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Shaolin vs. Evil Dead
Tai Seng // Unrated // May 17, 2005 // Region 0
List Price: $19.95 [Buy now and save at Amazon]
Shaolin vs. Evil Dead stars Gordon Lui (Kill Bill) as Pak, a priest who guides the walking undead towards the peace and assorted salty goodness of reincarnation. 
While shepherding a group of hopping vampires towards their final resting place, Pak and his students Tien and Yat stroll into a restaurant teeming with zombies. The sort of extended battle sequence you'd expect from a movie with "Shaolin vs..." in the title quickly follows, and then we're introduced to Hak, a priest who prefers to decimate the souls of the dead rather than usher them into a new life. Yat falls for Hak's nubile young student, and Tien is force-fed a possessed egg that eventually causes him to give birth on the can. Oh, and I guess it goes without saying that Pak and Hak duke it out repeatedly, building to a climax that ends more abruptly than any movie I can think of straight off the top of my head.
Okay, I admit it: I was suckered in by the title, expecting to be dazzled by an hour and a half of guys wire-fu-ing twenty feet in the air and lopping off the heads of undead armies. Disappointingly, it's not really "Shaolin vs. Evil Dead" so much as "Shaolin vs. Evil Bad Guy"; after the underworld restaurant brawl that opens the movie and after the hopping vamps are put to rest a few minutes later,
that's pretty much for the 'evil dead'. There's a decent enough dwarven zombie who seeks out Pak's help, and Hak unwittingly unleashes a single undead warrior to set up the climax, but that's it. Aside from not living up to its title, Shaolin vs. Evil Dead really just isn't a particularly interesting movie. The action sequences aren't that thrilling, and the comedy's mostly just stale slapstick and dick-'n-piss jokes. The only real laugh in the movie comes during Tien's daydreaming about his shat-out-son Little Egg dying a grisly death, but having a grating character who unrelentingly screams "Mommy!" in a language I don't understand kind of offsets that. The not-much-of-a-romance between Hak's student and Yat is dull, the overall story is uninvolving, and...okay, I guess I've gotten the point across. Didn't really like the movie.
Video: 1.78:1 letterboxed. The licensor didn't provide Tai Seng with an anamorphic widescreen transfer, which is a disappointment -- the R2 release was 16x9-enhanced, at least. The quality as a whole is lackluster and borders on baffling for a movie produced in 2004. The transfer looks like it could've been culled from a twelve-year-old composite video master, sporting an undetailed, slightly smudgy, and pretty thoroughly bland appearance.
Not unwatchable or unredeemably awful, but still well below average.
Audio: Shaolin vs. Evil Dead includes the original Cantonese soundtrack, presented in Dolby Digital 5.1 and encoded at a bitrate of 384Kbps. Like the video quality, the 5.1 audio just falls short; the sort of clarity and punchiness I'd expect from a six-channel action flick just isn't there. Even after cranking up my receiver a few notches higher than normal, the track just sounds muddy and almost timid. A Dolby Digital 5.1 dub in English is provided as well, and although I admittedly didn't listen to much of it, the acting in the Cantonese track sounds better to these ears by an order of magnitude or two. There's also a 2.0 Mandarin track, and along with the English subtitles, Shaolin vs. Evil Dead also offers both traditional and simplified Chinese subs. The DVD is not closed captioned.
Supplements: Hong Kong film expert Ric Meyers, a mainstay on a lot of these audio commentaries, contributes another track for Shaolin vs. Evil Dead. He's joined by Tai Seng's Frank Djeng, whose name I sincerely hope I'm not butchering too badly. Most of the conversation doesn't really revolve around Shaolin vs. Evil Dead itself, partially because it's the last commentary in a big batch they recorded,
and partially because Meyers isn't wildly enthusiastic about the movie either. A lot of the discussion is kind of tangential, but they talk about what a great, talented guy Gordon Lui is and delve into the mythology behind the movie. Meyers seems to think that the commentary's going really badly, but I'll give it a thumbs-up -- I had a better time watching the movie with the commentary than without. It might be worth pointing out that the track is hidden under the "Setup" menu. Is it a fairly recent thing for no one to want to list commentaries under the 'Special Features' submenus anymore? I guess I wasn't CC:ed on that memo.
The DVD also includes a 'making of' featurette that runs more than thirty-two minutes in length. It's not the usual talking heads documentary, instead choosing to use a lengthy assortment of behind the scenes footage to tell the story. The meticulously choreographed battle sequences understandably get a lot of attention, and location scouting and the film's make-up effects work are also briefly touched upon. What this featurette does particularly well is give a sense of the scale of this sort of production. Finally, a trailer for Shaolin vs. Evil Dead is provided, alongside plugs for The White Dragon, The Master Swordsman, The Master Swordsman Returns, Red Trousers, and Sword in the Moon. The movie is divided into twelve chapter stops, and the DVD sports a set of static 4x3 menus. For the six or seven people obsessed with that sort of thing, no, there's no insert.
Conclusion: I guess I could complain about the way Shaolin vs. Evil Dead jarringly, abruptly ends, but I was kind of ready for the movie to stop fifty minutes earlier, so maybe I should be grateful. This is obviously not leading up to a particularly enthusiastic recommendation. If you feel compelled to watch Shaolin vs. Evil Dead, I'd suggest sticking with a rental, but I'd be even more likely to recommend steering clear entirely.
