Ebola Syndrome (1996)

 

Director: Herman Yau

Screenplay: Ting Chau

Cast: Anthony Wong as Kai San; Wan Yeung-ming as Yeung; Wong Tsui-ling (Angel Wong) as Lily; Miu-Ying Chan as Har; Meng Lo as Kei

A Night of a Thousand Horror (Movies)

 

There are some infamous Category III films from Hong Kong, where they used a rating that limited viewers to adults but fed a boom in exploitation, erotic and horror movies, and among them, Ebola Syndrome is one which lives up to the infamy, so much so it is worth having caution in terms of actually watching it. Contextually, when the Category I, II and III ratings were first devised for Hong Kong cinemas in 1988, it was dealing with content, not just gore but films were criminals were shown as heroic, which could have been controversial. The ultra-notorious Men Behind the Sun (1988), an exploitation film dealing with Unit 731, the overt research unit of the Imperial Japanese Army that performed lethal human experiments during the Second Sino-Japanese War, was the first film to get the Category III rating, and when this rating came in, the films which earned them were not necessarily cheap productions, but films with named stars. Even Wong-Kar Wai has had a Category III film in his career, as unfortunately, depictions of same-sex relations were qualifiable for the rating, leading to Happy Together (1997) being among them, a subject for a more complex dissection of what that says in terms of LGBTQ politics at the time.  

The Category III film however has an infamy for the notorious and bloodier entry among them, alongside the erotic works like Sex and Zen (1991), and Ebola Syndrome near the end of their peak in interest can be labeled with justification as the last blow out, for good and bad in offensive ways.  I would have to call myself out a hypocrite for labeling some of the content in this offensive and distasteful, as someone who has been intrigued by this film over a decade and went out of his way to see it, so moral high ground is a ridiculous notion to get into. Just be aware that, whilst it actually calms down in tone, this is pretty extreme as a film can get, starting off with an explicit sex scene introducing “Chicken” Kai San (Anthony Wong), a completely irredeemable villain who we follow as for a large portion of the film, which leads to him being caught with a mob boss’ wife. Threatened with castration, and urinated on beforehand, he kills everyone, including the wife, and nearly torches her young daughter, dowsing her with gasoline, only to have to leg it before the act is done. Already this film before it becomes truly extreme has already set up the tone of taking no prisoners in good taste and gruesomeness, with a streak of deliberately crass dark humour intermingled within it too whether appropriate or not.

It is feasibly big budget film shot in two countries, as Chicken hides after this in Johannesburg in South Africa, which is a disarming thing as usually a production value like this in a horror film would not get into some of the content here. Even if you can stomach when it gets into taboos like rape and cannibalism, it is extremely nihilistic about global connections, even without the moment, to be frank about it, the story properly begins when Chicken sexually assaults a female carrier of Ebola and starts to spread it over two countries. No one until the last half, where it somewhat tones down and the heroic Hong Kong police have to try to stop Ebola being spread by Chicken, is defendable expect as transgressive, sick humored or just purposely nasty to make the viewer squirm. The owners of the Chinese restaurant Chicken has been working in at Johannesburg are unlikable, a bickering husband and wife; the husband himself, among others with the Taiwanese and Chinese figures living there, is racist to the white and black Africans, exploiting cheaper meat from the local Zulu tribe of black Africans, who are suffering through the Ebola outbreak; and the white Africans can be racist to the Asian immigrants in a country where one cannot help but look at through the view of Apartheid ending only in 1994. No one in this half of the film is likable, and it is here where some of the most uncomfortable and transgressive details come in.

There is the obvious concern, shot in real locations, that this is an exotic exploitation of South Africa, finding to way to have real decapitations of chickens brought in watching a tribal Sharman try to cure the Ebola plague in the Zula village, viewing the community as a “foreign” other in their dress and appearance to our distasteful lead from Hong Kong. There is some sense of this, alongside exploiting a couple of 1995 Ebola outbreaks in the African continent, such as in Kikwit, Democratic Republic of the Congo, as it was called at the time,  which would have been clear influences, alongside the fact that, as a virus which has tragically had a lot of outbreaks in various African countries in general, Ebola is exaggerated here beyond just being a horrifying disease which can cause internal and external bleeding to literally causing the organs to melt and eat themselves in some of the more legitimately disgusting details, such as an autopsy sequence. There is however, to contrast this, a sense of general misanthropy all round, the idea of transcontinental travel and cultural exchange being a doomed affair, and it becomes less a problematic film in the tone of what “mondo” documentaries from Italy were accused of but its own twisted and transgressive film with some uncomfortable scenes in a variety of taboos, which says a lot when Category III became stereotyped for some extreme films in both gore and sexual violence when these films were being learned of in the West. Some goofy humour, more common in Hong Kong’s cinema, does appear but it is more thankfully to emphasis a sick sense of humour to this, that this film is deliberately emphasizing the transgression whether justifiable or not, in the inventive cursing or the ill advised decision to take a pee in the underbrush only to encounter a leopard, which involved actually placing Anthony Wong, already an acclaimed actor by this point in his career, near an actual leopard.

