, but here it serves as a visceral promise that no one is safe.

Directed by Simon McQuoid and written by Jeremy Slater, this time the movie has course corrected to have the hero be Johnny Cage (Karl Urban), a washed-up martial arts actor recruited by the thunder god Raiden (Tadanobu Asano) to join a series of fighters for Earth, including Sonya Blade (Jessica McNamee), a reborn and reformed Kano (Josh Lawson), Liu Kang (Ludi Lin) and Jax (Mehcad Brooks) against the forces of Shao Khan’s Outworld army, which has Edenian princess Kitana (Adeline Rudolph), her mother Queen Sindel (Ana Thu Nguyen), a reborn Kung Kao (Max Huang) and Jade (Tati Gabrielle).

Yes, it turns out that Earth is about to lose to Outworld. Plus, Shao Khan hedges his bets with the aid of sorcerer Quan Chi (Damon Herriman) and Shang Tsung (Chin Han), who have sliced Raiden’s throat and taken his power to give Shao Khan immortal power. 

Somewhere in the middle of all this, Hanzo Hasashi/Scorpion (Hiroyuki Sanada) has learned how to transform Hell into his own paradise, getting past his anger at Bi-Han/Sub-Zero (Joe Taslim), until he learns that he’s still kind of alive and has also split into a second fighter, Noob Saibot. Then there’s Baraka (CJ Bloomfield) and the Tarkatans, who are the only ones who can get into the castle.

If you played the games — and yes, I have and still do — you’re going to find so much to love, like actual energy bars showing up at one point and a devotion to gory fatalities. I mean, Ed Boon shows up twice, once as a bartender, and his voice says Scorpion’s “Get over here!” It’s fan service, but why else would they make this movie?

That makes it kind of hard to rate. If you’re someone just walking in, I guess there’s entertainment here, particularly if you like martial arts movies. If you’re someone who knows how to pull off an animality or a friendship, you’re probably going to like it way better than the last one. Then again, nothing has ever been better than the original, but such is life. Or death, in the case of Mortal Kombat.

TL: DR Johnny Cage was awesome, a human brain pops out and lots of fingers get sliced off. I cheered. Here’s to Nightwolf and Stryker being in the next one.

I love: 

• Beat up kids rising up against the odds
• Foreign movies that make no sense
• Godfrey Ho cinematic universe films

This has all those and more.

Also known as Thunder Ninja Kids: Little Kickboxer, Kickboxer Kid and Korean Boy, this is the story of Biao (or Choi, depending on where you watch this movie), a kid with a heavy burden and a surprisingly high pain tolerance. After his father is murdered by a ruthless gang leader, Biao realizes that stranger danger is the least of his worries. Under the tutelage of a wise (and likely underpaid) taekwondo master named Don, he undergoes a rigorous series of training montages to dismantle the criminal syndicate threatening his family and find closure for his father’s death.

Biao’s mother doesn’t want him to fight. She’s raised him to be kind, and he’s friends with all of the girls in school, while the boys beat on him unmercifully. But in a massive coincidence, Don was trained by Biao’s father Tiger Jack, so mom decides that her son dying in the octagon is a good idea because it all lines up spiritually.

Don and Gloria, the mother of one of Biao’s schoolgirl chums, are both falling in love and in the middle of a protection scheme from organized crime. Don and Biao beat the hell out of some lower-level thugs, so the boss sends his best fighter to break Don’s leg. That man? Well, he’s Pichai, the same guy who killed Jack. It all comes full circle, and everyone just goes along with a literal child facing a man who has murdered before. 

Wouldn’t Don say, “Hey, this guy dropped a literal bomb on my leg, and it’s in so many pieces I may never walk again, and I’m an adult, and you’re, like, 11?” 

No, no one says that.

Let’s let IDF themselves tell us what this is about: “Hyuk-jin is a model student in the 6th grade who is tormented by his physically superior peers. He sees Chloe-ho fight a bunch of hoodlums and is moved to learn Taekwondo. His mother is shocked to learn about Hyuk-jin’s determination to learn the sport that killed his father, who died in a tournament. But she learns that Chloe-ho was her husband’s pupil and on of his acquiesces. Hyuk-jin trains during summer break and is transformed into a physically powerful young boy. He roughens up Nak-joon’s men who come to his mother’s restaurant to collect rent. Nak-joon runs a fake gym while controlling a crime organization on the sly. He brings the Thai kick boxer who killed Hyuk-jin’s father and opens a martial arts tournament. Hyuk-jin sees this as the perfect chance to avenge his father.”