While shepherding a group of hopping vampires towards their final resting place, Pak and his students Tien and Yat stroll into a restaurant teeming with zombies. The sort of extended battle sequence you'd expect from a movie with "Shaolin vs..." in the title quickly follows, and then we're introduced to Hak, a priest who prefers to decimate the souls of the dead rather than usher them into a new life. Yat falls for Hak's nubile young student, and Tien is force-fed a possessed egg that eventually causes him to give birth on the can. Oh, and I guess it goes without saying that Pak and Hak duke it out repeatedly, building to a climax that ends more abruptly than any movie I can think of straight off the top of my head. Okay, I admit it: I was suckered in by the title, expecting to be dazzled by an hour and a half of guys wire-fu-ing twenty feet in the air and lopping off the heads of undead armies. Disappointingly, it's not really "Shaolin vs. Evil Dead" so much as "Shaolin vs. Evil Bad Guy"; after the underworld restaurant brawl that opens the movie and after the hopping vamps are put to rest a few minutes later,
that's pretty much for the 'evil dead'. There's a decent enough dwarven zombie who seeks out Pak's help, and Hak unwittingly unleashes a single undead warrior to set up the climax, but that's it. Aside from not living up to its title, Shaolin vs. Evil Dead really just isn't a particularly interesting movie. The action sequences aren't that thrilling, and the comedy's mostly just stale slapstick and dick-'n-piss jokes. The only real laugh in the movie comes during Tien's daydreaming about his shat-out-son Little Egg dying a grisly death, but having a grating character who unrelentingly screams "Mommy!" in a language I don't understand kind of offsets that. The not-much-of-a-romance between Hak's student and Yat is dull, the overall story is uninvolving, and...okay, I guess I've gotten the point across. Didn't really like the movie. Video: 1.78:1 letterboxed. The licensor didn't provide Tai Seng with an anamorphic widescreen transfer, which is a disappointment -- the R2 release was 16x9-enhanced, at least. The quality as a whole is lackluster and borders on baffling for a movie produced in 2004. The transfer looks like it could've been culled from a twelve-year-old composite video master, sporting an undetailed, slightly smudgy, and pretty thoroughly bland appearance.
Not unwatchable or unredeemably awful, but still well below average. Audio: Shaolin vs. Evil Dead includes the original Cantonese soundtrack, presented in Dolby Digital 5.1 and encoded at a bitrate of 384Kbps. Like the video quality, the 5.1 audio just falls short; the sort of clarity and punchiness I'd expect from a six-channel action flick just isn't there. Even after cranking up my receiver a few notches higher than normal, the track just sounds muddy and almost timid. A Dolby Digital 5.1 dub in English is provided as well, and although I admittedly didn't listen to much of it, the acting in the Cantonese track sounds better to these ears by an order of magnitude or two. There's also a 2.0 Mandarin track, and along with the English subtitles, Shaolin vs. Evil Dead also offers both traditional and simplified Chinese subs. The DVD is not closed captioned.
Supplements: Hong Kong film expert Ric Meyers, a mainstay on a lot of these audio commentaries, contributes another track for Shaolin vs. Evil Dead. He's joined by Tai Seng's Frank Djeng, whose name I sincerely hope I'm not butchering too badly. Most of the conversation doesn't really revolve around Shaolin vs. Evil Dead itself, partially because it's the last commentary in a big batch they recorded,
and partially because Meyers isn't wildly enthusiastic about the movie either. A lot of the discussion is kind of tangential, but they talk about what a great, talented guy Gordon Lui is and delve into the mythology behind the movie. Meyers seems to think that the commentary's going really badly, but I'll give it a thumbs-up -- I had a better time watching the movie with the commentary than without. It might be worth pointing out that the track is hidden under the "Setup" menu. Is it a fairly recent thing for no one to want to list commentaries under the 'Special Features' submenus anymore? I guess I wasn't CC:ed on that memo. The DVD also includes a 'making of' featurette that runs more than thirty-two minutes in length. It's not the usual talking heads documentary, instead choosing to use a lengthy assortment of behind the scenes footage to tell the story. The meticulously choreographed battle sequences understandably get a lot of attention, and location scouting and the film's make-up effects work are also briefly touched upon. What this featurette does particularly well is give a sense of the scale of this sort of production. Finally, a trailer for Shaolin vs. Evil Dead is provided, alongside plugs for The White Dragon, The Master Swordsman, The Master Swordsman Returns, Red Trousers, and Sword in the Moon. The movie is divided into twelve chapter stops, and the DVD sports a set of static 4x3 menus. For the six or seven people obsessed with that sort of thing, no, there's no insert.
Conclusion: I guess I could complain about the way Shaolin vs. Evil Dead jarringly, abruptly ends, but I was kind of ready for the movie to stop fifty minutes earlier, so maybe I should be grateful. This is obviously not leading up to a particularly enthusiastic recommendation. If you feel compelled to watch Shaolin vs. Evil Dead, I'd suggest sticking with a rental, but I'd be even more likely to recommend steering clear entirely.
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