What happens when a serial killer expert has to face off with the real thing? That’s what happens when Dr. Helen Hudson (Sigourney Weaver, Alien) is cornered and attacked by a man she profiled, Daryll Lee Cullum (Harry Connick Jr.).

For the next 18 months, Dr. Hudson is a recluse, refusing to leave her computer and high rent apartment, only allowing her friend Andy into her world. A new series of murders — right in her neighborhood — threaten to draw her out. Joining up with Inspector Monahan (Holly Hunter) and Rueben Goetz (Dermot Mulroney), she begins to realize that this killer is copying the world’s worst serial killers.

It also turns out that the killer is following the script she presented on the night that Cullum attacked her. Along the way, Rueben is killed in a police standoff and Monahan has to deal with her feelings of loss.

After her friend Andy is killed like Jeffrey Dahmer, they figure out that the killer is Peter Foley. As the police get to his house, they realize that it was a ruse and he’s kidnapped Helen, placing her back into the same crime scene she was in 18 months before. Will Monahan be able to save her friend? Will Dr. Hudson be able to deal with her crippled agoraphobia?

This is a fine 90’s crime drama, with Connick quite good in his role. Weaver has stated that of all her films, she was most proud of Copycat, as she worked hard to understand how an agoraphobic would behave and she’s regretted that the movie is not better remembered.

The first Mortal Kombat video game is essentially Enter the Dragon with some magic and ninjas added. So it stands to reason that the movie should be pretty much the same idea — a martial arts tournament to the death with implications for our entire world. And the movie delivers the goods.

Director Paul W. S. Anderson (Soldier, the Resident Evil films, the Death Race remakes) was totally the right actor for this film — they feel like the 90’s 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 Earth realm’s defender.

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 90’s), 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.

Despite Johnnny Cage defeating Goro, Shang Tsung kidnaps Sonya (who until this point had been a take charge woman and suddenly becomes a helpless girl in distress. Ah, the 90’s!) and draws them all to Outworld. There, Liu Kang faces his greatest fears and defeats the sorcerer, releasing all of the souls he had stolen, including his brother’s.

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 that he is here for everyone’s 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 gets it right is that it sticks to the source material. Better than that, it introduces concepts that would become part of the mythology of future games, such as Emperor Shao Khan, Outworld, Kitana, Jax and more.

It’s funny to me that so many critics savaged this movie. It’s fun as hell and true to its inspiration. It’s a video game version of a Hong Kong martial arts movie — a mixture of bastard pop culture that no one wants to claim as anything but a guilty pleasure. This doesn’t look like a cheap movie, as even though it’s over 20 years old, it’s packed with effects that hold up and fight scenes that continue to be impressive.

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 adaptions, you won’t feel let down. That’s actually high praise after some of the films I’ve endured this week.

Pittsburgh born Rusty Cundieff co-wrote and directed this portmanteau film, which takes the structure of an Amicus film and positions it against the problems of African-Americans circa 1995 (sadly, these problems haven’t changed all that much in the past 22 years).

During the framing sequence, Welcome to My Mortuary, the drug dealing team of Stack (Joe Torry), Bulldog and Ball arrive at the Simms’ Funeral Home to buy “the shit” — drugs that were found in an alley. As the four men make their way through Mr. Simms’ (Clarence Williams III, Linc from TV’s The Mod Squad) building, he tells the story of some of his past customers.

Rogue Cop Revelation

On his first night of patrol. Clarence is taken by his partner Newton (Michael Massee, The Crow) to join two other officers, Billy (Duane Whitaker, Pulp Fiction) and Strom (Wings Hauser, Beastmaster 2: Through the Portal of Time) as they attack Martin Moorehose (Tom Wright, the hitchhiker in Creepshow 2), a civil rights activist.

Clarence stands up for the man, but is told not to break the police code. The officers shoot the battered Moorehouse up with heroin and then push it into the water. As the man had fought to keep drugs — supplied by bad cops — out of his community, he is seen as a hypocrite.

A year later and Clarence has left the force and wanders the streets, drunk. Finding a mural of Moorehouse, he is haunted by a vision of the man crucified and screaming, “Bring them to me!” He then lures the other three officers to the dead man’s grave, where they laugh at him and proceed to piss all over it.

As Newton and Strom make a move to execute Clarence, Moorehouse emerges from his grave to drag Billy underground with a handful of his genitalia. A coffin bursts from the ground, with Billy’s corpse lying inside it and Moorehouse holding his beating heart.

