Fear the fury of the front-flips! Shriek at the ferocity of the finishers! Quiver at the capacity of the…catch phrases! New Line Cinema is making a new Mortal Kombat movie, and they’ve hired the guy who directed the recent Glee concert movie to be in charge! Does that sound like a winning combination or what?

Get over here!...and sing me a song!

But seriously, it’s actually a pretty cool story and I have high hopes. The director Kevin Tancharoen got the job by being the biggest Mortal Kombat fanboy ever. While the video game series is pretty cool, the Mortal Kombat movies in the 90s were  train wreck of idiotic costumes, horrible acting and groaningly stupid dialogue. They were cheesy and campy because movie studios are idiots. So two years ago, Tancharoen got his pals together and some actual Hollywood actors and made his own Mortal Kombat fan film. He made it realistic and brutal, with actual stakes and no silly costumes.

He called it Mortal Kombat: Rebirth.

It’s actually pretty badass.

The Interwebs loved that little video, and it garnered enough attention that New Line Cinema hired Tancharoen to produce a series of Mortal Kombat webisodes. They were short little mini-movies that ran earlier this year, featuring rebooted or retooled versions of the classic Mortal Kombat characters. For some reason, it wasn’t an exact take off Mortal Kombat: Rebirth. In a lot of places, he relied more on the original video game origins and characters than on his rebooted versions, which I found weird. But for the most part, the short films were pretty good.

And now, after that first series of webisodes, New Line Cinema has hired Tancharoen to just make a full blown movie! That’s pretty damn awesome. A geek who loves a property enough to make his own fan film does such a good job and earns such acclaim that a movie studio hands him the keys to the franchise for reals.

That’s every geek’s dream come true. That’s like writing a Batman fan fiction story on the Internet and then DC Comics letting you write an issue of Batman because your story was just so neat.

I guess I need to start working on my Strawberry Shortcake fan film…