The other night I watched Mortal Kombat: Annihilation with my best friend Lindsay, while she read out facts and factoids about it from IMDb. Then we watched a bunch of making of footage with hardcoded Spanish subs while she did her German Duolingo. After that we migrated to all the FMV cutscenes from the game Mortal Kombat Mythologies and we sat in stunned silence, totally captivated.

Annihilation is the second Mortal Kombat movie, sequel to the 1995 film and, at time of writing, the third best Mortal Kombat film. Which order you put the 1995 one and the 2021 reboot before is left an exercise to the reader, but I assure you there is a correct answer. It picks up directly from where the 1995 film left off, but has been nearly entirely recast, with somehow even cheaper and less well known actors. Everyone is, objectively, trying their hardest and some of them are even having fun, but it would make for a jarring double feature. Rather than Mortal Kombat, Kost Reduction is the name of the game and that’s not just with the cast. Annihilation features a lot of very terrible CGI, it’s a 1997 film, so I wasn’t expecting the world. There’s this ‘texture wrap’ effect that makes the sky look like a Golden Eye skybox, which is particularly captivating in its terribleness. One of the characters is a centaur, who is nearly always seen from the waist up to avoid his CGI legs/(2nd?)body. The film was so ambitious with its use of CGI, its eyes so wide, that nearly every scene features some 90’s digital abomination that wouldn’t look out of place in a Doom mod. It even sets the tone for the modern DC/Marvel seat filler, where everyone steps aside at the end to let two GCI monsters punch each other for a while. When I pointed it that just 2 years later The Wachowskis would make The Matrix, Lindsay simply said “oh my god”.

The beginning the movie is so frantic, there’s no waiting around to explain what’s going on. It’s like you’ve just flipped the channel to the second part of a TV shows big finale. The show has been running over half a decade, it expects you to know what’s going on, there’s a short hand with the audience. But none of that is the case and neither of us had seen Mortal Kombat (1995) in enough years that it was slightly confusing, Lindsay filled me in on some of the details, that this film continues directly from the sequel set up of the last and who the various recast actors had replaced. I’m not sure how much that helped, or if you were indeed ever meant to care what was happening. The plot strings together a series of underwhelming flips, kicks and fights, leaning into the ‘two guys in a pub carpark’ style of fight choreography. Opponents never seem to want to hurt one another, there are lots of dodged roundhouse kicks and flips out of the way. While you’d never see that in a pub carpark, the sentiment, that everyone is going home and no one to A+E, is the same.

Annihilation sits at odds with Mortal Kombat, there are no fatalities, only friendships. It’s frustrating, all the elements are there for some (low-rent) iconic imagery, but the film never follows through. It’s entirely bloodless, a defanged version of a game that attracted protest for its violence.

It’s clear the film was rushed out for profit, that capitalising on the modest success of ’95 was more important. That putting out something in the shape of a Mortal Kombat film was the goal. One that has even more in common with a Power Rangers straight to VHS spectacular than the previous film.

The behind the scenes footage is crispy, it’s been uploaded and reupload, encoded and transcoded many times. At some point it gained hardcoded yellow subtitles and it got pillerboxed into something resembling 4:3. Along the way, this 15 minute reel became found footage. It’s been transformed from b-roll, into the eerie set up from a horror short. Anthology horror, especially the V/H/S franchise, are just too good at capturing thing style of incidental filming. That when you’re watching something completely unstructured, off the cuff and undirected, you recognise the pattern. I kept expecting a story to form about a hunted camera or a cursed stunt performer.

In contrast with the film, the making of footage is much more interesting, it’s naive, wondering, a slice of life. 90’s haircuts and fashion rule behind the scenes, the director does 8 takes of someone falling off a ladder. Whoever is shooting it is trying quite hard, they’re getting the moments they’re paid for a maybe a little more. This kinda behind the scenes filming is interesting and honest. I like watching it and I’m not sure you need the context of the film to make it worth seeing, that’s my recommendation for this week, watch the making of YouTube video, not the film. Then maybe all the FMV cutscenes from Mortal Kombat Mythologies, it’s ace.