Letterboxd says this was directed by Lim Seon. Other sources say Godfrey Ho. I think Godfrey Ho — yes, I have seen him show up in extras, I know he’s real — is some sort of AI that cuts and pastes these movies. That’s how I want to think of him. It. Whatever.

You can watch this on Cultpix.

“When a man climbs on top of a woman, she becomes ugly!“

Man, this killer really has a Madonna Whore complex, huh?

Also known as Sex Power and Target Massacre in the UK, this is a sleazy thriller in which Mike (Michael Stearns), an incel who just never makes it with the ladies. Even when Susan (Donna Young, appearing as Dawna Rae; she was in everything from The Black Gestapo to Take It Out In Trade) invites him to her home while she’s go-go dancing at The Classic Cat, he’s simply shocked at all of the sex going on around him. 

Mike, it’s 1970, and you’re in a Lee Frost movie.

He gets so upset that he drives up into the Hollywood hills and starts shooting at people while they’re balling. 

That’s the whole movie, but it’s got some fuzzed-out tunes and attractive au natural 70s ladies such as Sherill Thomas, Joan McBride and Cathy Horton, all one-and-done actresses. 

Lee Frost was a cinematic chameleon, operating with a prolific, pseudonym-heavy madness. Whether he was billed as David Kayne, R.L. Frost, F.C. Perl, Elov Peterson, or any of a dozen other aliases, the man was a one-man industry.

He cut his teeth in the trenches of sexploitation with titles like Surftide 77 and the wonderfully bizarre The House on Bare Mountain, eventually graduating to the grimier world of “roughies” with The Defilers, The Pick-Up and The Animal. He even dabbled in the dark corners of the American Mondo scene, lensing shock-docs like Mondo Bizarro, Mondo Bizarro and The Forbidden.

Much like the Italian exploitation fiends who pivoted to whichever was printing money that week, Frost was a genre-hopping machine. His resume reads like a roadmap of drive-in history:

• Westerns: Hot Spur, The Scavengers
• Biker Flicks: Chrome and Hot Leather
• Occult: Witchcraft ’70
• Horror: The Thing with Two Heads
• Hicksploitation: Dixie Dynamite
• Naziploitation: Love Camp 7
• Blaxploitation: The Black Gestapo

And then, of course, there was the hardcore stuff. But Frost didn’t just sleepwalk through a skin flick; he directed A Climax of Blue Power, a piece of porno chic designed specifically to rattle and upset anyone brave enough to hit play. Somewhere in the middle of all that beautiful, greasy chaos, he even found the time to write the satanic-panic masterpiece Race with the Devil.

Zero In and Scream isn’t good, but it’s great. It has the same feel as the Zodiac Killer: the hopelessness of being trapped in a world filled with gorgeous women who couldn’t care less about you, and the only release you have is hot lead sprayed right in their faces. It’s not pretty, but for those who love this kind of cinema, a battered print is 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: Reed’s monotonous days lead to a meltdown at his dead-end job. He bails and heads to his parents’ place in Arizona, spending his days floating in the pool while his parents persuade him to get back on track. Reed comes up with a wild plan instead. He hires an escort, Tess, to take care of him for a week. Debauchery and buffoonery ensue as Tess joins Reed on his journey to nowhere fast.

Darkly comic character studies of socially awkward characters exhibiting troubling psychological issues are becoming a subgenre unto themselves lately. Director Oliver Bernsen’s Bagworm looked like it might be the most uncomfortable of that type of film to premiere this spring, but writer/director/star Nick Funess’s The Hedonist says “Hold my drugs from my parents’ medicine cabinet.”

You know you are in for a wild ride when a film’s opening scenes include a close-up of STD warts being frozen off of a man’s genitals. Hang on tightly because Funess, who portrays the decidedly strange Reed, has much more in store, including some of the deliberately least erotic sex scenes you’re likely to see in a 2026 film. 

Just before his rich, enabling parents (Richard Funess as Dad and Marijane Funess as Mom) go on a vacation, Reed introduces them to Tess (Izzi Rojas), who he says is his new girlfriend but is really a sex worker who he has hired to “take care of” him for the week. The foursome’s initial dinner meeting is enough to put viewers ill at ease, but a later dinner scene with Reed, Tess, and two other people makes the initial one look somewhat close to normal. There’s also a third act scene that quickly takes the film into unexpected places.

