Review: SARS Wars (2004)
As anyone who has been reading this blog, or who has known me for any length of time will know, I love spoof movies. There are a lot of film genres out there that just beg to be made fun of and usually, we’ve had to turn to the likes of MST3K or Rifftrax for our spoof-a-licious fix, but sometimes, there are really good, funny flicks that take on a particular genre and do an excellent job of taking apart the conventions. This film, in it’s own advertising, says it’s in the vein of Shaun of the Dead, but it’s got a lot to recommend it on it’s own.
SARS Wars: Bankok Zombie Crisis opens with an announcement by the Thailand Public Health Minister that Thailand is the only nation in Asia completely free of the SARS virus and we all know that’s just asking for trouble. In far-off Africa, an infected insect with the fictional Type-4 SARS strain flies all the way to Thailand and fun and zombie goodness ensue.
Meanwhile, a Catholic schoolgirl named Liu, daughter of a powerful crime boss, is kidnapped and held for ransom by the transvestite Yai. If he isn’t paid 5 million baht, he’ll defile the boss’s virgin daughter. Unable to turn to the police, the boss turns to his old friend Master Thep, but due to an injury, he instead sends Thep’s student Khun Krabii to save Liu, who is being held captive in an apartment building, which, as if we needed to be told, is also the site of the SARS Type-4 outbreak.
Can Khun, Master Thep and a sexy scientist named Dr. Diana save Liu and get out of the building alive? Maybe with a little luck and a case of D-batteries, they can!
SARS Wars spoofs everything. It’s not just zombie films like Shaun of the Dead did, they do everything from weird sexual kinks to giant snake movies, Star Wars and beyond. While it’s not as gross as films like Dead Alive, I think it pays homage to that kind of film with some of it’s sequences, the zombie fetus on the rubber umbilical cord, for instance. Best of all, it never takes itself too seriously. Even movies like Shaun of the Dead, while lots of jokes were flying around, they never lost sight that the undead were wandering the streets. This one, however, the zombies are the least of their worries, they’re often more of a distraction than an actual threat and outsmarting the zombies is never all that difficult.
If you get a chance and can handle 95 minutes of Thai, subtitled, this is a really good movie to laugh at. I doubt it’s commercially available in the U.S., but you can download it via P2P and have a good time.
(4.7/5)
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