Wow, I haven't gone on a random tirade that long in a while! Felt good. Felt Right. Very cleansing. Refreshing even. Groovy. With that out of the way, and barring any further ado about nothing, let's go kill some zombies!... or hang out at the mall for a while and then get around to killing the zombies later... provided they don't trample each other to re-death in the mad rush to try the new "Sardine-Peppermint Swirl" flavor at Cinnabon. See, I knew that opening story would eventually have some relevance with today's movie!

From the beginning I gotta say that Bio-Zombie, when it wants to be, has flares of creativity that work so well it smooth talks your brain into remembering it more fondly than the total experience actually is. And it starts its seduction early too, because even the opening credits are funny! They run like the movie itself is being bootlegged with a handi-cam by someone in a theater. If you've ever opted to pay $5 to a shady looking guy on a street corner in order to see the latest defecation from the Hollywood Hills rather than fork $10 over to some pizza-faced dingus in your local cineplex to see the same thing, you know what I'm talking about. It's a little slice of brilliant and if someone purchased a bootleg of Bio-Zombie shot in a theater in the exact same manner, it would create an anomaly in the very fiber of our universe and shift us all into an alternate dimension where people drive nimbus clouds instead of cars, William Shatner clones are tasked to clean everyone's litter box twice a week, and Fozzy Bear has just been nominated the first muppet president, bringing us one step closer to reconciling centuries of tension between humans and puppets.

The movie itself centers around a septet of characters who all live meaningless 9-5 existences in the epicenter of soulless human economics: their local mall. Our heroes are Woody Invincible and his pal Crazy Bee... let that sink in a little bit before you try to figure it out. Hearing something like "Woody Invincible" for the first time can split open the back of your skull and induce seizures if you don't know how to handle it properly. Not unlike smoking crystallized Thompson's Water Seal, really. The dynamic duo work a VCD (DVD for the American subs) shop out of a closet sized store that makes a Porta-John look palatial. When unhappy customers complain about the unsteady camera work of their bootlegs, they excuse it as special "MTV style" cinematography. They're also a pair of artificial tough guys whose plans for future financial security consist of one day striking it rich betting on horse races. Bee also has this unsettling urge to see Titanic throughout, but hopefully that's just because he wants to take jerk lessons from Billy Zane or he's keeping his fingers crossed that Kate Winslet will give the folks a peek at the goody bags.

In addition to Woody and Bee, we have beauty shop salesgirls Rolls and Jelly, neither of which is overweight as their names might suggest. They're cute, but Rolls is one of those "flirts with people so they'll give her free stuff" types that makes you want to stomp on their feet as hard as you can with your steel toed boots while they're wearing open-toed shoes, but pretend like it was an accident afterwards, only to laugh later at the thought of her toes turning black and possibly falling off... as you can tell, this is a thought that too many women in my line of vision have induced into my brain over the years. The rest of our casts boils down town to Mr. Kui (a phone store owner with delusions of grandeur), his wife Mrs. Kui (whom he treats like an Indonesian housekeeper), and Loi - a sushi restaurant worker who's in love with Rolls and tries to win her affections with coupons for discount fish. She bats her eyelashes a little bit, flashes him a smile, and goes into work without a bra on and before you know it she's getting all of her California Rolls half-off. And so, with the cast introductions out of the way, I'm pretty sure we've got a story somewhere laying around here. I haven't cleaned up in here in a while, so watch your step. Don't want you tripping over it, taking me to court, and getting the judge to appoint me as your personal movie reviewer for the next 40 years.

At a warehouse somewhere between the mall and a competitively priced auto mechanic's garage, two official looking government guys buy a deadly chemical from Iraqi weapons traffickers that turns people into unstoppable marauding super zombies. Nobody seems to question why the shit is stored in a soda bottle though, as this will of course lead to wacky mishaps and misunderstandings later. Woody and Bee hit the guy transporting the bottle with their boss's car and when the fading lackey manages to utter out "soda" as his last words, the boys figure the guy wants to drink from the bottle, so they pour half the contents into his mouth and toss his body into the trunk of the car as opposed to leaving him there. It makes sense though, because a passing motorcycle cop stopped at the scene to investigate, only to be fooled by the pair's Weekend At Bernie's routine, so finding a body at the same spot later wouldn't be good for our "heroes"' chances of keeping their asses from becoming meat sheaths in a Hong Kong prison. Woody Invincible, meet Juggernaut Cock.

