Mortal Kombat Annihilation

It's time for the second installment of the Mortal Kombat series on the big screen. If you're a fan of the game (up and including Mortal Kombat 3) then you'll be happy to know that a whol swag of new characters have been included such as Smoke, Cyrax, Nightwolf, Reptile, Shoa Khan, Sindel, Jade, Jax with metal arms, Motaro, Sheeva and Baraka.

Gone is Johnny Cage after 1 spoken line, gone is Christopher Lambert as Raiden, returning is Sub-Zeros younger brother and Scorpion in a small scene. The special effects have improved but the plot has taken a slight nose dive.

Ok, it is obvious that Roadshow have sacked there current out-sourced dvd mastering and imported quality transfers or DVM has made an about face and decided to produce quality themselves. This is by FAR Village Roadshows best looking disc yet. By far...

From the outset we are given a much crisper and detailed image than what I saw in Pulp Fiction. This is a big difference from their previous attempts and if they keep this up, with the current titles they will be releasing, they should do real well in the market.

Shadow detail has been improved to the point of putting region 1 transfers to shame. Brightness levels are perfect but given that most of this movie is shot at night or dark scenes there was not really much brightness levels to check.

This movie has a plethora of effects and they come up great on this disc. Colors look vivid, is basically how I can describe it. When the screen shots are up, check them out and see for yourself how well this movie has been rendered.

I'm going out on a limb here and stating that this is one of the reference discs of region 4 at the moment. It's good to see so many titles with anamorphic enhancement for region 4. Forget Godzilla for now, if your machine can only play region 4 titles then borrow mortal kombat and see for yourself. Why not buy you ask? read below in the overall section...

Ok, now this is a nice sounding soundtrack. Bass was present in many scenes as there is alot of boulder bashing and hard techno music that uses this nicely.

Surround effects were used mainly for things flying across the screen or to the sides. It surprised me that some of the punches and kicks used the surrounds. It could've just been coincidence with the scene but it seemed a little exaggerated.

One obvious flaw was the opening scene. Usually, the new line logo comes onto the screen with some screaming "Mortal Kombat" as it does so but the sound does not start until about 1-2 seconds in which means all you hear is "bat". This annoyed me and I'm hoping its not my player or the decoder doing so. Can someone confirm?

Overall, the audio was good, but not demo material of any kind.

If you call these extras then good for you, I personally call them 10 second clips and thats all.

We are given the theatrical trailer, cast crew biographies and cast crew interviews. Now, I'd expect interviews to be a decent series of questions with informative answers but when the interviewee simply re-iterates what they've already stated within the movie then its not an extra but rather an example of someone who knows there lines.

No other languages, no subtitles at all but we do get an anamorphic transfer and an above average picture disc.

I enjoyed the first mortal kombat and I say that proudly. It had some semblence of flow in the plot. This one didn't.

All it did was interrupt the flow by bringing in 1 or 2 adversaries, having our heroes fight them or they fight each other and then move on. And the end was a total let down. Slo-motion fighting is a detriment to action flicks when it involves fisticuffs. Jumping and other such agile stunts are ok for slo-mo which is why this flick irritated me so.

I'd like to recommend this flick but as I said above, just borrow it as you won't be going back to it if you own it. If you're a die hard fan of the games though, you'll still be un-impressed. Haha, thought I was going to recommend it to you did you, well nope... :)