Since it burst into arcades like a bloody fist through a ribcage, Mortal Kombat has had movies on its mind. You don’t have to look hard to see the films that inspired these games, with most of the original cast bearing clear resemblances to famous martial arts characters and performers: Liu Kang is modeled after Bruce Lee, Raiden was lifted from Lightning in Big Trouble In Little China, Kano was a legally distinct T-800, and so on. In fact, the original 1992 game was almost shelved in favor of an adaptation of the largely forgotten Terminator knock-off Universal Soldier, but Midway allowed the team to continue work on its fighting game instead because Jean-Claude Van Damme was busy with other projects. They would add Johnny Cage and his signature crotch punch special move as an homage to Van Damme’s Bloodsport.
But beyond these often-cited inspirations, there’s a crucial missing link that doesn’t get discussed as frequently. “When I would get asked, ‘Hey, what influenced you?’ there were a lot of different things,” saidMortal Kombat series co-creator John Tobias. “There are kind of the obvious ones: Enter The Dragon, Bloodsport, Big Trouble In Little China. But there were other films that I think had even more of a direct influence. Really, what it was is there was a production company called Shaw Brothers.”
The Hong Kong studio, which put out close to 1,000 films (including many of the most technically impressive martial arts films ever made), helped kick off the kung fu craze of the 1970s, spearheading a wave of action movies that broke with wuxia’s fantastical swordfighting to focus on grittier hand-to-hand combat. If there’s a defining quality to the Shaw Brothers kung fu movies of the ’70s and ’80s, it’s the authenticity of their action choreography. Virtually all of the leading performers in these films were trained martial artists, something that directors like Chang Cheh and Lau Kar-leung took full advantage of with involved, long-take fight sequences.
The camera barely cuts as these actors flip, dive, punch, and kick with the deft movements of a professional. There’s a captivating realness, even with all the iron-limbed men and occasional dashes of wizardry running through the films. Other studios also employed Shaw Brothers’ approach of using real martial artists, like its greatest rival, Golden Harvest, which was founded by its former executives. Golden Harvest eventually won worldwide recognition when it signed Bruce Lee (and later Jackie Chan and Jet Li). But while Golden Harvest’s work is probably better known than Shaw Brothers outside of Hong Kong, many of the latter’s films made their way to theaters in the U.S., like the one in downtown Chicago where Tobias first caught them during triple features.
The Mortal Kombat co-creator has acknowledged many of the obvious homages to Shaw Brothers films. Series protagonist Liu Kang’s name was derived from Gordon Liu, the martial artist who played iconic shaolin monk characters in The 36th Chamber Of Shaolin and The 8 Diagram Pole Fighter. Similarly, the villain Shang Tsung was inspired by the white-bearded villain of Clan Of The White Lotus. There are other clear (yet unconfirmed) parallels to the studio’s films: The iceball-summoning Sub-Zero and the rest of the palette-swapped shinobi bear resemblance to Five Elements Ninjas, Five Deadly Venoms has a guy named Scorpion in it, and, most direct of all, there’s the Shaw Brothers film Crippled Avengers, which was released in the U.S. in 1981 as…Mortal Combat.
But more than these straightforward points of inspiration, certain aesthetic similarities run much deeper. Both Mortal Kombat and these martial arts films focus on colorful characters defined by cool gimmicks, something especially common in Shaw Brothers director Chang Cheh’s filmography. The opening of his classic Five Deadly Venoms is a perfect example. As a master delivers a monologue about his dangerous former students, a flashback shows each of their unique fighting styles: Centipede unleashes a blur of punches, Toad resists a bed of spikes, and Scorpion delivers explosive roundhouse kicks. This wasn’t the first movie to feature a roster of fighters armed with highly specialized fighting styles, but the over-the-top presentation is a clear forerunner to the kind of exaggerated flair found when cycling through the options in a fighting game.
Once punches and kicks begin landing with deadly efficiency in Chang’s films, you see what would eventually become Mortal Kombat‘s whole shtick: over-the-top violence. Lethal blows shed fluorescent red blood. People are stabbed, tortured, lit on fire, mutilated, amputated, drowned, assassinated with brain picks, and kicked so hard they literally die. One of the most memorable scenes in The 8 Diagram Pole Fighter comes when Gordon Liu’s Yeung Dak, a monk now at the peak of his vow-breaking wrath, starts palm-striking bundled bamboo shoots from a wooden cart, sending out shards of fiber that impale his victims like he’s firing a Song-dynasty shotgun. Almost without exception, these films end with a mountain of dead bodies. It’s the kind of exploitative fun that would eventually ignite a moral panic over Mortal Kombat‘s fatalities.
At the same time, Shaw Brothers movies were more than just their rampant violence. At their best, they delivered pulpy tragedies, as do-gooder warriors battle each other to the death, like in Invincible Shaolin‘s climax. Government corruption and underhanded tactics punished those who had faith in the criminal justice system. While good basically always prevails, this frequently came at a great cost, with heroes biting it left and right. And above all, there’s the contrast between unabashed cheesiness—the cheap costumes and phony props—and the utter seriousness of trained professionals performing some of the most impressive feats of graceful violence you’ve ever seen. It’s a tone the best Mortal Kombat stories, like the 2013 reboot, have wholeheartedly mimicked. Mortal Kombat may be accumulating its own long list of screen adaptations, but Shaw Brothers has always been the real thing.
Keep scrolling for more great stories.