Distracted by a round of House of the Dead (at least it was the game and not the movie...) and a customer service incident that includes nipple tweaking, W and B return to the car to check up on the body, only to find the trunk caked with rancid green shit and less one deceased political stooge. Unfortunately, as quickly as we get to the setup for the inevitable undead hoedown, the payoff takes a little longer. It's like your spouse/partner/fuck-buddy getting you in the mood for a night of spring busting Bedroom Olympics, but they make you go to dinner with them and sit through a Rob Schneider movie first. Okay, so maybe the Rob Schneider comparison was a little harsh, but you see where I'm coming from... but don't look at it too long or I might shoot your eye out. *rimshot*

Eventually Rolls' wanna-be boyfriend Sushi-Boy Loi has a run-in with the escaped ghoul in the men's room after-hours and gets an unwarranted hickey-from-Hell. From here it's the natural progression all zombie movies since Romero have taken, with the infection spreading through the mall's pool of employees (and a couple of cops) while our heroes and heroines do what they can to keep their necks relatively free of missing pieces. Lucky for everybody that Bee has an extensive education in video games about killing zombies, and thus knows that shots to the head are the only answer. Eventually, around the 75 minute mark, shit starts to pick up as the survivors arm themselves with any available items that can cause some damage and go on a Gallagher-like bender of melon mutilation... well, four of them do. Jelly goes zombie chow first, so she's out. And Mr. K technically spends a lot of time filling his drawers behind a Coke machine, so he's not exactly of much use to anyone until he later does the unavoidable character turn-around and sacrifices himself to save his wife as a final testament that despite being a massive dickburger to her, he always loved her. How charming in a Shanghai Tennessee Williams motif.

Remember, this is a zombie movie though, so you know that not all of the survivors can actually survive. As such, I'm sorry to say that we lose everybody but Woody and Rolls, and that includes Crazy Bee. Sorry kids, but you knew from the start that Bee was the sidekick of the pair, and once the hero hooks up with the love interest, the sidekick's got nowhere to go but into a makeup chair to be fitted for ghoul prosthetics. It happened in Dawn of the Dead, it happened in Shaun of the Dead, and it's happening here. Poor kid, on his birthday and everything too. His death is one I actually cared about though, cuz he gets one of those really sad endings where everybody's blubbering and he's telling Woody that he loves him and the whole thing makes you question the level of acceptable gayness you're showing by actually being moved by a movie character's big finish. All I know is that when I die, make sure my funeral picture's taken with a Game Boy Camera. And don't fuck around with the morph functions either, cuz my family's going to want something at least resembling a decent picture of me as I was, not at my stoner friends would have wanted me if they'd had a million dollars and the number of a plastic surgeon with flexible ethics.

The last 15 minutes or so almost make you forget about the veritable ass dragging that takes place throughout the flick's midriff. We get the melancholy loss of the movie's heart, Woody finally goes legit bad-ass and fights his way through a pack of zombies, there's this powerful ending (that I know a number of people will laugh at me for calling "powerful", but I thought it was so up your nose with a rubber hose) that comes with a Zombie like revelation, and even undead Loi gets one last chance at garnering some sympathy from the audience. The poor awkward lump deserves it too. For guys like us, it's not our fault we crush on people out of our league only to wind up brain hungry, gut-munching, boil-infested shadows of our former selves.

Despite those final 15 minutes, they can't wash the taste of Bio-Zombie's slow points out of our figurative mouths. It's lax on the good stuff for far too long in the middle, establishing the characters and zombie threat, only to meander and make us sit on a bench and wait for it while it trots out mindless socializing scenes that feel, well, mindless. Appropriate for a zombie movie some might say, but I'm not looking for irony, I'm looking for a smooth transition between build up and pay-off. What I don't want is a build up, a stubbed toe, a sit down while we wait for the toe to stop hurting, a quick check to make sure the toe's not broken, then a gradual "working out the kinks" period to get the toe back to normal before we finally start heading for the finish line. It's a momentum killer.

Characterly (that's right, we make up more words than Webster here!) speaking, Woody and Bee are practically perfect in every way as the comic leads. Their personalities go from disaffected to loud and brazen in a heartbeat, and not to come off as racist, but Cantonese is one of those languages that just lends itself to instant hilarity to begin with. The intensity put into delivery, the heavy emphasis that's heaped onto pronunciation. It's so animated! Beyond Woods and B though, the other characters are pretty meh. Loi's a lovable loser, Rolls is a flirt with hollow material pursuits, Jelly might as well have had no lines at all considering how "in the background" she felt, Mr. Kui is the washed up old guy with an archaic approach to his marriage and a cowardly sense of self-preservation, while Mrs. Kui just sits around taking the abuse until a few kind words from a guy like Bee give her enough confidence to stand up for herself. Nothing special, none of them really unique or personable, they might as well have been cloned from a million other movie characters. But, and if you stop and look behind you there's always a but (har har), the one thing this group has that most don't is their own video game-style profiles! Yep, continuing the odd mash of game and movie, the main-eventers get their own humorous character profiles. Entertaining enough that I felt the need to include screen shots...

In the end it's Dawn of the Dead meets Mallrats, only there's no Ken Foree being awesome or Michael Rooker licking Jason Lee's chocolate ass bacteria from his own fingers. For those of you who have seen the latter you know what I'm talking about, and for those of you who haven't seen it, you're now disgusted but oddly curious as to how exactly that comes about. You might even be opening up another window right now and adding it to your NetFlix queue... Like I was saying though, before I so rudely interrupted myself with Henry: Portrait of a Serial Killer's dysentery, I was saying that Bio-Zombie has this almost surreal imbalance between its dramatic parts and its comedy parts. Both aspects work well enough, even admirably at times, but they don't really compliment each other. The two sides are in a struggle for dominance reminiscent of Ash and his hand in Evil Dead II, appropriately enough, only neither side seems capable of cutting the other off at the wrist with a chainsaw...