Originally Posted by Iroquois
It's Mortal Kombat, cartoon substance is the whole point. The violence is meant to be absurdly over-the-top in line with something like Evil Dead II or Riki-Oh or Braindead, not the kind of violence that's primarily about making an audience flinch.
What I mean is the PG-13, made for SyFy
Sharknado quality in both the
blood mode OFF and character silliness. I
want the violence to be absurdly over the top. Evil Dead it is not, but would have been an improvement on the original MK movie IMO. Less Van Dammes
Street Fighter and more
The Raid. When I typed cartoon, I meant that the movie felt very children-friendly relative to the weight of the game---at the time of their individual releases. Yeah, kids were playing the game, but parents had no idea the level of violence it provided in the original arcade cabinets. That was unheard of at the time, at least here in the states. The movie had none of that. It was fun, sure, but it was not
Mortal Kombat as the game depicted it.
Also, I don't mean an audience that would have deliberately sought out a movie like
Evil Dead. I mean specifically, the general
parenting audience that saw a mild action video game movie trailer that their then 10-15 year old boys were begging to see. Those parents would have flinched, I'm quite certain.
Anyhoo, Just a personal fantasy that didn't quite happen when I sat in the theater for this one. Borderline magical in context of the time, but not what it could have been. I'm not sure general audiences could have handled that though given how adults perceived video games then. It probably would have freaked a lot of people out the way
South Park: Bigger Longer, & Uncut did for ignorant parents taken their kids to a "cartoon." Or even
KIDS (1995). WOW that movie lasted less than a weekend where I live due to all the Christian Conservative parents and even grandparents blindly taking their children to a friendly Disney movie! I mean it has "kids" in the title! lol. sigh.