Sheng hua yao shi

Ten-second review: This low-budget laugh-free horror comedy has non-threatening undead and the world's most annoying leading lady (who doesn't appear to have an IMDB entry).

Slightly more detailed review: For some odd reason, any site that has a brief summary of this movie's plot gives away the big twist from the third act. I got lucky and never read it, so the big revelation stayed intact for my viewing. It's a good thing that I did actually get the full effect of the surprise because that's all that this film had going for it.

For anyone wanting a spoiler-free description of this film, here it is: Herbalist Li (Chin Siu Ho from Fist of Legend, Rigor Mortis, and far too many other films to name) was orphaned at a young age and grew up under the roof of Zhenzhu (Woo Heung Chun) and her father. After the elder man's passing, Zhenzhu wants to get married and has her eye on Li. Unfortunately for her, Li has less than zero interest in her.

As Zhengzhu attempts to force Li into marriage, Lei Wanlong (Billy Lau from Mr. Vampire) shows up with animated meat puppets. Li and Zhengzhu manage to defeat the animated puppets but promptly fall into the clutches of Lei and his armed goons.

Lei, like Herbalist Li, studied Chinese medicine under Master Mo (Richard Ng from the Lucky Stars films and a ton of other movies). Lei desperately needs Master Mo's secret eternal life medicine because he believes that is the only the thing that can save the Young General (Eddy Law), the son of a warlord, who is dying from a gunshot wound. If the Young General does not recover, Lei would have to face the warlord's firing squad.

Figuring that Herbalist Li would have some idea about Master Mo's eternal life elixir, Lei has come calling. The herbalist, however, insists he doesn't know the recipe but does agree to use his knowledge of healing to try to help the Young General. Li rhymes off a formula for a herbal brew that might help the dying man at least temporarily but warns that the measurements for each ingredient have to be precise or else he could turn into the bloodsucking undead.

If you guessed that everything goes well and the Young General comes out of all this just fine, you might want to try another guess.

Bio Raiders is heavily dependent on incredibly obvious attempts at comedy, mostly involving Woo Heung Chun trying to grope Chin Siu Ho or get his attention by pretending to be injured. During one of the few battles with the undead, Zhenzhu's bustline figures into the fight, which gives you an idea of the type of cheap laughs that Bio Raiders goes for.

Chin is the straight man in this movie as he plays Li as a serious character. He's definitely the most effective in the fights and has to put up with no end of shenanigans from Zhenzhu.

Billy Lau is the goofball who's always threatening the other two, but he's such a clown that it's impossible to believe that he would ever make good on killing anybody. Lei waffles back and forth between begging for Li's co-operation and coercing him into helping. The character is the very definition of a frenemy.

Anybody going into this movie expecting lots of black magic to be used and tons of action sequences involving the undead is going to be disappointed. There are just a handful of these scenes in Bio Raiders and they're not very memorable. The Mr. Vampire movies from the '80s and '90s might not have had blockbuster budgets, but a number of them at least had experts on mystic lore as consultants, leading to ingenuous black magic battles that felt fresh and exciting. None of that is on display here.

With little to offer fans of the Chinese dark arts, Bio Raiders fails pretty miserably as a comedy as well. Attempts by Woo Heung Chun and Billy Lau to pull off gags are mostly annoying but sometimes downright painful to sit through. Richard Ng, while quite watchable, is sidelined for a good chunk of the movie and is in a largely non-comedic role.

Bio Raiders is one of those movies that makes you wonder what was going through the minds of the people who made it. To say that the movie is mildly amusing would be an outright lie. There is very little here to appeal to fans of the undead genre and even the movie's big twist is spoiled by the description on this site (I told you not to read it). If this film comes up on your streaming service's menu, take my advice and just keep scrolling...you'll thank me for it.

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For those of you who are absolutely determined to watch this movie, I want to point out something about the names of the characters. The version I saw was from Asian Crush...I don't know if they handled the subtitling, but I figured mentioning them was an easy way of identifying the release I watched.

The subs get confusing because they use multiple names for the characters. Here's the list:

Chin Siu Ho --> Herbalist Li / Niu / Junior / Li Yao Shi

Billy Lau --> Lei Wanlong / Senior / Senior Lei / Peter / Brother Lei

Woo Heung Chun --> Zhenzhu / Auntie Pig / Pearl

Some of these are contextual. In Chin's case, only Lei refers to him as Junior because the two of them studied under Master Mo: Lei was the first to be taken on as an apprentice so he's the Senior while Li is the Junior. Niu (literally "bull" or "cow") is what Zhenzhu calls Herbalist Li because that's the nickname he had growing up. His full name apparently is Li Yao Shi, which is how he's identified in the end credits, but I don't remember ever seeing that name in the English subs.

Meanwhile, Billy Lau is called Lei Wanlong but only once. Li refers to him as Senior or Senior Lei because of the two of them apprenticed under Master Mo. Lei had also studied abroad and took the English name Peter, but no one calls him that. In the closing credits, he's called Brother Lei.

Now we get to Woo Heung Chun who probably needs the most explaining. Her character is called Zhenzhu which literally means "real pearl". That's why in the credits she's listed as Pearl, although I don't believe that ever shows up in any of the subtitles

What most definitely appears in the subs is "Auntie Pig" which will probably confuse a lot of people. Master Mo's daughter, Xin (Liu Jia), is the only one who calls Zhenzhu this name. The "auntie" part is a rough translation for a polite way for a younger woman like Xin to address a woman who's older. The "pig" part is just a bad translation. "Pig" and "pearl" are homonyms in Cantonese, so whoever translated the dialogue put the wrong one--it should be Auntie Pearl. I'll give that person this much: she/he is really consistent because the subtitles only ever have "Auntie Pig" not "Auntie Pearl".

Again, this might be specific to the Asian Crush release. If you see a different version, you might have a whole other set of translation issues to contend with, in which case, bon chance!