PopHorror Let's Get Scared
One Cut of the Dead simply can’t be reviewed without spoilers, so continue no further if you want to remain spoiler-free.
Zombie films hold a special place in my heart. As someone who frequently comfort-watches Night of the Living Dead in order to unwind before bed, I’ve yet to fall into the same zombie fatigue that has plagued horror fans for several years now. As straightforward films, they’re almost effortlessly entertaining, arguably even more so than any other subgenre of film. However, zombie movies inspire a creativity that isn’t so cleancut. There’s an undeniable clutter of similar films, but that often leads filmmakers to work harder to differentiate their work from the rest of the group. In the case of Shinichiro Ueda’s One Cut of the Dead, viewers are treated to what is probably the most unique zombie film to date (Just when you thought it didn’t get more ambitious than Zombie Strippers), because, in many ways, it isn’t a zombie movie at all.
Centering around a group of filmmakers and actors who are working on a movie, the first 40-minutes of One Cut of the Dead are dressed up like an especially bad zombie flick, despite the impressively extensive one-take shot. Actors fail to perform appropriately, there are awkward pauses and moments of confusion among cast members, and the director loses every bit of his shit. These moments are effectively played for laughs, and the meta nature of the film is quite entertaining as an actual zombie outbreak begins while shooting, resulting in the deaths of cast and crew. Nearly halfway through the runtime, however, the zombie film ends. Literally. We find out that the “real” outbreak was just another part of the movie that was being made when the credits roll, and a flashback places us a month prior to the events of the film.
It’s in this second act where One Cut of the Dead lost me. Viewers bear witness to how the film came to be for the fictional cast and crew: actors rehearse lines, the director finds his motivation, etc. For twenty or so minutes, the film lacks all resemblance to the one we’d just seen. It’s not bad, it’s just dull and terribly out of place, even if it does eventually serve a purpose in the grand scheme of things.
The final act, though, doesn’t quite allow One Cut of the Dead to feel like a cohesive movie again, showcasing their zombie film from an outsider’s perspective. We see everything that went horrendously wrong on set and how it affected the final product of the film. These moments are the greatest that One Cut of the Dead has to offer. They’re hilarious, but not only that. Ueda’s film manages to be a love letter to filmmaking in this act, as we see the passion from the director, actors, and members of the crew. It doesn’t matter that they’re making a bad movie. The important thing is that they are making a movie, period. I found this section of the film to be quite charming and admirably direct in the shots it fired at movie studios for blindly moving forward with low quality cinema just to make money.
If you’re attending Fantasia Fest 2018 and you want to see a zombie horror comedy that isn’t really a zombie film at all, but rather a movie about the passion of making movies, then this very specific work is tailor-made for you. Where it lacks cohesiveness in its second act, it makes up for in humor and charm.
