Tomb

Three weeks ago, your intrepid Video Vulture was picking up DVDs at random, and reporting on whatever happened to be going on at the 60-minute mark. One film in particular offered a surprising amount of insanity in the brief glimpse I took of it. There were exploding zombies, a gigantic meowing snake, a magic whistle that summoned a magic bald guy, and a zombie fetus getting dropkicked by the hero.

Clearly, this film requires further investigation. Here then, is the lowdown on SARS Wars: Bangkok Zombie Crisis (2004).

This Thai splatter comedy wastes no time in getting to the weirdness. A pretty schoolgirl is being driven home by her two bodyguards when the car collides with a man in a cartoon bear suit. The bear springs back up with a shotgun, and is joined by a swordsman resembling Wesley Snipes from Blade (1998) and a hot bikini chick who turns out to be an ugly man in disguise. This motley crew overpowers the bodyguards and kidnaps the girl. Meanwhile, the Bangkok authorities assure everybody that the current SARS virus that is turning the world into a zombie apocalypse will never infect Thailand. As soon as this announcement is made, an infected mosquito arrives in Bangkok via jet airliner and a fresh zombie infestation begins in the very building in which the kidnappers are holed up.

The father of the kidnapped girl hires an aging, bald mystic and soldier of fortune to save his daughter. Baldy passes the assignment on to his apprentice, an eager young hero wearing homemade armour and goggles. Goggle boy succeeds in fighting his way to the kidnapped girl, but the two of them are now trapped in a building full of SARS-zombies and a giant zombie snake the size of a subway train.

Baldy decides to sneak inside the building alongside a team of disease-control experts in contamination suits. The team leader is a beautiful woman who loses her containment suit and spends the rest of the movie running around in kinky lingerie. Baldy immediately rips his containment suit off as well in a gallant attempt to make Dr. Lingerie feel more comfortable. It works! Dr. Lingerie has a case full of untested vaccine that she hopes will cure the zombies, but most of the test samples just cause them to blow up. Baldy does his best to fight off the infected horde, but the batteries keep wearing out in his lightsaber. (He has a lightsaber!) The poor guy even tries that trick of taking the batteries out, rolling them around, and putting them back in. No luck.

So, we've got the kidnappers shooting zombies, Goggle Boy and Schoolgirl are falling in love while fighting the kidnappers, the authorities are preparing to blow up the whole damn building, Dr. Lingerie and Baldy are falling in love while trying to cure/lightsaber up all the zombies and a ridiculous CGI zombie fetus jumps out of an infected pregnant lady to do battle with Goggle Boy, resulting in the greatest roundhouse-kick-the-flying-baby scene in cinema history. The last 10 minutes of the film are a bit of a letdown, but after a buildup like that, who cares?

Watching this berserk farce has made me curious about other modern Thai B-movies. I notice that the director of SARS Wars made a silly monster film called The Sperm (2007) in which a (...flock? Pack? Squadron? Load? Load!) of flying spermatozoa escape into the city, causing chaos and producing monster babies. Sounds like a winner!