One Cut of the Dead Review: A Fresh Take on the Zombie Flick – The New York Times

The crew of a low-budget zombie flick is getting antsy: Theyre shooting at an abandoned water plant that once hosted military experiments, and the spooky location is a little too on the nose. Lo and behold, real zombies pop up and chomp their way through cast and technicians. Suddenly, the fake blood turns real.

And cut at long last, since the mayhem took up the first, uninterrupted 37 minutes of Shinichiro Uedas One Cut of the Dead (streaming on Shudder). The mood is oddly goofy, though, and the cut-free gambit is a lot less grim than in Sam Mendess 1917, which aims for the same breathless effect on a much larger scale and in a much somber way.

But the trick is actually more narratively justified in this inventive low-budget Japanese comedy, which quickly turns out to be an uproarious backstage farce about the perils of live television rather than a mere zombie spoof.

Uedas wonderfully tight script is divided into three acts, with the second and third parts casting the opener in an entirely new light so much so that I rewatched it as soon as the movie ended. We now understand what prompted those initial distracting details, like, for instance, the pauses the male ingnue (Kazuaki Nagaya) takes in the middle of trying to bite the female ingnue (Yuzuki Akiyama), or why said ingnue, who happens to be the designated final girl, screams so relentlessly and so unconvincingly.

The tyrannical auteur of the zombie movie (Takayuki Hamatsu) is revealed to be a mild-mannered hack his motto is fast, cheap, but average who channels years of frustration into one glorious explosion of creativity. Ueda even manages to reinvigorate two of the most tired tropes cluttering our media landscape: art as meta commentary on art, and explosive diarrhea. How about that, Sam Mendes?

One Cut of the Dead

Not rated. Running time: 1 hour 36 minutes.

Read more here:
One Cut of the Dead Review: A Fresh Take on the Zombie Flick - The New York Times

Related Post

Reviewed and Recommended by Erik Baquero
This entry was posted in Zombie. Bookmark the permalink.

Comments are closed.