Nick Funess won the Best Director award at MidWest WeirdFest for The Hedonist. His commitment to seeing his vision through is all there on the screen. The performances are sometimes nearly emotionless but that conveys the miasma of being and near-nothingness through which these major characters trudge. Nick Funess and Rojas give strong performances as they head up a good ensemble cast. 

The Hedonist characters try fleeting attempts at happiness and go through long bouts of joylessness, and there is plenty of merely going through the motions. For viewers, jaw dropping oddness and head scratching enigmas are on full display. You may wonder what you got yourself into but you won’t be able to look away.

The Hedonist screened at the 10th annual MidWest WeirdFest, which took place March 5–8, 2026 at the Micon Downtown Cinema in Eau Claire, Wisconsin.

Gary Kent is a name that should be spoken in hushed, reverent tones by anyone who loves genre cinema. The man didn’t just work in the movies; he bled for them, tumbled for them and fought his way through the toughest biker flicks and drive-in classics of the 60s and 70s. He started the old-fashioned way — in Allied Artists’ mail room — before working on Westerns. Then, he kept on moving up, becoming the stunt coordinator for Hell’s Angels on Wheels, the production manager for De Palma’s Phantom of the Paradise and the guy who survived Al Adamson’s Dracula vs. Frankenstein. And oh yeah, Tarantino interviewed Kent while writing the script for Once Upon a Time…In Hollywood and used him as the real-life model for Cliff Booth.

Booth may have fought Manson’s Family on film, but Kent met them for real. In his book Shadows and Light, he recalls filing lash of Lust at the Sphan Ranch. The dune buggy used as a camera car suddenly broke down, and the women who lived in the shacks on the grounds recommended that Charlie fix it. Kent wrote, “Charles Manson’s handshake felt like a dead trout and he wouldn’t look me in the eye. We were on the Spahn Ranch, the hangout for Manson and his creepy-crawlies…to me, Manson was as shifty and full of hot air as a corn-eating cow.”

In 1976, Kent stepped behind the camera to give us something far removed from the switchblades and chrome of his usual haunts. The Pyramid is a Dallas-shot, metaphysical time capsule that feels like it was beamed in from a very specific, patchouli-scented corner of the past. AGFA said that Kent “…returned from a 1970s vision-quest to gift us with The Pyramid, his ultra-personal study of crystal healing and plant whispering in the mold of Medium Cool.”

Chris Lowe (pre-videotape, lugging a 16mm camera like a true pro; played by C.W. Brown) is a TV news cameraman who is absolutely done with the industry’s “if it bleeds, it leads” cynicism. He’s a sensitive soul: he plays guitar, practices yoga and isn’t afraid to let the tears flow. He’s a New Age Southern man whose best friend is L.A. Peabody (Ira Hawkins), an African-American reporter who is also feeling the weight of a world that just won’t stop breaking people’s hearts.

The movie follows Chris as he tries to pitch uplifting stories, like spoon-bending psychics and the healing power of pyramids, only to have his news director (a guy clearly failing his way down from New York) throw them in the trash. Instead, Chris and L.A. have to cover the grim reality of car wrecks and the senseless police shooting of two Black youths during a robbery.

It’s a heavy mix. You’ve got confrontational therapy encounter groups contrasted against the raw, unscripted rage of L.A.’s failing personal life. It’s a movie that wants to talk about everything: race, mysticism, infidelity,and the human behavioral spectrum.

The pacing is pure 1970s TV movie-of-the-week. It’s slack, it’s scattershot and it tries to juggle way too many ideas at once without ever really catching any of them. By trying to cover every issue of the day, it might just end up glossing over the very depth it’s searching for. But as an artifact of the movie past? It’s fascinating. It captures that brief moment when we thought we could heal the planet with positive vibrations and a little bit of geometry. It’s mystical, it’s messy and it’s pure Gary Kent, a man who spent his life falling down so that cinema could stand up.

You can watch this on Cultpix.

May 3, 1962 should be a day to be celebrated. After all, that’s when this movie debuted as a double feature with Invasion of the Animal People, Jerry Warren’s remix of the Swedish movie Space Invasion of Lapland. But here, in this film, it’s all Jerry: directing, writing, producing and editing. What did people feel when they crawled into the light from a dark theater or drove away from a drive-in? Were they astounded? Did they feel like someone had smacked them in the head with a rock? I wish I could have been there and seen normal people confronted by the magic that is Jerry Warren.

