Contour (2006)

Contour (2006)

Starring: Eric Jacobus, Ed Kahana, Andy Leung, Tyler Wang, Dennis Ruel, Ray Carbonel, Stephen Reedy

Director: Eric Jacobus

Action Director: Eric Jacobus

The Stunt People.

I discovered them around 2000 through their old website, mainly because I was always looking for places that reviewed martial arts movies/Hong Kong action. Back in those days, I was an ardent follower of Dragon’s Den UK (now Far East Films), The Martial Artist’s Guide to Hong Kong Films, and lived in hopes that Teleport City and Stomp Tokyo would review a Hong Kong film on their next update. The Stunt People reviews broke the films down on a fight-by-fight basis, complete with multiple screenshots of each individual fight, and were extremely critical of every aspect of a fight. 

Assuming that it was Eric Jacobus who was reviewing those films, he was very much a purist and came down hard on almost anything to come out of the USA, even when it had a HK choreographer (like Bloodmoon). He even was extremely harsh on Cynthia Rothrock’s performances in HK films back in the day. So, I liked his reviews and the occasional video clips he included with them, but I found myself disagreeing with him…A LOT. I was also aware that he and his crew were in the business of making martial arts shorts, some of which I downloaded and watched back in the day. I think I saw one of the “Teamwork” videos—it had something to do with a car stopping in a parking garage and the guys getting out of the car and starting to fight.

In the mid-2000s, the Stunt People started making their own feature films. The first one appears to be Immortal, followed quickly by Contour. They went on to make other movies: Bound by Blood (2007); Detective Story (2010); Dogs of Chinatown (2010); Death Grip (2012); and Rope a Dope (2013). Eric Jacobus himself has done some stuntwork in Hollywood (A Good Day to Die Hard), a lot of motion capture/action direction work in video games (including several incarnations of Mortal Kombat); and even some action directing in Asia. So, good for them.

Contour is a martial arts comedy that is very much an homage to the sort of films that Sammo Hung made in the 1980s—if you read Jacobus’s old reviews, he seemed to respect Hung’s work the most. The film is a comedy, but the action is mostly played straight. And even when there is humor in the action, it is a bit more situational (i.e., a guy in forced to dress in drag ripping off his wig and dress before fighting) than simply choreographed goofing off.

The plot (such as it is) goes like this: Lawrence “Law” Young is a cynical, hard-smoking tour guide in San Francisco who owes a lot of money to a rich Vietnamese guy named Thuoc (Stephen Reedy, who does a lot of behind-the-scenes work in Hollywood). Thuoc has gotten rich selling self-defense videos for his own style called “Tae Phở”—with the running joke being that Thuoc is almost never seen without a bowl of phở (the Vietnamese soup) in front of him. Law occasionally goes in for different jobs, usually stealing money from thieves and drug dealers, in order to accelerate the payment progress. But after a few bad jobs, Law goes back to his dead-end tour guide job.

His latest batch of clients include a “teenager” named Alfonso de la Rosario (Ed Kahana, American Brawler and Unlucky Stars), the crown-prince of the obscure island nation of Uruvia; his Chinese bodyguard, Lei Tak (Andy Leung, Immortal and Bound by Blood); and some right-wing Christian missionary named Renee Wilder (Tyler Wang, who was in the Stunt People’s short “Undercut”). Long story short: the Uruvian government is at war with the United States, who wants to undercut the small country’s cheese production. And there is a video cassette with compromising information that may destroy the country. The tape has fallen into the hands of a criminal named Esteban (Dennis Ruel, of American Brawler and The Man from Death). Since there is a reward by Alfonso’s parents for the retrieval of the tape, Lawrence sees this as a means of getting the money to pay off his debts.

Let me start off with the bad: the length. I don’t see any reason for a film like this to be 100 minutes long. And the overlength of the move can be summed up in most of the footage “set” in Uruvia and the final brawl, which has some nice choreography, but draws out the denouement more than it should have. I didn’t find any of the scenes in Uruvia to be funny—Alfonso’s mother is a male actor (Jesse Traugot) in drag, har! I also thought they could have done more with the Renee character, like explain why a (supposedly) straight-arrow Christian right-winger instinctively knows how to use a sub-machine gun…I guess I answered my own question right there. She gets to throw down a little at the end, but she seems more there to provide a little bit of “romantic” “tension” and keep the film from becoming a total sausage fest.

The action was staged by Eric Jacobus himself, with help from his co-stars. There are several major fight sequences. The film starts with a fight at a warehouse when Law tries to steal a blue bag from the bad guys. There is some stylized gunplay in addition to some solid 1980s-Hong Kong-style choreography. The next big fight is between Law and Lei Tak inside of a Taekwondo school, and this is where things really get good. The two put on a kicking clinic with the sort of aerial boots that would make Scott Adkins proud. There are flip kicks, all sorts of nutty jump kicks, and just your garden-variety roundhouse and spin kicks. The two put in their repertoire, broken up by nice stretches of punch-and-block exchanges that remind me of Fan Siu-Wong vs. Billy Chow in The Death Games (a film Jacobus was a huge fan of).

The next set piece pits villains Dennis Ruel and Ray Carbonel against a roomful of baseball bat-wielding men (presumably the other main actors in ski masks). There is some nice weapons choreography as Carbonel is able to get a hold of the weapons and use them like escrima sticks. Ruel is a bootmaster supreme and does all sorts of neat work in this sequence. There is even an homage to Dragons Forever when one of the nameless fighters—Jacobus himself, I think—gets kicked and performs a fall where he hits neck on a ledge, similar to how Yuen Biao dispatches Billy Chow in that film. That is followed by a fight involving Alfonso (Ed Kahana) while on a sugar high—the gag is that his character is hypoglycemic and if he eats junk food, he goes into super kung fu mode, similar to Jackie Chan in Drunken Master II. This fight plays like a dream sequence as he has to beat up a series of enemies in different locations, including a guy in a bunny mask on a rooftop. The second part of his shtick is that Alfonso is a big fan of the “Tae Phở” videos, so his fights look a mixture of 1980s Jackie Chan and more old school kung fu.

The final fight runs for a good 20 minutes and is set in the same warehouse as the opening set piece. The fight is broken up into four different mini-fights. One of them has Ed Kahana going into his crazy “sugar fu” routine, which has some nice falls and kicks, plus some wicked chain whip work. There is an extended fight between Andy Leung and Ray Carbonel, which is a mixture of strong bootwork with lots of complex handwork and chin na, presumably taken from kung fu (wing chun?). Leung is joined by Vlad Rimburg, who plays the former owner of the warehouse who is forced to take on custodial duties after Esteban takes over. He gets his revenge and uses what appears to be more conventional Taekwondo or Karate in this sequence. But the meat of this martial arts smorgasbord is the fight between Eric Jacobus and Dennis Ruel, which is like the final fight of No Retreat, No Surrender 3 or any fight from In the Line of Duty IV just cranked out to 11. The entire sequence is several minutes of uninterrupted punch, kick, and block exchanges performed with speed, height and crispness. If you can sit through the comedy and corniness, you’ll surely enjoy the fight action on display. Then again, that’s more or less how we talk about our favorite 80s HK films, too.