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Perhaps the funniest moment in Resident Evil: Extinction appears in the extras, where Paul W.S. Anderson, a true god among hacks, claims that he single-handedly reinvented the zombie film . “No one made a zombie film for fifteen years before Resident Evil,” he boasts, a claim which even a cursory glance at any list of zombie films will quickly debunk. Bold pioneer that he is Anderson claims goes on to brag about his daring choice to shoot a zombie in the daylight… ground well-tread not only in Romero’s Dawn of the Dead twenty-nine years previous, but also in the 2004 Zack Snyder remake. Yeah, Paul. You’re a real ground-breaker.

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I suspect most of the column’s regular readers have already seen Shaolin Soccer. We mustn’t let that slow us down. If we all pull together, I’m sure we can still make this a worthwhile review.

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Happy New Year! When switching calendars, one must be drunk. Let’s take a look at a film with one of China’s favorite inebriated folk heroes.

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First off:
Happy birthday everyone!

As you may or may not have known, your humble reviewer is the Baron of Birthday. After years of forgetting the ages and dates of birth of close friends and family members, I decided about three years back that I would usurp the Barony, and thus all ages and dates of birth may be reassigned at my personal whim. If I waited around for an election to work out in my favor, who knows how long this might have taken. Instead, I just cut the bullshit, and did what had to be done. Now, I rule.

In a similar spirit, The Stunt People, a group of genre fanatics in California, are not waiting for Hollywood, Hong Kong, or Bombay to start investing in their work. They like action movies. They want to make action movies. They make action movies. And they rule. See how easy it is?

Budgets? Bah! Time off the day job during production? For the weak! Insurance? Nothing could possibly go wrong!

The Stunt People have done a load of short films in the five to ten minute range. Today, I’ll be looking at their longer works, Undercut, and Contour.

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Your humble reviewer may have mentioned once or twice that things were not going well for China at the end of the Ching Dynasty. I want to revisit that theme for just a moment. Recall that, as Western powers divvied up China, the Shantung Peninsula was under Russian Control. When Russia was defeated by Japan, Shantung was placed under Japanese control. We’ll be seeing a bit of symbolism as the film gets going. The Ching government was powerless to control the destiny of its own territory.

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