Enjoy this Monday with Mildred!
This is also Zombie World Tour post!
Biozombie
Set in Hong Kong, this standard story of zombies arrive, people run around dying is a day in the life of two Chinese slackers who actually reminded me a lot of the two slacker heroes in Juan of the Dead. The movie follows a day in the life of Woody Invincible and Crazy Bee, who work at a store that sells bootleg DVDs of movies they shoot in the theatre, complete with audience interruptions and announcements of impending bathroom breaks (“I want to stool now.”). We never see the boss, but if he can pay two employees there must be more business for bootlegs than I ever imagined.
There’s a small nod to Romero in that almost all of the movie happens in a mall. It’s not an American style mall, though, but a twisty, narrow set of hallways wending past closely packed glass-walled shops. The place is chock-full of ne’er do wells who spend a lot of time mouthing off to one another with a terribly annoying accent.
It’s obviously done on the cheap, with some hilariously bad zombie makeup, and subtitles that don’t even match the English dubbing. Doesn’t matter, though, because the subtitles are part of the hilarity more than a few times.
The film is intended to be funny, and it does have some laugh out loud moments, some of them intentional. The last spoken line of the film would be hilarious if done intentionally, but there’s no way to tell. For all we know it’s just another goofy misinterpretation.
There is enough pathos and thrill to balance the comedy, with some nicely done action sequences and genuinely gory, tense moments. Unfortunately they tend to stand out as not the norm. The acting isn’t the worst I’ve seen. (One of the actresses could be Morena Bacarrin’s sister, separated at birth.) A big theme of the movie is how we don’t appreciate what we have until the dead show up to ruin your day.
The filmmakers seemed to be sincere in their desire to turn out a zombie flick and not a parody. Despite its many flaws, I enjoyed watching it and if you’re in the mood for Asian goofiness give it a whirl.
LINKS:
BioZombie Trailer
Chick Flicking Reviews 