Junk
Produced for Japanese home video in the late 90's - early 2000's. Junk is an action horror about a bunch of Jewel thieves who head to a remote factory to sell off their loot to a fence only to wander into a botched American experiment to revive the dead. It also nabs the plot of an earlier video hit score by having rival Yakuza and special forces in the mix. So when not battling the undead the rival factions are engaged in gun-play with each other. It's cheap and cheerful. A lot of stuff shot for the video market in Japan is. Takeshi Miike cut his teeth turning out films for the market early in his career and it seems to instil a discipline in the film makers to shoot quickly while turning out entertaining films that appear to have higher production values than they actually do. As a result Junk is a lot of fun. Score was excellent but credit where its due, taking that film then adding zombies is about as Exploitation as it gets.
Bio-Zombie
Hong kong entry into the western influenced zombie genre. This has a pair of hapless video store clerks making money selling counterfeit VCD's (remember those?!) and robbing people. They aim to save up some cash but end up blowing it on hookers, drugs and booze. They run down a man carrying a bio-weapon in a lucozade bottle and unwittingly unleash a zombie plague upon the city. Back at the shopping centre they work at they must work with various other shop workers to try and stay alive as the shopping centre begins filling up with the undead.
More of a straight up comedy with nods to video games like house of the dead, Bio-zombie is a lot of fun. It's got the traditional crude humour that can be found in HK cinema and the main characters are hopelessly corrupt but have enough likeable charm to keep you watching. The film doesn't scrimp on the gore either with plenty of blood and actually manages a genuinely bleak ending that doesn't feel out of place given the amount of humour that precedes it.
 |