A chase ensues, but obviously, the cops never saw Creepshow 2. Moorehouse beheads Strom and chases Newton through an alley, where he crucifies him to a wall with used hypodermic needles and then melts his body into his mural in a psychedelic scene.

Moorehouse then asks Clarence where he was when he needed him. The story ends with two mental hospital orderlies watching Clarence in a straightjacket, noting that he was a dangerous cop killer.

The second casket tells a story all about how Boys Do Get Bruised. Walter (Brandon Hammond, Menace II Society) is the new kid in school, constantly abused by bullies. A kindly teacher, Richard Garvey (writer/director Cundieff), takes an interest and visits his home one night.

Walter has a power that enables him to damage people through his drawings, a power that he’s used to stop a bully already. But he can’t stop the real monster in his life — his father, who beats both him and his mother once Garvey leaves. He returns to intervene, but Carl (David Alan Grier, In Living Color) is too powerful, beating all of them down until Walter crumples his drawing and decimates the man.

We see Carl’s twisted and burnt corpse as Mr. Simms shows the three gangsters a small doll, which is part of the next story, KKK Comeuppance.

Duke Metger (Corbin Bernsen, Major League) is pretty much David Duke. He was in the KKK, he’s racist and has an office inside a haunted slave plantation. Well, maybe not that last part.

While reporters gather outside, character actor Art Evans appears to tell everyone that the plantation is haunted by the souls of the people murdered there. Now, they live inside the body of small dolls.

Of course, those dolls are going to kill everyone they can. And they sure do. Much like Trilogy of Terror, the rest of this chapter involve Metger battling one, then several of the dolls until he is consumed by them.

The drug dealers are now angry, as they just want to get “the shit” and get out. But when they see the body of someone they know, Crazy K, they have to hear the story of the Hard-Core Convert.

After following one of his enemies and killing him, Crazy K is attacked by three men who shoot him repeatedly before they are all killed by the police.

Yet somehow K survives and is taken to a rehabilitation building that’s something out of a mad scientist movie. Dr. Cushing (Rosalind Cash, The Omega Man) hopes to use her mental techniques to retrain his mind, but he proves to be too uncaring to be saved. There’s a great sequence here that predates Get Out where he is placed into sensory deprivation and basically goes into his own mind.

Because K decides that he’s fine with his crimes, his mind goes back to the moment where he was shot by the three men and he dies. And the three men?

We’ve been following them all along. They are the gangsters and “the shit” is their closed coffins, with their bodies inside. And Mr. Simms? He’s Satan. And this is Hell.

Yep. The Amicus ending!

I was really struck by the gorgeous camerawork in this film, which elevates it beyond being the low-budget schlockfest that I had always believed that it was. Turns out I was wrong. Dead wrong. Cinematographer Anthony B. Richmond has quite the pedigree, working on films such as Candyman, The Man Who Fell to Earth and Don’t Look Now.

This movie was a welcome Christmas gift from Becca. The new Shout Factory release of the film looks amazing in blu-ray, with a crisp transfer and bright colors. And the new cover art is amazing!

Becca said, “Don’t you have one more Christmas movie to do?”

I said, “We should watch The Car. Or how about Lizard in a Woman’s Skin?”

She then told me she had a surprise for me.

This was the surprise.

Yes, Sandra Bullock is lonely and working for the CTA when she sees Peter Gallagher every single day, good old caterpillar eyebrows. Then he gets beat up and tossed off the platform and she saves his life, leading to some comic misunderstanding that she is his fiancée.

Peter’s family falls in love with her instantly. There’s grandmother Elsie (Glynis Johns, who neatly cut Terry-Thomas up and labeled him in Amicus’ portmanteau Vault of Horror!) Jack Warden shows up as family friend Saul, who learns her secret. Peter Boyle (Young Frankenstein) plays the dad. And of course, Bill Pullman (Independence Day) plays the brother that she falls in love with.

Director Jon Turteltaub also was in the chair for National Treasure series, Disney’s The Kid, 3 Ninjas, Cool Runnings and the upcoming film The Meg. Becca refers to him as “my buddy.”

This is one of those movies where she waits for me to get emotional. But I had steel resolve, holding back any tears or emotion. Sandy Bullock, you won’t break me. You won’t.

Becca and I often argue over what movie we are watching next. When you have thousands of movies, this back and forth can go on all night long — particularly when the only movies I ever want to watch are The Car and Dredd.

That said, I always give in to my wonderful and glamorous wife.

Tonight, I gave in to Home for the Holidays.

