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Mortal Kombat

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  • Title: Mortal Kombat (1995)
  • IMDb: link

Mortal Kombat movie reviewThrowback Thursday takes us back to 1995 to the first attempt to adapt the Mortal Kombat video game into a feature film. Director Paul W.S. Anderson‘s Mortal Kombat is a flawed, but nonetheless enjoyable, B-movie. The story involves former Shaolin monk Liu Kang (Robin Shou), Hollywood action star Johnny Cage (Linden Ashby), and Special Forces officer Sonya Blade (Bridgette Wilson) being chosen by Thunder God Lord Raiden (Christopher Lambert) to defend Earth against an evil dimension in a tournament known as Mortal Kombat.

Each fighter has a different purpose for entering the tournament. Cage wants to prove his ability as a fighter (in a secret tournament no one will know about?), Kang is after revenge for the death of his brother (Steven Ho), and Sonya is chasing another competitor in the mercenary Kano (Trevor Goddard). The story is simply a loose structure to fit the various fight sequences, locations, and set pieces. An unapologetic B-movie memorable for Lambert’s mugging and some not too shabby special effects for the time, the film works as a tribute to the video game series without anyone in front, or behind, the cameras, or in the audience, taking the very ridiculous premise seriously.

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WWE Elimination Chamber 2021

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  • Title: WWE Elimination Chamber 2021
  • wiki: link

WWE Elimination Chamber 2021 DVD reviewReleased on DVD, WWE Elimination Chamber 2021 includes all seven of the matches from this year’s Elimination Chamber PPV (although it’s stretching things to refer to two of them as matches) plus the Fatal 4-Way Match which was part of the kick-off show is included as an extra. Most of the matches are short (under 10 minutes each) and the PPV featured no woman’s Elimination Chamber Match for the first time since 2017.

The two Elimination Chamber Matches featured Daniel Bryan defeating Cesaro, Jey Uso, Kevin Owens, Baron Corbin, and Sami Zayn to earn a Universal Championship opportunity (and promptly get squashed by Roman Reigns) and Drew McIntyre successfully defended his title by defeating AJ Styles, Jeff Hardy, Kofi Kingston, Randy Orton, and Sheamus to retain his World Heavyweight Championship before being attacked by Bobby Lashley (who had lost the WWE United States Championship earlier in the evening) and then losing his title when the Miz cashed-in his Money in the Bank contract.

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King Kong vs. Godzilla

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  • Title: King Kong vs. Godzilla
  • IMDb: link

King Kong vs. Godzilla DVD reviewOriginally envisioned as a stop-motion film featuring King Kong fighting a giant Frankenstein Monster, the struggling project was given to Toho Studios which saw in Kong an adversary worthy of Godzilla. The story involves a submarine which takes absolutely no attempt to avoid hitting a giant iceberg which cracks and releases the slumbering Godzilla once more. The movie is a bit unclear on if people know who Godzilla is (they know at least about his name, but otherwise the film is inconsistent about the creature’s history).

Elsewhere, a pharmaceutical company discovers Kong on an isolated island. Deciding to remove him from the island as a prize, the giant raft takes him close to Japan where he escapes as events maneuver the two behemoths into a confrontation. When the first fight proves inconclusive, and doubles Japan’s problems of now having two rampaging monsters on the loose, the locals arrange a rematch for the two at Mount Fuji (including delivering a slumbering Kong via balloons) hoping that the creatures may end up killing each other. Their battle ends with only one walking away and the fate of the other in doubt.

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King Kong

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  • Title: King Kong (1976)
  • IMDb: link

King Kong DVD review1976’s King Kong holds up fairly well nearly 45 years after its release. The first remake of the 1933 film, producer Dino De Laurentiis and director John Guillermin‘s film is memorable for its practical effects including the mechanical Kong mask developed by Carlo Rambaldi and Rick Baker giving Kong’s face a wide range of emotion. While some of the composite shots merging Kong with the world aren’t as effective today, there’s still quite a bit of movie magic. Baker also credits cinematographer Richard H. Kline whose work he felt hid the limitations of what could be done with Kong at the time.

Updating the story a bit to fit with the times, the ship isn’t searching for exotic locations but instead that of an oil company executive (Charles Grodin) looking to drill. Stowing away is paleontologist Jack Prescott (Jeff Bridges) who has his own reasons for wanting to visit the island. The ship also picks up the sole survivor of a shipwreck, aspiring actress Dwan (Jessica Lange), who completes a cast supplemented by the ship’s crew and the natives they will encounter on the island.

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Boss Level

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  • Title: Boss Level
  • IMDb: link

Boss Level movie reviewB-movie actor Frank Grillo, best known for his role of Crossbones in the Marvel Universe films, stars as soldier Roy Pulver stuck in a time loop reliving the same day over and over again. Structured like a video game, although the explanation for the loop turns out having nothing to do with a video game, Ray fights through the army of oddball mercenaries every day but always ends up dying at some point.

The story behind Ray’s predicament traces back to his ex-wife (Naomi Watts), her latest scientific breakthrough (which of course is never adequately explained), and her evil boss (Mel Gibson) who apparently has a never-ending rolodex of ridiculous killers on hand and a hard-on to kill Ray. The film is structured by showing us some sequences over and over again, and other times jumping forward to only the new moments. It does make use of ideas in both Groundhog Day and Edge of Tomorrow in Ray using his unique situation to learn more skills to survive. Sadly, writer/director Joe Carnahan‘s film is nowhere near as good as either of those films, or last year’s far more enjoyable entry into the genre Palm Springs (also released on Hulu).

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