Dan's Movie Report: 2020-03-22

Tuesday, March 24, 2020

Lost Souls: Mortal Kombat - (Short Fan Film) Movie Review (C) 2020 Dan's Movie Report Danny Templegod

All of the action on a poster, no fluff needed! 'Lost Souls' delivers!

Greeting valued Dan's Movie Report and Action-Flix readers. During this trying time, we have hard hitting films of all shapes and budgets unleashed. Thanks to Sachiko Ishida posting it, I was made aware of a Mortal Kombat fan short that posted in January. The Mortal Kombat fan film “Lost Souls' was produced, edited, and directed by Kevin Barile. Starring Chris Yong, Robert Steven Brown, Omari Valentine, Jenny Sahagun, Sachiko Ishida, Narayan Cabral, Ashley Becciani, Mario Rocha and Davis Chong.

Sachiko as Mileena, practicing social distancing with sai!

Sachiko plays Mileena and Ashley Becciani plays Sonya Blade. They have my two favorite sequences, but all are great. The reason I like the Mileena sequence is she is shown attacking toward the camera and then the camera moves to the side, Sachiko is fast and lithe adept at her action craft.

Ashley is ready to fight in Lost Souls, stay home and let Ashley handle business!

Ashley's scene as Sonya Blade is well lit, and shows some additional action with a broken bottle. Ashley has experience on the live action show of Kill Bill. Ashley is also on the front lines as a nurse now, that is the real action hero!

The 11 minute film is basically an extended fight clip in a bar, and introduces the characters and their signature moves in rapid succession. All are experienced actors and action people and the film flows with an accelerated yet not overly frantic pace. Director Kevin Barile, got the cast to tighten the movements and this creating a seamless transition. A particular praise to DP Andrei Litvinov. The way the fights were filmed made it exciting, and engaging. The musical score is just fascinating and retains the excitement for each character fight uniquely. When Jax uses his arm, a mechanical whirring sound comes right on cue, it is quite cool, proving the magic and musical wizardry from Brian Wherry. The musical score and timing it to the action is a huge accomplishment due to the number of character transitions and action machinations.

Overall this is a great example of what can be done with limited budget, creativity, and talented personnel. 'Lost Souls' rates a very strong 9 out of 10.