Claudia Larson (Holly Hunter, The Firm) is a single mom with no job, no direction and a family who she loves and hates. From her parents (Anne Bancroft and Charles Durning, both great here) to her siblings (including Robert Downey Jr.), she dreads the one-two combo of Thanksgiving and Christmas. Her daughter (a blink and you miss her Claire Danes) stays home to have sex with her boyfriend over the holiday, so she flies home alone.

Throw in wacky Aunt Glady, who has never fallen out of love with her sister’s husband and the feud between siblings that has never gone away and a visiting friend (Dylan McDermott, not Dermot Mulroney) and you have the ingredients for a holiday filled with plenty of stress.

For a movie I had no interest in viewing, I came around by the end. I blame the talents of Durning, whose emotional speech about what moments matter most in life really stayed with me.

Jodie Foster made this the second film she directed after Little Man Tate, spending two weeks with the cast just improvising. It shows — everyone feels real here. And Downey Jr. credits this film as one he had fun with and bringing him back to acting, a craft he had come to be disillusioned with. That said — he kept doing heroin throughout the film, leading to an emotional letter from Foster.

What really shocked me is that the screenplay comes from W.D. Richter, who is better known around these parts as the writer of 1979’s Frank Langella starring Dracula, Big Trouble in Little China, 1978’s Invasion of the Body Snatchers and Needful Things. As if that wasn’t enough, he directed The Adventures of Buckaroo Banzai Across the 8th Dimension!

What happens when you put together three of horror’s biggest stars — Robert Englund, Stephen King and Tobe Hooper? That’s the question posed by this film, based on a King/Harry Allan Towers short story that first appeared in the men’s magazine Cavalier before appearing in King’s 1978 collection Night Shift, which also spawned the movies Children of the Corn, Cat’s Eye, Maximum Overdrive, Graveyard Shift, The Lawnmower Man, Sometimes They Come Back, Trucks (yes, I know it’s the same story as Maximum Overdrive) and Battleground.

Bill Gartley (Robert England) owns the Blue Ribbon Laundry service, which is based around a laundry press that everyone calls The Mangler. His niece, Sherry cuts herself and gets blood all over the machine, which leads to the machine coming to life. It starts to eat anyone who gets too close to it, like Mrs. Frawley, by folding them just like a sheet.

Drunken police detective John Hunton (Ted Levine, Buffalo Bill from The Silence of the Lambs) and his ex brother-in-law Mark — who just happens to study demonology — investigate the many deaths that follow. It turns out the Tha Mangler is how Gartley runs the town — when their virgin daughters turn 16, the town’s most powerful men and women sacrifice them to the machine. Sherry is next.

Sherry is next, but she helps the two men take out the demon — even if it kills Gartley, his lover Lin Sue and Stanner, the foreman. They throw holy water on it and the machine nearly beats them, but they succeed in taking it out. That is — until John talks about the antacids he’d been taking, which once belonged to the now dead Mrs. Frawley. One of the ingredients is deadly nightshade, also called “The Hand of Glory.”

Here’s where the movie descends into bullshittery. It only follows some of King’s story — which was a novella, so we can cut them some slack. It takes passages from Sir James George Frazier’s The Golden Bough: A Study in Magic and Religion. But the “Hand of Glory” is usually the hand of a murderer who has been put to death or part of the root of the mandrake plant. That said — the ending of the book and movie are totally different, so I shouldn’t expect anyone to do actual research or make the occult make sense within their film.

The Mangler comes back to life, killing Mark and chasing John and Sherry. She tries to give herself to it to save him, but he stops her. They fall through a manhole cover and escape, with him taking her to the hospital, as he’s fallen in love.

Oh yeah — Mark is friends with an old photographer named J.J.J. Pictureman, who tells him the hidden history of the town before he dies. As John waits for news on Sherry’s condition, he gets a letter from the dead man. He warns him not to trust anyone in town with a missing body part, as they may have sacrificed it to the Mangler.

When John goes to see Sherry, flowers in hand, the machine is back in place and she has replaced her uncle, looking like a female version of him. She waves to him and he notices that her finger is missing. Throwing away the flowers, he leaves.

I worry that my description of this movie makes it sound better than it really is and that people will watch it. Hooper may not have even finished the film, as some say he was replaced by the producer, Anant Singh. It actually played in around 800 theaters, but was considered a failure. Hooper would go back to directing for TV after this.

Honestly, no hint of his directorial skill is evident here. It’s painful to watch and while there’s some nice lighting and mood in a few scenes, there are other times that I fought to even keep the DVD in the player. Again — I don’t want to bury Hooper, but it’s a real shame that this came from his hand.