Ebola Syndrome
(Herman Yau; 1996)
(Tai Seng)
-Overview-
A man gets caught having sex with his boss’s wife and proceeds to murder everyone involved, including their young daughter. As he is about to burn her alive, he is discovered and flees. Many years later the man is working in a restaurant and travels with his new employer to South Africa to purchase meat (it’s apparently much cheaper there). While on their way back, they have a bit of vehicular trouble and our hero wanders off. Soon he comes across an African woman collapsed by a small stream. Seeing his opportunity, he proceeds to rape the woman as she starts to convulse and die from the Ebola virus. Soon he is back home and it appears that he is a very rare carrier of the disease, insofar as he won’t get sick and die from it, but merely pass it on to others. The man proceeds to unwittingly spread the virus to people through his various lurid kitchen habits such as masturbating into the meat, etc. Soon his boss’s wife pushes him too far and he rapes and kills kill her, beats her husband to death, and prepares their remains as meat patties to be served in the restaurant. Eventually the little girl he almost immolated, now grown, happens across him in the restaurant and he skips town. As he runs from authorities, and the populous dies from the deadly virus, he returns home to the wife he deserted those many years ago. Mayhem and convulsions ensue.
An amusing little film with some strong visuals, Ebola Syndrome is a fun film. I found that the people dying from the virus should have been a lot gorier, rather than simply people collapsing and convulsing however. Still amusing to viddy a family twitching to death at a barbeque, though. All in all an entertaining film that fans of Asian cinema should enjoy.
(Rating scale is out of 10, with 1 being the worst and 10 the best)