It's very difficult to keep the line between the past and the present.

Do you believe that someone out of the past can enter and take possession of a living being?

We may be true with the past, but the past is not through with us.

Welcome back to the next pitcher show, a movie of the week podcast devoted to a classic film and the way it shaped our thoughts on a recent release.

I'm Tasha Robinson, here again with Keith Phipps, Scott Tobias, and Genevieve Kosky.

On last week's show, we talked about Big Trouble in Little China, John Carpenter's 1986 action fantasy, which updates a weird western into a movie

that still feels a lot like a weird western, even though it swaps the familiar hero and sidekick

roles. The other half of this pairing is pretty short on sidekicks. Here, there are just

antagonists and protagonists, warriors and monsters. It's based on a fighting video game, so all

the characters are pretty much equal until they start to face off, and in this case, level up.

The 2021 Mortal Kombat, directed by Simon McCoy, drops former Mortal Kombat star Johnny Cage in favor of newbie Cole Young, played by Lewis Tan, as a small-time MMA Cage fighter who actually isn't all that great at fighting.

That becomes a problem when it turns out that he's the last of the line of the great Japanese warrior Hanso Hasashi, and he's marked with a sigil that means he's been chosen to represent Earth, or in this mythology, Earth Realm, against the fighting forces of a mysterious place called Outworld.

If Earth Realm, and I'm going to try to keep a straight

face as I explain this, if Earth Realm loses one more fighting tournament against Outworld,

then Outworld will invade and conquer Earth. Based on this movie, we know nothing about Outworld,

except that it looks like a pretty dank place to live, and it produces all kinds of weird warriors

with wings or forearms, or acid breath,

or super speed. By comparison, Earth Realm's warriors look pretty puny, especially since most of them

haven't figured out how to tap into the secret hidden powers their Earth Realm warrior sigils give

them. That's why the new Mortal Kombat, which premiered simultaneously on HBO Max and in theaters,

doesn't never actually get around to the Mortal Kombat tournament.

This entire movie is just prologue,

...