Sars Wars: Bangkok Zombie Crisis (Special Edition) 2004 Discotek Media   Buy It Now

I’ve seen zombies from virtually every part of the world. The United Kingdom, Italy, Japan, Spain, Mexico . . .. but I’ve never seen what Thailand has to offer as far as the walking dead, at least not until now. As the trend of grabbing any and every Asian horror film continues, companies have been looking elsewhere besides the two big countries, Japan and Korea. Little by little, Thai films have been showing up, and not just in some dirty, back alley operations filled with bootlegged DVD’s. But, zombies don’t always have to be serious.

Sars Wars: Bangkok Zombie Crisis is another of the few zombie comedies that have been made, though I suppose there are some serious films that are unintentionally hilarious that could be added onto the short list. In the grand scheme of the film, the sars virus has mutated over time, now having evolved to its fourth strain. The virus however has also mutated in such a fashion that those infected are changed into blood thirsty zombies. Thailand however is the one country that remains disease free (and I guess that would mean that every brothel has been shut down and bar girls are a thing of the past.)

Well, Thailand was disease free . . . until an innocent insect made his way to the country and managed to infect on single person. Now a high rise condo has become nothing more than a plague of undead that the government is working on containing before they make their way into the general population, but there’s another problem. Lui (Phintusuda Tunphairao), the daughter of wealthy businessman, has been kidnapped and is being held for ransom. Dear old dad has decided to hire the services of Master Tape (Thep Pho-ngam) and his apprentice Khun (Suppakorn Kitsuwan.) And wouldn’t you know it, Lui happens to be held captive in the same high rise, and all hell is about to break loose.

Gore and comedy have come back into popularity as of late, and that’s really partly the result of the United Kingdom’s Shaun of the Dead, but Shaun wasn’t the first in the genre, just the one that is in the public mind right now, but Thailand’s take on gore, violence, and laughs is a little different. From plot alone, it should be extremely easy to determine that Sars Wars isn’t trying to go for any degree of seriousness, though the title really should have been the give away. The movie is filled with parodies of the zombie genre including exploding heads (something made famous in the opening few minutes of Romero’s Dawn of the Dead), dismemberment, zombie babies (seen in the remake of Dawn as well as Peter Jackson’s DeadAlive), and a ton of blood and guts. The big debate in the past couple of years with zombie films regards movement: slow or fast, and to be on the sage side, the decision here is both.

But, you can’t just have zombies and make a funny movie. Well, you can, but Sars Wars throws in plenty of other things. You’ll meet possibly the worst gang of kidnappers that has ever been put to film. There is a transsexual, a schoolgirl kicking ass, sword fighting, shootouts, a lightsaber that doesn’t have the batteries recharged, and plenty of other outlandish situations and elements that will leave you laughing one minute, then scratching your head the next. At times there are things thrown into the mix that seem to be there simply because someone though that it was a great idea, and but often it’s not really detrimental to the way the film plays itself out.

Sars Wars isn’t just about zombies though . . . well, it is, but why not throw some other things into the film? Sure enough, there is a love story when Khun decides that he doesn’t want Liu to spend money on him for saving her, he just wants to sleep with her and lose his virginity (though it doesn’t quite work out that way.) Master Tape on the other hand gets down and dirty with a Dr. Diana (Lene Christensen) who has come up with a means to possibly stop the virus. A woman of many cures, and many panties to boot, dressed in her dominatrix style costume, I guess that apparently Thailand didn’t close down all the brothels. Of course, what zombie film would be complete with a bit of animation? Errr . . .I guess none of them have included anything like that, but in a Kill Bill nod, Sars Wars does throw in an animated sequence or two for good measure. The only thing that’s missing is nudity, and that has something to do with the Thai film censors and their “sense of morals.” Yeah, whatever.

There are a few things that I didn’t care for in the film however, and in particular there are too many cartoon sound effects. Had they been used a little more sparingly, it may not have been nearly as bad, but the problem is that the director has tried to use them to add a bit more comedy, and if often doesn’t work. There also is a fair amount of computer animation used, and while what has been included isn’t necessarily bad, there are some instances, such as CG gore, that I’m actually quite opposed to seeing in horror films. It’s much cheaper to do things that old fashioned way, prosthetic applications and such, than render it on a computer. The biggest offense however is the computer animated snake that shows up in the film, though not nearly as much as it could, and while somewhat amusing, it’s more of a nuisance than anything else.

When the movie ends, that doesn’t mean that the fun has to stop. The DVD includes a few special features to go right along with the bloody comedy. There is a behind the scenes features that looks at the visual effects, such as the animation, and not just the computerized graphics either. There are not one, but two music videos, and why not? Thailand does have a growing music industry including even grindcore bands like She’s Gore and industrial metal act Nerve. There are even deleted scenes and a look at the trailers for Sar Wars, as well as some of the other find releases from Discotek.

Sars Wars is definitely a zombie comedy that will certainly find itself with the same cult stats that films like DeadAlive, Return of the Living Dead, Shaun of the Dead, and Verses found . . . but not Dead and Breakfast, that was a horrible example of zomedy. The film might borrow heavily for many sources, but there really isn’t a zombie film that doesn’t, and Sars Wars has Thai zombies that have left me wanting to see what other kinds of grisly gore the country has to offer. Lightsabers, dismemberment, hot Thai girls, and plenty of blood . . . you can’t go wrong with any of that.

-mike-