There’s a good chance that the Ebola virus will wipe out humanity at some point. It’s highly contagious, incurable and has a ridiculously high mortality rate. Which makes for potentially shocking and inevitably sensationalistic movie material. If the virus does break out on a large scale, though, it’s unlikely we will see the events of Herman Yau’s cult exploitation movie EBOLA SYNDROME played out for real. At least, I hope not...

Anthony Wong plays Kai, a psychotic rapist and murderer from Hong Kong, who flees the police to make a new life for himself in South Africa working in a Chinese restaurant. His boss (former Venom Lo Meng) has trouble finding merchants to sell him meat, so he does a deal with a local tribe suffering from an outbreak of the Ebola virus to seel him cheap pork. Kai comes into contact with the virus when he casually rapes an infected tribeswoman and becomes a carrier for the disease, which he starts to spread – at first unwittingly, and then deliberately.

EBOLA SYNDROME is sleazy as hell and pretty much unforgivable on any level. There’s always something nasty being done to someone or something either living or dead (there’s a shot of a dead mouse getting run over which is particularly gratuitous and pointless, and do we really need to see Wong slice up three frogs in one prolonged shot?). All of the characters are inherently unlikeable – even Kai’s boss (the most “normal” of the bunch) only hires him because he’ll work for low wages as he’s a wanted criminal. Oh, and let’s not forget Lily (Angel Wong), who very nearly became one of Kai’s victims in Hong Kong and who accidentally stumbles on him again in South Africa. She can’t be near him without vomiting as she claims she can “really recognise his scent of smell”. Yeah, all right...

With such a crew of amoral and unsympathetic characters, there is little drama. There is, however, what appears like an attempt at gross-out humour throughout the film (Wong Jing is the producer, after all) which, if you like that sort of thing, might raise a few laughs. And fans of Yau and Wong’s previous collaboration THE UNTOLD STORY are treated to another “human flesh served to restaurant patrons” subplot.

It has to be said that the depiction of the symptoms of the virus are fanciful at best and don’t seem to bear much resemblance to the real thing. The sufferers have a tendency to be right as rain one minute then suddenly fall to the ground in spasms, making for some unintentional hilarity. Later on in the movie things are taken in a more serious direction with the introduction of Sergeant Yeung (Vincent Wan) and his team as they try to track down Kim and evade the virus, and the focus shifts away from Kim for a while.

I can see why EBOLA SYNDROME has such a cult following, with its gross comedy, gore and so forth, but there is just too much nastiness in there that just put me off – and animal violence in movies is a complete taboo for me (live chickens are killed on screen). I understand that the current Hong Kong version is as uncut as it’s likely to be, but it is clear that some scenes have been trimmed for violent content and the part where Kim slices off a woman’s tongue is quite obviously cut. If a fully uncut version becomes available, I think I’ll pass...