There are scenes which will be uncomfortable and un-defendable for many, such as the rape scenes, especially as they all involve murder, and it is completely understandable if that is enough to caution a viewer off ever watching this film. In general, the entire passage of the film when Chicken gains Ebola is going to shock even hardened viewers nowadays if just in amazement of a higher budget Hong Kong film managing to “go” where this does. This is a film where Anthony Wong uses raw meat as a masturbatory aid and puts it back in the kitchen to later cook, so there is a deliberate shock value to the film, whether justifiable or not, which was trying to go further than other films. Herman Yau, whose career started with late eighties and kept going into the 2020s, clearly wanted to make a film with some depraved scenes on purpose, as eventually you will get into cannibalism and, in deposing and feeding a body to patrons to the restaurant, Chicken unwillingly beginning to spread the Ebola virus in Johannesburg. Eventually, fleeing to back to Hong Kong, this will continue, if with less emphasis on these more shocking scenes and, with an exception of an explicit threesome scene with two female sex workers played both with horror and goofy humour, on the threat of this virus in a metropolis. Some of the post-contagion and even autopsy scenes are going to be shocking for some viewers in their extremity too, but it starts even playing like a more “tamer” contagion film in how, with slow motion scenes to emphasis whenever Chicken can or does spread his illness, as the ultra-rare case of someone immune to it, the tone becomes less grotesque horror but a virus thriller.

Once it reaches its final, with the police in Hong Kong trying to catch Chicken when they contact an Ebola outbreak, even those who do find the film tasteless will have to concede that this does things with a lot of considerable heft to them even if they themselves understandably do not have the tolerance for the film’s tone, such as having an insane fire stunt in the final scenes with a stunt actor. There is also Anthony Wong himself, who having worked with Herman Yau on The Untold Story (1993) and Taxi Hunter (1993) was not a stranger to extremity. He has been a prolific actor who here brings what is absolutely needed to make this film vaguely defendable – a character who is impossible to connect to as he is a horrifying figure, yet is both fascinating to watch and, when he tries to have a happy ending with an old flame, actually brings in a bleaker shade to the material as you come to realize even a sociopath could have kindness in his heart, despite the chance he will kill that person he cares for even by pure accident as a Typhoid Mary figure. Considering how diverse Wong’s filmography is – John Woo films, Yau’s work, Johnnie To crime films, Ann Hui dramas – like so many Hong Kong actors, it is not a surprise he can add a gravitas even to a sleazy, depraved film like this as being able to act in a variety of genres and tones for films is more commonplace in their cinema. In fact, Wong won an actor’s award, the Hong Kong Film Award, for The Untold Story, which would be like if suddenly a figure like Daniel Day Lewis made a controversial and extreme horror film, and had such a good performance within it he still won an Oscar.

This is the same for Herman Yau too, alongside those in front of and behind the camera here, as with a string of horror films throughout his career, including the long Troublesome Nights series, he has gone from comedies dealing with housing crisis issues (A Home with a View (2019)), action films and entries in the Ip Man martial arts franchise. Yau even co-directed a re-imagination on JB Priestley's An Inspector Calls for a 2015 film set in its own Hong Kong centric context, which makes his notoriety in the West for films like Ebola Syndrome, which does live it to its infamy fully, more fascinating with hindsight. It is a strong film, even in the current day, where time has not made it “quaint” and it is to be approached with caution. Knowing its director went on in a variety of genres, and continues working, places more on respecting him as a director and with a sense that, even if a viewer may find the film utterly irredeemable, it was with hindsight made with the likely hope at least a viewer or two would react like that.