One Cut of the Dead - with many spoilers

One Cut of the Dead was initially titled Don’t stop shooting and can best be described as a Zombie/Horror/Comedy of errors movie.

The completely unheard of cast all initially paid to be in the film themselves as it was actually produced as the final project in an acting and directing workshop called ‘ENBU seminar’. It cost $25000 to create and eventually earned over $25 million. The ‘one cut’ that the movie is based around was all filmed in one shot and took 6 takes to get correct.

Verdict

My movie ratings consist of thumbs up or middle fingers as sometimes one starring something doesn’t shame it enough. 5 thumbs up = an absolute triumph. 5 middle fingers = a complete piece of shit, go fuck yourself.

My final verdict for One Cut of the Dead has actually presented itself as somewhat of a maths problem. This has never been my strong suite so forgive me if it leads to a false score. I will show my working:

• First 37 minutes - 2 thumbs up

• Middle section - 1 thumbs up

• Climax - 5 thumbs up

• Retrospective opinion of the first 37 minutes - 5 thumbs up

Therefore my initial opinion of the film was :-

⅖ +⅕+1 (5 out of 5) ÷ 3 = 2.66 thumbs up

My Final opinion of of he film was:-

1+⅕+1 ÷ 3 = 3.66 thumbs up

Making my overall opinion of the experience 2.66 +3.66 ÷2 = 3.1666666667 thumbs up to 10 decimal places

3.1666666667 thumbs up Is my final score.

Feel free to correct this in the comments section below. Maths.

Favourite quote “Action!” - The frantic director shouting action was hilarious before and after it was obvious what was going on in that first 37 minute section.

“Pom!” - the Director’s Wife’s self defense cries were equally brilliant.

Favourite scene

The last section of the movie is completely hysterical and had me laughing all the way through. The jewel in the crown was when the actor who had been complaining of an upset stomach due to the hard water he had been drinking is shitting against a wall and crying with embarrassment as he is having his hair and make up done for his next part in the ‘one cut’.

Best Meme from the movie

Analysis

Watching this movie with a faint idea that it involved zombies and the instruction; ‘Bear with it. Don’t give up and turn it off in the first half an hour” turned out to be exactly the right course of action. I can honestly say I’ve never seen anything quite like it.

Personally, I wasn’t entirely put off by the poorly made, budget Zombie film at the beginning. In fact I quite enjoyed how odd it was. It appeared to be playing out as if a director's movie about zombies was about to be raided by actual zombies, which would have been predictable but fine. There were several obvious flaws in the filming of this that I’d picked up and had planned to comment on. An example is when the leading lady is limping with her injured leg through a dark corridor and is ambushed by a zombie at the end of it. The cameraman is all over the place and seemingly part of the endangered crew but manages to escape every situation as the zombies choose to pursue everyone except for him. Other peculiar things were the pair of grey legs that find the same actress sitting in a shed after picking what she thought to be an injury off of her legs. Not to forget the director’s wife leaping up in front of the camera with an axe in her head. Most of this I put down to the quirks of Asian cinema.

After the credits roll comes a twist that I was completely expecting. An “And now for something completely different” Monty Python style moment. But wait, what? It's no longer a horror movie? Nah, this must be leading up to some sort of curse that causes whatever went down on set and we’ll eventually tie up with a hauntingly dead cast again later. This necessary section of the film lays the foundations for the big payoff at the end. Unfortunately it was incredibly boring.

Finally, we’re slowly led into the filming of the ‘one cut’. All themes of horror are completely missing and we are now watching a comedy of errors. And it’s hilarious. Everything I had issues with in the first viewing of the ‘one cut’ became everything I loved about the film. The boring build up seemed worth it and everything fell into place. This is one hell of a clever movie in it’s own stupid way. The grey legs belong to a member of cast with a cue card. The camera man is actually two camera people attempting to follow the crazy developments whilst in the midst of a power struggle and the Director’s wife is a crazy person posing as an actress.

One Cut of the Dead is a Russian doll. It begins as a movie within a movie as we are led to believe the Director is mad. Then we discover that it’s a movie within a movie within a movie and what we are watching is actually about the creation of the Zombie film gone wrong. THEN to add yet another layer to the comedy onion there is behind the scenes footage of the antics on set as the final credits roll. This section is a movie within a movie within a movie within a movie. There are a crazy amount of people pointing cameras at each other at this point. This must have been like herding cats. It’s a wonder anyone knew what to do when the actual director shouted “Action!”.

look at all of those cameras!

One final note is that the copy of the movie that I watched had seemingly quite racist subtitles, particularly for this character:

For some reason the lowercase letter ‘L’ was quite often replaced by a capital ‘R’, giving the impression of an English speaker impersonating a Japanese person. There was a credit for the subtitling that would randomly appear throughout the film in place of dialogue leading me to believe this was post production trolling.

The bottom line

This movie is the best horror comedy I’ve ever seen, although it is possibly a Horror and then a Comedy. It shits all over the quite frankly overrated Shaun of the Dead.