Actor, stuntman, motion capture performer, video essayist and filmmaker Eric Jacobus (“Mortal Kombat Legacy”) will be releasing his 2006 hit action comedy, Contour, for free on YouTube in the coming weeks. Jacobus made the announcement last week in a community post on his channel last week, further offering followers a chance to provide feedback with an advanced screening.
Billed as the “black & blue” edition (as illustrated by the film’s original poster), Contour was the next major step for Jacobus and his fledgling team of aspiring stunt performers known as The Stunt People, after co-directing Immortal with Chelsea Steffensen, and winning big with MTV shortfilm crowdpleaser, Undercut. The team had already begun crafting several shortfilms as it assembled its members from various parts of California over time.
Contour stars Jacobus who plays Lawrence “Law” Young, a shiftless thug indebted to a weasley boss posturing himself as a martial arts pioneer. Forced to pick up the slack as a San Francisco tour guide, “Law” is thrust into a spell of fisticuffs and hijinks with a Chinese bodyguard to a child prince, and an Uzi-packing Bible journalist, as well as a ruthless gangster with a kickboxing leadfoot named Ticker and his henchmen when a salacious tape threatens to upend the prominent cheese industry of the unstable country of Uruvia.
Shot on a shoestring budget of $5000 and a reliable stash of protein bars, nuts, water and henchmen balaclavas, the cast also lists Dennis Ruel Ray Carbonel, Troy Carbonel, Andy Leung, Ed Kahana Jr., Tyler Wang, Vlad Rimburg, and Stephen Reedy, along with Todd Roy and Donovan Kendrick. The film would go on to win accolades across audiences and niche websites for The Stunt People, including recognition from Kung Fu Cinema’s Mark Pollard as “the premiere independent action studio”.
Jacobus independently released the movie on DVD prior to its acquisition by Indican in 2008, as well as Manga’s digital rollout of the film in 2012 in the U.S.. As a result, the new DVD for its retitling of the film as The Agent removed many of the extras on the original black and blue print along with the extensive behind the scenes featurette of the film which also takes you into the world of Contour.
Its digital counterpart from Manga not only crops the layout of the film to a more “squished” presentation, it also cuts the film down to size by roughly fourteen minutes, comprising multiple changes in terms of dialogue reduction and fight sequencing. The biggest example of the latter can be noticed in a dream sequence featuring Kahana Jr. in the role of Al under a hypoglycemic spell as he hallucinates his way from a talking car to a street fight against a thug wearing a bunny mask in order to get a key to a door to retrieving a missing cassette. That sequence leads to a rooftop fight with a mysterious man in a white jacket brandishing a knife in one of the film’s more exciting fight scenes.
Some of the cuts and changes work in an effort to make the film more brisk and straightforward, partly including “Law” and his entry into the warehouse at the start of the film, his first interaction shown in the film opposite boss Tuoc, which is played by Reedy, and other brief subtractions in scene dialogue from the start of the film. Capping off the litany of discernible changes in the film however is the Jacobus’s Pink Panther-inspired finale in which an fourth wall-breaking outro monologue by “Law” escalates into a full-on melee among all the cast members in a post-party duplex resulting in everyone taking a mad two-story tumble down a flight of stairs.
There’s plenty that’s been said, or to be said, or could be said about Contour depending on your views of indie film. At any rate, Jacobus made a film knowing who his audience was, and did so with the same ambitious fervor shared by a team with designs on making more. A few more projects certainly unfolded along the way allowing its cast members to create with the potential for more; Jacobus would collaborate with Micah Moore and Contour cohort Carbonel for 2010’s Dogs Of Chinatown before partnering with Johnny Yong Bosch on screen for 2012 dark comedy actioner, Death Grip.
Jacobus’s circulation in shorts would also continue with Zatoichi-inspired modern-day short crime actioner Blindsided co-starring Roger Yuan, as well as the back-to-back Groundhog Day romp that was Rope-A-Dope, reteaming with Ruel on screen as well as behind the lens for the action design of Vasan Bala’s hit martial arts comedy, The Man Who Feels No Pain. Ruel, who also starred in 2012’s American Brawler, efforted to recapture the indie spirit with the production of Unlucky Stars, starring alongside Ken Quitugua, Steven Yu and Sam Hargrave, which released in 2015. That push was definitely signaled in their performances between both Rope-A-Dope films, a rekindling of the magic they gave in their exorbitant fight finale in Contour bolstered with fight choreography, speed and pacing all adherent to the film’s initial title.
The first two-thirds of the film contains about seven or eight stunt sequences and gags, five of which are key fight sequences among cast members and stunt performers. As the film winds down to the big warehouse climax, Jacobus and Ruel are showcased in one of the four crucial match-ups in the film’s warehouse finale alone – others feature Wang taking on Ticker’s hooded goons, Kahana Jr. in character unleashing staff and chain whip action in the vein of his favorite martial arts idol, and Leung in a voluminous tête-à-tête with Carbonel that loops in Rimburg who is dressed in drag.
The comedy is hugely akin to the kind of slapstick that Jacobus and his team work to blend in as fans of Eastern influence through an open-minded Western perspective. Combined with the tenacity to endure the risk the and inevitable bodily injury that occured for some of its cast along the way, and coupled with the multi-tasked ingenuity and creativity among the team, including Nick Mastroianni’s score which rolls out the red carpet for the animation completed by Kahana Jr. as he recuperated from a torn ACL ahead of principal photography, Jacobus’s release of Contour guarantees that without fail, his is the version of a film that’s long become a fan favorite in the last fifteen years, and now, more people will get to see it very soon. And for free, no less.
