Starring Stephen Fung, Sam Lee, Alice Chan, Chan Wai Ming, Benny Lai, and Frankie Ng Chi-Hung, directed by Stephen Fung.
Nom, nom, nom…
Dr Harry (Lai) smuggles a sample of weaponised virus from a lab that’s attempting to create ‘painless warriors’, but he is bitten by one of the test subjects (Jude Poyer) and slowly turns into a zombie-like being, triggering an outbreak of the undead at a rural Hong Kong police station.
Green gunk dribbles from Dr Harry’s mouth during sex…
There’s too much extraneous chat and a string of pointless scenes padding out the beginning of this movie, but matters become more interesting once Harry starts drooling green gunk during sex, rips apart the occupants of a police cell and then becomes a super-strong, scabby-faced ‘New Human’, who can bend bars.
Harry gets pretty strong
Could’ve been better…
Instead of being a super-soldier thriller, as suggested by the opening sequence, BIO-COPS evolves into a zombie outbreak flick and is really rather silly. Quite a few zombies seem to like to hide in lockers, a cop gets his arse bitten by petty hoodlum Cheap (Lee), who’s just pretending to be a zombie, and Frankie Ng Chi-Hung simply looks embarrassed playing zombified Hung Hing triad gang boss Kow.
For a ‘zombie’, Harry talks quite a bit
Reminiscent of BIO-ZOMBIE (1998) in some ways, this film is nowhere near as good as that flick, though the diverting latter zombie siege moments, involving submachine guns and pump-action shotguns, do enliven the story, but the finale lacks fizz, turning into a talky confrontation between cop hero Marco (Fung), his girlfriend May (Wai Ming) and Harry, but at least it ends with Harry having a grenade shoved into his mouth. Boom!
Directed by Hwa I Hung, starring Billy Chong, Chan Lau, Chang Tao and Cheng Ka Ying .
Poster
Ocean Shores video sleeve
A renegade priest brings the dead back to life as eyeless, hopping zombies to help a bad guy called Mu Tai kill his opponents, but the villain dies in one of his own boobytraps, so his ghost demands to be reincarnated in another body. Mu Tai’s spirit ends up residing in the corpse of hero Pang’s father, but a faulty ritual turns him into a white-faced, part-human & part-ghost being, who’s hellbent on murdering several folks. To make matters worse, Pang (Chong) is also targeted by scar-faced undead villain Long, a guy so tough he even carries on fighting when his hands and feet catch fire! Fortunately for Pang, the handy intervention of a Buddhist monk imbues him with the power to defeat Long, who is finally lynched with prayer beads and stabbed to death with a tree branch.
Is Pang’s dad dead or unwell or a zombie?
Nice eyebrows!
Splash!
This is a corpse, innit?
This Eternal Film Company production is a comedic fantasy-horror-actioner, starring the likeable Billy Chong, which merges lively bouts of kung fu, humour and supernatural hijinks with music borrowed from the likes of MOONRAKER and EXORCIST II. The movie informs us that spirits need to be nailed to the corpses they are going to inhabit and reveals the fact that a hat constructed from leaves can make its wearer invisible to the living dead!
This leaf hat will make you invisible to vampires and zombies – honest!
Video cover
There’s some super-fast editing for several fight scenes, plus speeded-up farcical chases, though this all actually works out fine within the context of this film, which is, after all, an exaggerated comedy kung fu horror flick.
A giant tongue sprouts a toothy mouth and tentacles!
A tax collector (Leslie Cheung) travels to a rural town and ends up taking shelter in a creepy, deserted temple in the forest. Here he encounters a beautiful young woman (Joey Wang) and falls in love with her. A Taoist priest (Wu Ma), however, informs our hero that this woman is a ghost… and it is soon revealed that she is under the control of an evil Tree Demon.
Poster
Directed with kinetic panache by Ching Siu-Tung, this film is a horror-romance-martial-arts-comedy-actioner that is crammed with atmosphere, emotion, gravity defying swordplay and some goofball physical comedy.
Leslie Cheung and Joey Wang
Its mix of Asian story elements (beautiful flying ghosts, a Taoist priest-swordsman, etc) and western filming techniques (Sam Raimi-esque roving cameras and some gooey FX) make this Hong Kong production an enormously entertaining watch, with Leslie Cheung, Joey Wang and Wu Ma all perfect in the leading roles.
Wu Ma performs a very acrobatic Taoist rap!
Joey Wang is a standout playing the sexy-yet-vulnerable ghost, flying about the stylishly-lit locations in her flowing silk robes. There is a wonderful moment where she gives Leslie Cheung’s character (who is having to hide from her evil ‘sisters’ underwater) a slow motion kiss that is also providing him with much-needed air.
