Shaolin vs. Evil Dead (2004)

Review by Sean Patterson



"The night is dark. And the road is long. Come on dead men. Return to your home." I have a slight confession to make. I love kung fu movies. Even the poorly made and cliche ones. I'd like to think I'm impartial enough not to allow this guilty pleasure affect a perfectly good horror movie review. But I know myself better than that. So you will have to interpret this review in that context. Don't worry too much about what I think, though. If the title of Shaolin vs. Evil Dead doesn't sell you, skip it for a more traditional horror movie. Unless you've never seen a kung fu movie, and even then this isn’t the first one you should see. There is a short list of 30 words that can be used in a random pick-and-choose fashion to name a kung fu movie: tiger, crane, eagle, monkey, mantis, dragon, jade, drunken, fist, crouching, blind, finger, legend, enter, fury, shaolin, seven, evil, five, flying, vs., hidden, warrior, hero, master, return, iron, death, dead, and deadly. Go ahead. Pick two. Doesn't make sense? Keep adding words until it does. Shaolin Mantis Fury. See? The Deadly Drunken Iron Death Warrior. The Seven Fisted Monkey Master of Death sounds like cinema magic. You're not even sure I didn't make that one up are you? You'll notice that "zombie" and "undead" are not on the list. Still, Shaolin vs. Evil Dead manages to let you know the score without straying from the list. I have to stress at this point that the movie is in no way related to Sam Raimi's Evil Dead franchise. Too bad, as it would be fun to see Ash use his iron fist to take on hoards of undead warrior monks. Gordon Liu of Kill Bill fame plays a traveling priest named Pak. He, along with his sidekicks Sun and Fire, leads a group of zombies who hop along with their hands straight out in front of them. He’s trying to help them and guide them home by using his special powers. The most important tool at his disposal seems to be the voodoo papers which allow him to control the zombies like robots. It’s here that the movie starts making less sense. Everyone keeps calling each other brother or uncle, which might refer to some sort of warrior school caste or might just be a product of the poorly translated dubs in the version I watched. The dubbing itself was also laughably bad. The first inn they come upon is haunted, of course, and it’s here that they meet Hak (Siu-Wong Fan) another warrior monk/priest from the same zombie tamer school. Where in China is this place that is exclusively populated with the undead and their priest ringmasters? Hak is the bad guy. We know this because, instead of wearing the white garbs Pak does, he wears black and has a beautiful and vicious female companion, Moon. He is the Brother Black to Pak’s Brother White, and he’s got a chip on his shoulder from being passed over by Pak for a leadership position in their school. Instead of "helping and guiding" the zombies, Hak uses his powers to torture the dead and bend them to his will. The powers Hak and Pak use are highlighted by the use of CGI. These effects are kept simple and sparse, making them effective for most of the film. It’s only when the CGI fills the screen that it becomes cartoonish and silly. What is also silly is the toilet humor in the movie. There are many penis and peeing jokes in the first part of the movie. Pak even requires virgin piss for a difficult kung fu spell. The movie slows way down with the bizarre, pining love story between Sun and Moon (get it?) about one-third of the way through. We then continue along as Pak just follows Hak around trying to stop him from using his powers to bilk ignorant villagers with flashy shows of magic and demonology. Except for the fighting, it gets pretty boring, though there is a "phantom chess" scene where dozens of small children use kung fu on each other that is very entertaining. The ending is very abrupt and bears almost no relation to anything that happened in the rest of the movie. Hak unleashes a powerful demon and Pak must come in and save him. Even Pak isn’t a match for the demon, though, and it’s up to the weird "Egg" which Fire swallowed early on and then farted out explosively in the form of a small child Billy Corgan impersonator who can only say "mama," (don’t ask) to become the deus ex machina. So, as entertaining as this movie was for me, and despite my love for Cantonese schlock, I really can’t recommend the movie to anyone other than kung fu fans.