Ebola Syndrome (1996)

Dir. Herman Yau

Being a fan of splatter movies, more than any other genre, seems to invite people to demand an explanation as to one’s enjoyment of them. No one will roll their eyes at you for watching a period drama, no one will think your sick or depraved for seeing the latest comic book movie, and romantic comedies seem to always squeak by as a guilty pleasure. Even more mainstream horror movies will get a pass if they’re “artsy” enough. But many people still seem to have this puritanical aversion to gore films and the people who enjoy them. I can’t really explain why I like gore movies. Maybe it helps me process my anxieties regarding death. Maybe I find it cathartic to see such extreme displays of bodily carnage. In any case, I don’t need to explain it to you. I like em’ and that’s reason enough.

With that out of the way, Ebola Syndrome is a completely indefensible film. Within the first five minutes there is dick stabbing, head crushing, tongue cutting, and an attempt to set a little girl on fire. This is all done by the film’s protagonist. This is his story. 10 years later and antihero (emphasis on anti) Kai is laying low in South Africa after committing triple homicide, working in a Chinese restaurant and being a generally horrible person. I won’t spoil the specifics, but a series of events unfold by which Kai becomes an unwitting and asymptomatic carrier of Ebola, causing an outbreak in South Africa and another later in Hong Kong as law enforcement and a figure from Kai’s past race to find him and stop him from spreading the deadly virus.

The first 45 minutes or so of the movie are filled with misogyny, racism, rape, violence against animals, dismemberment, cannibalism, and more rape. It gets rough to watch, and is reason enough not to recommend the film to anyone with taste or shame. But for seasoned exploitation aficionados, it’s almost breathtaking to behold this movie’s commitment to over the top mean spiritedness. Kai is a remorseless psychopath who revels in rape and murder while complaining about all the “bullies” in the world trying to keep him down. He’s so deluded that he even argues that the Ebola outbreak is not his fault because Ebola was created by God and not himself. Watching Anthony Wong’s sleazy, sweaty performance as Kai is a perverted delight. It’s the sort of thing that makes you want to take a shower. As the story goes on, his villainy gets more and more comically unpredictable, leading to maybe the most perfect moment in film history as Kai jogs through a Hong Kong alleyway, waving around a meat cleaver and shouting “Ebola!” over and over.

Subplots regarding a survivor of Kai’s initial massacre and the investigation into the outbreak help keep the film a little grounded, but really the parts centered around Kai are the best (and worst) parts. Ebola Syndrome is a bloody, scuzzy, sleazy, morally reprehensible film, and certainly not one for delicate, or even moderately durable sensibilities. You shouldn’t watch this without knowing what you’re getting into, which is a lot of ugliness and senseless misery. But for fans of that sort of thing (on celluloid, where it belongs) it’s a special kind trash that rockets into the delirious heights of depravity. As I sit in my room right now, worried that I or my friends/family/loved ones will contract Coronavirus and die drowning in our own lungs, and watching idiots across the US protest business closures, I think about how weird it is that such a nasty piece of Category III splatter from 1996 is so timely, not just in it’s depiction of a deadly viral outbreak, but in its portrayal of complete moral bankruptcy.