Bio-Zombie

Bio-Zombie is sort of Mallrats meets Dawn of the Dead meets Chopping Mall, except all the characters work in the mall, although I guess they also hang out in the mall more than work. The two main characters are Woody and Bee, two friends who work in a bootleg VCD/DVD shop. They flirt with Rolls and Jelly, two girls who work in a spa, and antagonize the nerdy Sushi Boy (guess where he works?) who has a crush on Rolls, and Mr. Kui, who owns what looks to be an illegal used cell phone shop. This movie came out in 1998, which means you can look at the cell phones now and laugh about how big they were. I do the same thing every time I watch The X-Files movie or an old episode of The X-Files.

Woody and Bee are asked by their boss to go pick up his car from the mechanic, and being the slackerly and generally unlikable characters they are, they also antagonize the workers at the car shop and almost get in a fight. At the same time, nearby, a bio-weapon in the form of a zombie and an infected soda are being sold to the army by the Iraqis. The zombie attacks one of the army men, and gets loose. Woody and Bee accidentally hit one of the army men on the run and carrying a cache of the soda on the way back to the mall. They stick him in the trunk since it’s a sportscar. When they open up the trunk when they are back at the mall, he’s gone, it looks like he melted. Hard-up for money to pay the mechanics, they mug Rolls in the bathroom of the mall, and steal her cash and a diamond ring. Rolls, who more or less know that it was Woody and Bee who mugged her, hires Woody to find out who did it. She conspires with Jelly to take the boys to dinner, get them drunk, and admit that it was they who robbed her. It works, but Woody admits it to Roll while they are about to have sex in the bathroom, and Sushi Boy bursts in to say he was attacked by a “monster” in the men’s room. They don’t find one, but the man who they hit with their car has also broken into Mr. Kui’s cell phone shop to get back his cell phone, which Woody and Bee sold. The security guard calls the cops, against the wishes of Mr. Kui, and two goofy cops show up. It’s not long before the zombie outbreak has reached moderate speed, and these zombies are smart enough to close down all the exits to the mall.

The zombie action doesn’t really start until 45 minutes into this 90 minute film. I guess it gives time for character development, but at the same time, half the characters are jerks, and it feels very tedious for the first half. Woody and Bee do become more sympathetic and likable in the second half of the movie, but that is because Mr. Kui is a coward who is mean to his pretty wife and doesn’t like it when Bee is nice to her, or when she agrees with Woody and Bee’s plan of action – he’s like Harry Morgan in Night of the Living Dead, but worse. At least Woody, Bee, and Rolls are trying to get everyone out of the mall safely.

The ending is surprisingly bleak for what was a pretty light film for the first 45 minutes. It is seriously one of the bleakest endings to a zombie movie I’ve ever seen, since most modern zombie films give some hope that the final person, couple, trio, whatever will be okay. Bio-Zombie is a very stylish film, albeit in an ironic way sometimes (slomo lighting of cigarettes, for example) although at times it seems like it’s a Cantonese answer to a 1990s Kevin Smith comedy, or any American indie film that tried to be like a Kevin Smith comedy in the 90s, but wasn’t quite as funny.

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