Kung fu roles have been his bread and butter ever since and this week he is back as The Master in Rob Schneider's latest, Big Stan, and he practically steals the movie.

Schneider is one of those love-him-or-hate-him comics whose movies are invariably forgettable.

Sometimes it seems his films get forgotten even before they are released.

This one was made more than a year ago and is only now turning up in Australian cinemas, just in time to be overwhelmed at the box office by Baz Luhrmann's Australia.

Schneider frequently appears in small roles in Adam Sandler films (although not in Sandler's Bedtime Stories opening here on Boxing Day) but his starring roles, as in 2005's Deuce Bigalow: European Gigolo , for example, can be really bad.

In Big Stan, he plays the title character, a con man heading to jail where he is terrified he will face sexual attacks from other prisoners.

His crooked lawyer manages to get a six-month delay before Big Stan begins his sentence and he uses that time to learn, you guessed, kung fu.

Enter David Carradine.

Quarantine horror

WITH the release of Mirrors, starring Keifer Sutherland, a few weeks back, I commented on yet another Hollywood remake of a foreign film.

In Mirrors the plot was borrowed from Korea. Here's another!

Opening today is Quarantine, based on Spanish horror film Rec.. Jennifer Carpenter is a television reporter with Steve Harris as her cameraman assigned to a night at a Los Angeles fire station, which leads to the TV crew, the firemen, policemen and residents quarantined from the outside world in an old building.

What follows is akin to The Blair Witch Project and Cloverfield in that the horrors we see on screen are recorded on a television camera thus the name for the original Spanish film, Rec., for "recording''.