While his peers like Roger Corman were busy filming scenes, Jerry was the king of the buy-and-fix-it-up special. Usually, that meant taking a moody Swedish thriller or a Mexican horror flick, hacking out the plot and dubbing in dialogue that didn’t match the lip movements. But with 1962’s Terror of the Bloodhunters, Jerry actually stepped behind the camera to give us a Southern California pretending to be South America classic.

Our story kicks off with a great escape. A group of prisoners decides that a French penal colony isn’t exactly a five-star resort and makes a break for the dense South American brush. Because no B-movie escape is complete without a hostage, they snag the commandant’s daughter, Marlene (Dorothy Haney). From there, it’s a grueling hike through the Amazon by way of Griffith Park, where they face bug bites, humidity and the realization that their wardrobe wasn’t picked for hiking.

As this is a Warren movie, you should expect a generous helping of stock footage, including snakes, lizards and birds that clearly aren’t in the same zip code as the actors. And yes, there are actually cannibals.

If you’ve seen Warren’s other work, like The Wild World of Batwoman, you know one of his defining stylistic tools: The Long Pause. He loves a static shot where characters stare into the middle distance, perhaps contemplating their life choices or waiting for the craft services truck.

However, Terror of the Bloodhunters is often cited by the cult-cinema faithful as one of his better efforts. Why? Because it actually sticks to a coherent narrative. Starring Robert Clarke, a guy who survived both The Hideous Sun Demon and The Astounding She-Monster, the film has a professional anchor that keeps it from drifting entirely into the abyss of boredom. Clarke brings a level of sincerity to the role of Steve Mallory that the script probably didn’t deserve.

Plus, because it’s barely an hour, it doesn’t overstay its welcome. It gets you in, shows you some tribal spears and stock crocodiles, and gets you out. It’s not exactly Fitzcarraldo, but if you have a soft spot for grainy black-and-white foliage and guys in khakis shouting at the treeline, this is for you.

You can watch it on Cultpix.

Look, we’ve all been there. You’re out in the woods, the sun is shining, you’re filling your pail with strawberries, and suddenly you realize you’ve wandered too far into the green abyss. For siblings Kusti and Iti, a simple foraging trip turns into a folk-horror nightmare when they stumble into the clutches of the Forest Mother, an evil hag with a penchant for child labor and a complete lack of hygiene.

Coming out of the Soviet-era Estonian studio Tallinnfilm, Bumpy (originally Nukitsamees) is based on the 1920 story by Oskar Luts. But don’t let the fairytale label fool you. This is one of those Eastern Bloc productions that feels like it was fueled by unpasteurized milk and ancient superstitions.

The hag forces the kids into a life of grimy servitude, but the real heart of the film is her son, Bumpy. He’s a shy, soot-covered little creature with literal horns growing out of his head. While his family is busy being quintessential forest-dwelling creeps, Bumpy forms a bond with Iti. It’s the kind of beauty and the beast friendship that can only happen when both parties are terrified of the same matriarch.

When the opportunity for a jailbreak arises, Kusti and Iti don’t just run for the hills. They take the little horned weirdo with them. The third act is essentially a fish-out-of-water story, but the water is a civilized village and the fish is a boy who thinks bath is a four-letter word.

Oh, it is? OK.

Bumpy’s horns and the general grime of the hag’s hut are peak 80s practical effects. There’s a tactile, earthy quality to the sets that makes you want to wash your hands after watching. All with a vibe that balances the thin line between a charming children’s adventure and the kind of movie that gave an entire generation of Estonian kids a permanent fear of the woods.

Director Helle Karis was a master of the musical-fantasy genre in Estonia. She didn’t just make movies; she built worlds that felt like they existed ten minutes behind a secret door in your backyard. It’s weird, it’s rhythmic, and it’s deeply rooted in the idea that family isn’t about whose horns you share, but who helps you escape the forest. If you’ve exhausted your supply of Grimm’s tales and need something with a bit more Estonian grit, this is your strawberry jam.

You can watch this on Cultpix.

Matt Jaissle has earned a “forever pass” in my book. Anyone responsible for the unhinged, DIY madness of The Necro Files — a film featuring a flying, murderous baby doll — has proven they have the gonzo spirit required for true cult cinema. Jaissle is also one of the few directors to tackle the Amityville brand and bring original ideas to the table, rather than just filming a dusty hallway for 90 minutes. So, when I saw the cover for Night of the Rats, looking like a spiritual successor to Rats: The Night of Terror, I was all in.

