BIO-ZOMBIE (Hong Kong, 1998)



Directed by: Wilson Yip
Starring: Jordan Chan, Sam Lee, Angela Chang, Emotion Cheung
94 minutes, 35mm, in Cantonese with English subtitles

There were two trends in late-nineties Hong Kong filmmaking: Young and Dangerous movies, and Category III (Hong Kong's NC-17) sex shockers. The Young and Dangerous flicks were youth crime pictures about honorable gangsters who happened to be young and cute with perfect butts and sassy hair who went after one another in massive street battles for honor and glory. The Category III sex shockers, epitomized by Wong Jing's RAPED BY AN ANGEL series, were soft-core sexploitation knock-offs liberally dusted with gore and violence. Wilson Yip, a young stylish director with a perfect butt and sassy hair, notable for a couple of horror movie anthologies and a sex shocker, could raise money to go Young and Dangerous or Cat III. Instead, he took his investors' money, mixed the genres, and gave birth to BIO-ZOMBIE.

A shotgun marriage of Cheech and Chong's STILL SMOKIN' and George Romero's roughhouse zombie classic, DAWN OF THE DEAD, this off-the-cuff remake is a video-overdosed freak-out that mixes the Young and Dangerous genre with the horror movie and the result is wet and wild. Dripping with fake gore, shredded latex, pustulent zombies and the kind of frenetic fury that has made "Dance Dance Revolution" the best video game in the world, BIO-ZOMBIE has been rejected by horror fans as far too funny, and by comedy fans as far too gory. But know this: its black little heart is in the right place and it's got a beat you can dance to.

Raunchy and outré, the movie starts with our negligible heroes sitting in the cinema with a video camera, bootlegging a movie called BIO-ZOMBIE. Jordan Chan plays Woody Invincible: with his smoker's rasp, and his
marble-mouthed mumble he hijacks your eyes with anti-charisma. Crazy Bee is his buddy, a sawed-off half-wit with a heart of gold, played by Sam Lee, Hong Kong's accidental celebrity (discovered skateboarding in 1997, his only training was as an electrician. He has since become Hong Kong's hardest working actor). The movie moves on to some cleavage leering, then a penis-poking scene, and then we get a zombie in a box who's being sold to some rich Arabs but who, instead, eats them in a whirlwind of torn-off limbs and arterial spray, kick-starting the action.

The zombies march on the city and trap our heroes in one of Hong Kong's intestinal shopping arcades whose infinite chrome and glass corridors are lined with closet-sized shops selling everything from trendy cell phone accessories to bootleg movies. It's a puke-a-rama apocalypse, and our heroes march bravely into its teeth, chain wallets dangling, heads shaved, cell phones ringing, and blood-splattered machetes held tight. We arrive in high style at the end of the world, but not before doobs are smoked, a zombie falls in love, and legions of the undead are dispatched with a veritable catalogue of Black and Decker power tools. Technically tremendous, but defiantly low-brow, BIO-ZOMBIE is to movies what the Dead Milkmen were to punk rock - a lo-fi garage band that may barely know how to play its instruments, but gets by on sheer nerve and originality. In BIO-ZOMBIE the dead may hate the living, but the living hate them back. A lot.