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 ARS
Wars" sees the ever expanding Thai film
industry take a stab at the zombie subgenre which
has been given somewhat of an action packed
facelift in recent years. Thankfully, unlike a
great many of the recent genre films from Thailand
which appear to have been shot on video,
writer/director Taweewat Wantha actually has a
pretty decent budget to work with, resulting in a
film with a slick, professional look that even
manages some fairly impressive CGI work.
The plot is standard stuff,
with the denizens of a high rise apartment block
under siege after the titular disease mutates into
an infectious form which turns its victims into
flesh eating ghouls. Thrown into the mix are a
bunch of dim-witted kidnappers and virginal
warrior Khun (Supakorn Kitsuwon, also in the Thai
classic "Tears
of the Black Tiger"), whose master sends
him on a mission to rescue Liu (Phintusuda
Tunphairao), the nubile, school uniform wearing
kidnapped victim. In the best tradition, it
transpires that the new form of the virus has been
engineered by the military who, led by dominatrix
Dr. Diana (Lene Christensen) storm the building in
order to wipe out the infection as part of a test
of its effectiveness.
Although the plot is
essentially similar to that of "Versus",
"Bio-Zombie"
and countless others, the excellently-titled
"SARS Wars" scores extra points for
working in some surreal comedy and irreverent
social commentary amongst the plentiful gore and
scantily clad women. The laughs are generally
effective, if at times rather puzzling for Western
viewers and compliment the film's more serious
horror elements quite nicely. Although the film
degenerates into narrative chaos long before the
nonsensical final scenes, since it is obvious from
the start that the whole affair is not meant to be
taken seriously, this approach actually works
quite well and the wackiness never feels forced.
Much like Herman Yau's classic "The
Ebola Syndrome", the film makes no real
use of the actual SARS virus, though the use of it
in such a far out way surely scores a few points
for bad taste humour in the fine tradition of
exploitation cinema.
Director Wantha keeps things
moving along at a lunatic pace, and throws in
playful references to a variety of films,
including lightsabers and a "Kill
Bill" style series of animated scenes
which for some reason endow the female lead with
massive breasts. The film is pretty much non-stop
action of one sort or another, and when things
threaten to slow down, Wantha improvises by
throwing in a giant CGI snake and a bizarre,
"Crying Game" style transvestite gag
which adds a genuinely disturbing note to the
proceedings.
Although the film is fairly bloody, with some
graphic neck and entrail chewing, there are no
real standout scenes of nastiness. In fact, a
great deal of the splatter is played for laughs,
especially since the majority of it is directed
against the zombies, who are dispatched in a
variety of inventive and bizarre ways. Being a
Thai film, there is plenty of sex and ladies
wearing leather bondage outfits during the most
impractical of moments, but no actual nudity, a
fact which Wantha pokes fun at several times.
Overall, being determinedly self-referential and
soaked in pop cinematic culture, "SARS
Wars" is perhaps more likely to appeal to the
fan boy crowd, though its flair and high action
quotient make for exciting viewing, and the film
stands out as one of the subgenre's best, and
certainly one of the better genre efforts to have
come out of Thailand in recent times.
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