The mysterious ghost-girl
And, of course, we shouldn’t forget the shrivelled stop-motion corpses in the temple. These undead dudes shuffle around the building in the early part of the film, trying to get hold of the hero, but thanks to a series of comedic, lucky mishaps he remains completely unaware that the zombies are there, eventually killing them with sunlight without ever noticing them!
Stop-motion corpses in the attic!Another shot of the stop-motion zombiesFull-scale zombie head used for close-ups
The ancient tree spirit villain is a great antagonist, appearing as a cross-dressing dame or a gigantic human tongue. At one point the tip of the huge tongue splits, becomes a toothed maw with a face at the back of the jaws, with tentacles sprouting everywhere!
The tree demon!
Giant tongue erupts through the floor!
80s Hong Kong madness!
Produced by the legendary Tsui Hark, this film really impressed me when I first saw it in the cinema back in 1987. With its effortless merging of genres, a haunting score and a finale featuring the heroes battling it out in the netherworld to save the heroine, the movie turned me into an avid, obsessed Hong Kong movie fan for many years!
Wu Ma is especially good as the sword-fighting monk
Japanese poster
Awesome stuff!
Netherworld finale!
(If you hunt this down to watch, make sure you see the perfectly-formed ’87 version and not the remake)
A gas attack of unknown origin wipes out most of the population of Earth. A group of survivors (who all lived through the gas strike because they were in air-tight rooms, etc) gather together and base themselves in an English village hotel/pub.
Poster
The group, led by American test pilot Jeff Nolan (Willard Parker), soon discover that the gas attack was a prelude to some kind of invasion… because they now spot silver-suited robots plodding around the village! These automatons can kill humans with a touch of their hands and then, it is revealed later… these victims come back to life as white-eyed zombies!
Blank-eyed victims return from the dead!Robot and zombie slave!
Vanda Godsell gets zombiefied!
The protagonists move between the village and a Territorial Army drill hall, dodge stalking robots and zombies, and then Jeff finally formulates a plan that involves blowing up a local radio mast that’s being used to send signals to the robots…
First of all, I must say that THE EARTH DIES SCREAMING is a great name for a movie! Just how awesome is that title?! Okay, the movie doesn’t live up to the promise of this title (the Earth dies pretty much silently thanks to the gas attack), but the film does have some tense scenes that are well-handled by director Terence Fisher.
THE EARTH DIES SCREAMING has a brief running time, is low budget, has a doomy, subdued, dour atmosphere and is a ‘Middle England apocalypse’-type scenario reminiscent of a John Wyndham story. I always find these set-ups quite interesting, as scenes of dead bodies littering quaint village streets and robots clomping past homely pubs make for quite interesting visuals.
Dead bodies in the home counties…
The lo-fi robots have a Cybermen vibe to them, though they predate the DOCTOR WHO villains by two years. These mechanical menaces (they’re basically guys in silver spacesuits) move unhurriedly, as do their zombie human servants, and I think this adds anxiety to the scenes because you know the protagonists SHOULD be able to outrun the robots but you also KNOW these clunky dudes will still somehow creep up on them.
They may look a bit like Cybermen but these robots came first!
There’s an effectively directed sequence where Peggy (Virginia Field) escapes from unreliable cad Quinn (played by Dennis Price, who always played cads) and finds herself pursued by slow moving robots & zombies. There’s a similarly tense moment at the end of the movie when some robots and a now-zombiefied Quinn menacingly approach Lorna (Anna Palk) and her newborn baby.
Quinn returns as a zombie working for the robots
Though the movie ends rather abruptly, with the destruction of a single alien-commandeered radio mast conveniently putting all the robots in the area out of action, THE EARTH DIES SCREAMING is an interesting watch and its depiction of people coming back from the dead as zombies means that it can be viewed as a precursor to NIGHT OF THE LIVING DEAD (1968).
Terence Fisher must have acquired a taste for making small-groups-of-Brits-threatened-by-aliens/monsters movies because he went on to shoot ISLAND OF TERROR (1966) and NIGHT OF THE BIG HEAT, aka ISLAND OF THE BURNING DAMNED (1967) soon afterwards.
The robots close-in…
Pressbook
The movie’s no classic, with the characters lacking any real goal until the decision to destroy the mast is suggested late in the plot, but this B&W horror-sci-fi tale is worth a watch.
Devoted to every kind of movie and TV monster, from King Kong to Godzilla, from the Blob to Alien.
Monster Zone 