The film stars Lewis Tan, Joe Taslim, Jessica McNamee, Hiroyuki Sanada and more This is the second time the video game series has been adapted into a film, the first being the 1995 film. When the first Mortal Kombat film came out in 1995, I was 12 years old. I distinctly remember playing Mortal Kombat 2 on my Super Famicon and I must have worn that cartridge out because up until then, I had never seen anything like MK before. I wasn’t a coddled child or anything as I’d already watched films like Robocop and The Terminator by that time but the level of ultra-violence in MK really shocked me. The graphics, gameplay and sheer audacity of it all were enough to grab me hook, line and sinker. With an expanded roster of 12 unique characters, the game was bigger and better than its predecessor by a wide margin. The insane fatalities, new characters like Baraka, Mileena, Kitana, Jax and more really rounded up the game. The vicious stage fatalities where you could uppercut hapless foes into an acid pond and watch their bones float back up to the top, all while they wailed and screamed onscreen. It was intense, to say the least. Then I watched the live-action film on VHS and it was off to the races for little 12-year-old me. That soundtrack kicked off my love for industrial metal and through MK I discovered bands like KMFDM and the Utah Saints. I don’t even have to say anything about that theme song. You all know it and are humming it right now. I needed to know everything about the game. I would ask relatives abroad to buy me Electronic Gaming Monthly, Flux and Acxess magazine just to find out all the secret codes and fatalities, hidden characters, developer interviews. Anything I could get my hands on, really. The love for that franchise has now followed me for 25 years.