The setup here is classic, meat-and-potatoes eco-horror. A quiet Midwestern town (and the second a TV announcer casually refers to the setting as Evans City, my Western Pennsylvania heart grew three sizes, and I fell deeply in love) becomes an all-you-can-eat buffet for a mutated, subterranean colony of rodents. These aren’t your average dumpster-divers, either. We’re talking fast-breeding, hyper-aggressive, radioactive pests that have developed an insatiable taste for human flesh. We follow a pair of scientists desperately trying to stem the tide as the furry, red-eyed swarm moves rapidly from the rural cornfields into the local kitchen sinks.

Against all budgetary odds, the way the rat swarm spreads through the back roads, isolated barns, and farmhouses actually feels genuinely claustrophobic. Nowhere is safe, not even the wide-open, agoraphobic spaces of the Midwest. But Jaissle throws an incredible curveball into the standard eco-horror formula: these rats carry a pathogen that can actually take over the minds and bodies of the people they bite.

If you’re coming to a Matt Jaissle movie, you’re looking for those moments of “did they really just do that?” The way the rat swarm spreads through the back roads and farms feels claustrophobic. Nowhere is safe, not even the wide-open spaces of the Midwest. They can even take over people who have been bitten, which leads to a scene that’s at once both horrific and hilarious, as a woman is trapped in her car as a zombie pounds on the windows. The camera pulls back to reveal…about ten fake rats. That’s the kind of absurdist magic that I watch movies for.

There’s also a rat in a bathtub scene done twice — yes, Jaissle hasn’t just seen Nightmare City, he’s going to reference it to the point that The Nightmare Becomes Reality comes up on screen — that reminded me of the time vermin climbed up our toilet and as a three-year-old, I looked down between my legs into the eyes of a rodent. 

Jaissle’s love for the golden age of Euro-sleaze drips from every single frame of this thing. Even the closing credits are a masterclass in cinematic trolling and fan service, hilariously naming “Fulvio Cozzi” and “Umberto Margherti” (glorious portmanteaus of Luigi Cozzi,  Antonio Margheriti and Umberto Lenzi) as the wardrobe crew. The special thanks section reads like a holy litany of grindhouse gods, sending love to Evans City, PA; George A. Romero; Lucio Fulci; Umberto Lenzi; Luigi Cozzi; Bruno Mattei; Enzo G. Castellari; Antonio Margheriti; Dario Argento; Andrea Bianchi; Lamberto Bava and multiple energy drinks.

When you break it down, Night of the Rats boasts a rumored $2,000 budget, a horde of rats that look like they were rescued from a pet store bargain bin or a claw machine, characters running around in yellow hazmat suits, stuffed rodents being physically thrown at actors’ faces from off-camera à la Mattei and older dudes with long ponytails having vivid, waking nightmares (I have never felt more seen). Plus, it all gets done in 70 minutes and has a great poster!

You can watch this on Tubi.

Forget narrative. Forget logic. Forget everything your teacher told you about decency and linear progression. Fluctuations is a fever dream captured on celluloid, a 1970 sensory assault that feels like it was edited with a chainsaw by someone who spent the previous night huffing industrial glue and reading Marquis de Sade.

Imagine a kaleidoscope of human anatomy, high-contrast lighting and sudden, inexplicable violence. It’s a stream-of-consciousness bombardment where the only constant is the lack of a constant. One minute you’re watching a somber, avant-garde exploration of Sapphic intimacy; the next, there’s a hair-whipping sequence that defies both physics and scalp health. Then, because why not, the film decides it’s a Shaw Brothers flick and throws in some low-rent kung-fu. It’s a dizzying cocktail of threesomes, foursomes and bondage that blurs the line between arthouse cinema and “the kind of film found in a brown paper bag behind a dumpster.

Rumors have long persisted that the film was a “re-edit job” of multiple unfinished projects. This would explain the jarring tonal shifts from erotic drama to martial arts mayhem. Director Joel Landwehr is listed, however, and he also directed and narrated In Hot Blood. 

Among the actors, Kim Lewid is one of the few who have appeared in other movies. Using the name Kim LeWise here, she was also in The Ultimate Degenerate, Gigi Goes to Pot and The Filth Shop. 

I’ve heard the thought that the soundtrack is close to throwing silverware down the steps, which is accurate, along with a barely audible phone sex call. But mostly, dudes do bad karate and everyone gets naked, but not sexy, and I love this for that.

You can watch this on Cultpix.