Hong Kong Exploitation: Ebola Syndrome

When I was a kid, my dad loved to entertain me with stories from his police beat. We didn't have much else to bond over, so he overlooked the age-inappropriateness of letting me read his reports detailing crack busts and prostitutes beaten by their pimps, and he took a particular pride in recalling the infamous Zelinsky murder.

The murder took place in Trenton in 1978, a year or so after my dad joined the New Jersey State Police and a couple of years before he joined the city's police department. The short of it, Zelinsky got tired of her mother's criticism, so she hacked off mom's head and put it into a bag, drove her car onto the State House steps and crashed it into a pillar, and threw the bag at the feet of state troopers (including my dad) stationed at the building's entrance.

He claims that at the scene, he motioned to a rookie that "someone" wanted to talk to him, brought the rookie to the other side of the crashed car, and picked up the head and pretended it was speaking. I doubt it's true, one of those bullshitty cop legends that gets passed down, but for me, it sparked an early (and probably disturbing-in-an-8-year-old-girl) interest in the macabre and absurd.

In later years, that translated into a fascination with horror, gore and trash films, and with my move to Hong Kong, I've started delving into this special adminstrative region's library of exploitation movies. These are some pretty sick films and probably not for those who didn't grow up with dinnertime conversations about talking decapitated heads.

One of the classic examples of Hong Kong exploitation is "Ebola Syndrome," a 1996 movie about a restaurant worker who escapes to South Africa after killing his boss and quickly finds employment in a new business. Not long after arriving, he rapes a Zulu woman infected with the Ebola virus, contracts the virus himself but discovers he's only a carrier, murders his new boss and the boss's wife, turns his dead employers into burgers, and serves the Ebola-infected meat to unsuspecting patrons -- who become infected themselves. When police start to suspect him, he moves back to Hong Kong and starts an Ebola epidemic there.

The movie stars Anthony Wong, a half-Chinese and half-English actor that often plays the bad guy in Hong Kong movies, including the similar role of real-life serial killer Wong Chi-Hang, who turned his victims into dim sum.

In an interview with a magazine in 2000, Anthony Wong said that his mixed background initially caused him to be typecast as a villain due to racism in the film industry. I guess Halle Berry should be grateful that Hollywood's racism only led to her being offered roles as junkies.

Below is a trailer for the movie, and this is a YouTube video of a very not-safe-for-work scene and this is a site to view the movie in its entirety.