If you’ve seen George Romero’s zombie movies too many times, are tired of the wan imitations from Italy, and befuddled by the recent Japanese wave of undead films that stress low budget style over storytelling, then it may be time for you to look into a cheap Chinese import. Bio Zombie is a movie out of Hong Kong that puts a frenetic, comedic spin on the zombie genre and is surprisingly entertaining once the zombies finally start rampaging in the second half of the movie.

A lot of these Hong Kong horror movies are kind of like the drunken uncle at your family reunion. You know the one I’m talking about. He’s loud, obnoxious, and says the nasty things that everyone else is really thinking but too hemmed in by social mores to give voice to. He’s always most popular with the youngest kids because he’s burping and farting and generally acting like an overgrown tot himself. Also, when he’s drunk, he isn’t quiet and morose about his meaningless existence, he’s telling his teenage niece how sexy she is!

That’s what sets apart these Hong Kong flicks from the rest of the horror field. They revel in being extremely gross, don’t mind mucking around in some brief, but strictly gratuitous dirty stuff, and even as the severed arms are flying across the screen, there’s always an undercurrent of humor running throughout everything. You’ve seen it in really gross stuff like Ebola Syndrome as well as in movies like The Eternal Evil of Asia and Dr. Lamb.

Bio Zombie uses this formula of “yucks and yucky” pretty well in what amounts to a hyperactive (and therefore easier to sit through) rip-off of Romero’s Dawn Of The Dead. And no , I don’t call a movie a Dawn Of The Dead rip-off just because it has zombies in it. I call it a rip-off because it has zombies in it and these zombies just happen to trap a group of people in a shopping mall. But this is no carbon copy. Since this is a Hong Kong shopping mall, it seems to be located underground and be very cramped and instead of having Waldenbooks and Orange Julius it has a VCD shop and a sushi bar.

You also can see the difference between characters in an American zombie movie and a Chinese one. An American zombie film might star guys named Peter and Roger who might be helicopter pilots or SWAT team guys. In this movie, Woody Invincible and Crazy Bee work in the VCD store. A VCD store that sells lots of pirated movies and one where Woody and Crazy get into fights with the customers who don’t like the quality of their bootlegs. “If you don’t like how it looks, why don’t pay to see it in the theatre” one of them barks to some whiny cheapskate. You don’t hear that down at the Sam Goody in your local mall.

This movie also manages to touch (so to speak) on the Hong Kong horror film industry’s obsession with guys’ ding dongs. (Remember the peeing scenes in The Deadly Camp and Ebola Syndrome ? And the situation as presented in The Eternal Evil of Asia speaks for itself. ) While there isn’t a peeing scene in this one (though there was a funny scene in the bathroom where Woody is looking for a zombie and only finds Crazy Bee in a stall and when Woody asks him what he was doing, Crazy Bee shouts, “I was stooling!”), there is a scene where Crazy and Woody admire some guy’s nuts while he’s underneath a car he’s repairing. An odd sequence to be sure, but since this is Hong Kong, odd is only the prelude to full on comedy, so the boys kick it up a notch and direct a big bug into the guy’s shorts and then they watch the good times roll! And yeah, it had nothing to do with anything, but that had to be better than watching Peter and Roger go on a shopping spree for new clothes in Dawn Of The Dead.

Adhering to the conventions of the genre, the movie selects “government experiment” from its two choices (the other being meteorite) as to how the zombie problem is started. Believe it or not, the stuff that turns people into zombies was allegedly created by the Iraqis! Why didn’t we know about that? Stupid liberal media bias! It’s in liquid form and packaged like a soft drink and the next thing you know Crazy Bee and Woody Invincible are giving some unknowingly to a guy they just ran over! Shoot, we all know how parched a guy can get when he’s got tire marks on his head!

The first half of the movie is a bit on the slow side, especially when it comes to the presence or lack thereof of anything resembling a Bio Zombie. There is one initial attack that eventually leads to Woody and Crazy getting their hands on the zombie juice, but other than that, there’s a bunch of time spent with Woody and Crazy as they try to get their boss’ car repaired, though I never really quite caught on to what that was all about. I think it may have been the same car they ran the guy over with.

We also have to meet some other folks who hang out at the mall including two tomatoes named Jelly and Rolls, the nerdy guy that worked at the sushi bar who had the hots for Rolls, a bickering husband and wife named the Kuis who trafficked in electronics goods of questionable origins (what kind of malls do they have over in Hong Kong? Pirated movies and stolen cell phones? In the U.S. we call those places pawn shops.), and a mall security cop named Ox (because he’s really big. And no, I have no idea why they called her Jelly.)

The zombie stuff starts when the guy Woody and Crazy ran over comes back to life and finds his way from their car to the mall and runs amok. Anyone he bites eventually turns into a zombie and as you might expect, these zombies also crave human flesh. They also are only dispatched by a shot to the head, completing the movie’s slavish imitation of the Romero zombie mythos. (They do explain how the characters figure out that you need to shoot them in the head by having Crazy flashback to his hours of playing Sega’s House Of The Dead video game and recalling how you had to kill the zombies in that game. So this movie is actually copying a video game that copied the Romero zombie movies.)

Initially, no one believes that the problems in the mall aren’t being caused by Woody and Crazy and they are taken into custody by the police at the mall. They only manage to escape after a zombie attack on the cops and this leaves Woody running down the hall screaming that the zombies are coming, while hauling around a computer monitor that he is still handcuffed to. Mr. Kui sees this and as Woody is running past hollering about the zombies, Kui shouts after him, “are you threatening me?” That’s the kind of whacky stuff missing from that other mall-zombie flick.

The rest of the movie involves Woody, Crazy and the rest fending off the zombies in a variety of locations in the mall. Though the humor gets downplayed as the movie progresses (up until a surprisingly humorless and grim ending), it isn’t completely abandoned. Couple that with the fact that the characters constantly scream whenever they run into a zombie and you could argue that it was a tad more realistic that Dawn Of The Dead. Didn’t anyone find it odd that there wasn’t much screaming in Romero’s movie? I don’t know about you, but if I was just down at the mall to check out some new Air Jordans at the Athlete’s Foot and an army of zombies ambled by, I would be running around in circles howling like a banshee! (After helping myself to some free shoes in the ensuing chaos of course.)

There was some gore in this movie, but nothing on the level of one of the Romero or Italian efforts. You had some severed limbs and some head trauma (Woody armed himself with a rechargeable drill), but no one was wallowing in pig guts or anything. They also parodied the House Of The Dead video game a few more times, which alternately came off as amusing or just plain odd (like when Woody was out of bullets and the screen flashed “RELOAD” or when he was trying to operate some equipment and a symbol indicating he didn’t have a key flashed), but nothing was beat into the ground so that it became irritating.

The downbeat ending seems a bit off key considering the relative lack of seriousness that had preceded it, but with the death of one of the main characters, the humor evaporated from it, so it probably shouldn’t have been totally unexpected. A good, fast, change of pace from a genre that usually moves along as quickly as its subjects. One of those loud, spastic efforts ideal for parties. Just like your boozed up uncle!

© 2008 MonsterHunter