Mortal Kombat (1995 Film)

Mortal Kombat hit theaters in August 1995 with the game's arcade mystique intact and, controversially, none of its blood: director Paul W.S. Anderson delivered a PG-13 tournament movie, betting that the kids feeding quarters into the cabinets — most of whom couldn't get into an R film — were the real audience. He was right. It opened at #1 with $23 million and stayed there for three straight weeks, finishing over $122 million worldwide on a $20 million budget. Christopher Lambert hammed magnificently as the lightning god Rayden, Robin Shou's Liu Kang and Linden Ashby's Johnny Cage handled the actual martial arts, and Cary-Hiroyuki Tagawa's soul-stealing Shang Tsung gave a generation its go-to "Your soul is MINE" impression.

The secret weapon was the soundtrack. "Techno Syndrome" — the pounding track with the "MORTAL KOMBAT!" scream — came from The Immortals, a Belgian duo (Maurice "Praga Khan" Engelen and Olivier Adams, better known from Lords of Acid), and it actually predates the film: released in 1993 and featured on 1994's Mortal Kombat: The Album, it was adopted by the movie's marketing and fused to the franchise forever. Critics shrugged at the film itself (Rotten Tomatoes has it at 43%, citing the plot and dialogue), but audiences didn't care; for years it stood as the rare video-game adaptation that actually worked, precisely because it embraced being an arcade game on a big screen.

The follow-up burned all that goodwill in one weekend. Mortal Kombat: Annihilation (1997) — directed by the first film's cinematographer, with most of the cast replaced and, by its own producer's admission, released unfinished — opened at #1 and then cratered under a 4% Rotten Tomatoes score, killing the planned sequels. The franchise wouldn't get another theatrical shot until the 2021 reboot. But the 1995 original endures as the definitive artifact of arcade-era Hollywood: the scream, the techno, and Lambert's electric-white wig, exactly as cheesy and exactly as great as everyone remembers.