Ebola Syndrome

Kai kills his boss and his wife in Hong Kong and escapes to South Africa. There he works the lowest jobs in a Chinese restaurant. In a village where he goes to buy meat he rapes a dying woman and contracts the Ebola virus. The disease does not kill him; he becomes a carrier. Then he commits another murder at the restaurant and sells the bodies as hamburger patties. Herman Yau directs. Anthony Wong plays Kai. It belongs to what Hong Kong called Category 3, the eighteen and over classification used in the nineties for films with extreme violence and sex, and it counts among the furthest instances of the form. The same team had made The Untold Story, and this is treated as its continuation. There is a satirical side. Kai is humiliated, beaten and despised throughout; the narrative does not put him in the right and shows plainly where the violence comes from. Anthony Wong's performance is among the most cited in the genre; he never humanises the character and never makes him funny. The violence, the sex and the disgust are deliberately unbearable; the film was made to distress the viewer. Who it is for: anyone curious about Hong Kong Category 3 cinema and extreme genres. Who it is not for: it is very hard to watch, the scenes are explicit, and the film offers no justification at any point.