• Directed by Wilson Yip
• Written by Matt Chow, Siu Man Sing, and Wilson Yip
• Starring
  • Siu Shun Chan
  • Kam Ching Cheung
  • Chan Sum Lee
  • Yiu Cheung Lai
  • Angela Tong

Despite the presence of both zombies and a shopping mall, this movie is not a ripoff of Dawn of the Dead (1978), though it does show as much Romero influence as most zombie movies in the past twenty years. Shot in Hong Kong for a professional but low budget, it’s an example of the standard zombie fare transplanted into local culture, and it’s the combination of universal story elements and local color that makes it an intriguing if minor entry in the zombie canon.

Our main characters are Woody Invincible (Siu Chun Chan) and sidekick Crazy Bee (Chan Sum Lee), two macho young men that my inner Edwardian wants to label as “wastrels.” They occasionally run the bootleg VCD store in the local mall, but it looks like they spend most of their time wandering the mall, watching girls and wondering how they can make it big without exhibiting any redeeming character traits. And as they don’t interact with the zombie portion of the movie for quite a while, we get instead plenty of scenes of them belligerently flirting, berating customers who complain about the quality of their VCDs, getting on the wrong side of the mechanic fixing their boss’s car, and in one low point for audience sympathy, mugging the snotty girl Rolls (Angela Tong) that just started working in the beauty salon with their friend Jelly (Suk Yin Lai). Also, seriously, who came up with these character names?

Crazy and Woody, and yes, we’re screwed.

Meanwhile, the zombie portion of the plot starts without them. In a dark warehouse, representatives of two crime families meet for an exchange facilitated by Iraqi handlers, a purchase of a biological weapons smuggled out of Iraq. (…Nope, the jokes are just too easy.) The weapon’s in two parts: the chemical agent, cleverly disguised in a soda bottle, and a crate containing a thumping, angry thing. Said thing is chained to the insides of the crate, but not securely enough, and soon there are body parts literally flying.

And finally, plot intersection! The courier who took possession of the bio-agent runs away from the warehouse and onto the road directly in the path of the car driven by Woody and Crazy. After he bounces off the pavement several times they try to patch him up, and when he croaks something about a soda, well lookie here — there’s one sitting right there, having escaped from the man’s case! So they thoughtfully give him a drink, then load him in the trunk of the car as they try to figure out what to do with him.

Now that’s an automotive anti-theft device I can get behind!

By the time they get back to the mall, things seems pretty much moot, as the fellow is mostly dead. But after they’ve left him in the parking garage and gone off to a dinner date with Rolls and Jelly, something breaks out and starts shambling around the parking garage…

We still have to wait for a while until our main characters realize they’re in a zombie movie, so instead we get several strains of melodrama. Rolls has talked Woody and Crazy out to dinner to try to find out if they were the guys behind her mugging; their server at the sushi restaurant is Loi (Kam Ching Cheung) aka Sushi Boy, a kindhearted dweeb with a deep unrequited passion for Rolls. We also spend about as much time as we can stand with Kui (Yiu Cheung Lai), a small-time operator and proprietor of a shop of shady electronics, whose main pastime seems to be berating his shy wife (Suk Mooi Tam) in order to make himself feel tough.

Chicken pox are much worse if you contract them as an adult.

When finally everyone’s met everyone, then the actual zombie movie can commence, once the mall is locked down for the night with only Woody and Candy, Rolls and Jelly, Sushi Boy, Mr. and Mrs. Kui, one security guard, and two young cops investigating a break-in at Kui’s shop left inside. And a shambling infectious zombie. (Actually, there are several zombies around, the results of the courier zombie’s efforts in the time leading up to the mall closing. I don’t know how they were missed in the security sweep before lockdown, but it appears that one component group among the undead is an entire rugby team. No nuns, though.)

The rest of the movie can be summed up as: figuring out what’s going on, trying to find a safe defensible place, and waiting for Kui to get the gutmunching he deserves. Sushi Boy is one of the first do get bit, and as he slips into zombiehood his devotion to Rolls becomes a whole subplot of its own. Along the way, Woody and Crazy discover there’s something courageous beneath their bravado, in sharp contrast to Kui. They also discover that both skills and facts they learned playing first-person shooter zombie games do come in handy, especially because these zombies fill out the standard checkboxes like “love to eat human flesh” and “can be disabled with a headshot.”

I included this screenshot mainly for those people who thought I was mishearing her name.

Although shot on a tight budget, the only place where the limits of that budget can easily be seen is in the zombie makeup. Early appearances of the living dead are disguised by oblique angles, shaky camera work, etc., but we eventually have to see the zombies full-on, and the appliance work composed of latex and peeling tissue paper is pretty unimpressive. I guess the low-budget film industry in Hong Kong just doesn’t have the wealth of teenaged horror fans who practice appliance work on their friends to draw on.

Dude, soda is what started all this…

But otherwise, it’s a slickly produced little feature, which provides for action and gore while not taking itself too seriously and providing some decent comedy (though the ending is surprisingly nihilistic). And while none of the characters are really fleshed out, they are given character arcs believable enough to keep them (especially Woody and Crazy) from being mere two-dimensional cutouts. I don’t know how Bio-Zombie did in Hong Kong, business-wise, but I certainly wouldn’t complain if the dubbed version were more commonly available in US video stores instead of homegrown backyard zombie productions.

Some Notable Totables:

• body count: 12, plus 2 imminent
• breasts: 0
• explosions: 0
• ominous thunderstorms: 0
• actors who’ve appeared on Star Trek: 0