Director: Shinichirô Ueda
Writers: Shinichirô Ueda, Ryoichi Wada
Stars: Takayuki Hamatsu, Yuzuki Akiyama, Harumi Shuhama
1 Hour, 36 Minutes
Amazon Link: https://amzn.to/2QI72ep
Synopsis
We begin with a zombie cornering a girl and biting her to death. “Cut!” Oh, it’s just a film crew making a zombie movie. This is the 42nd take. The director yells at the leading woman that he wants to see “real fear” and yells at her to “quit acting!” He may be overreacting just a little bit himself. She just doesn’t look scared enough.
They go on break, allowing the actors and the makeup lady to talk, and she explains that some real horrors happened here in the past. The Japanese army conducted experiments related to raising the dead. Changing the subject, we hear that the makeup lady also teaches self-defense.
One of the crew goes outside to smoke and runs into an old man, who is now wearing zombie makeup. Except it’s not makeup. He bites the crew man’s arm off, and the other actors find his arm on the floor. Naturally, they think it’s part of the movie. Then the old man comes in and attacks, and they all believe it’s for real. Especially when the now-one-armed crewman gets up and attacks from the rear, chasing them all throughout the abandoned water-treatment plant.
The cameraman yells that “you can’t fake this!” and keeps on rolling his camera. The sound guy runs out and gets killed too. The director pushes a zombie back into the room and shouts “Action!” They start filming with real zombies– the actress looks scared now!
They all go outside and run to the car. There’s a foot-chase where the actress has to battle the one-armed zombie and the old man for the car keys. She injured her ankle… or was it bitten? The makeup lady wants to kill her with an axe until the leading man axes the makeup lady in the head. The main girl then hides out in a shed, possibly the only one left alive, except she’s worried about that cut on her ankle.
She finds an axe and then has to fight the leading man, who died offscreen. The director is still filming– this will be the climax of his movie. She cuts off the star’s head and then kills the cameraman too. She wins.
The Credits Roll at 37 Minutes in. “Cut!” shouts the director.
We jump back to a month before…
The director is working on a film, and a man comes to see him pitching an idea for a zombie film. They describe the plot of what we just saw… It will be shot in one long cut and be broadcast live! It’s for the premiere of the new “Zombie Channel,”and the film will be called “One Cut of the Dead.” The director is all in for this.
Credits roll again.
The director and his wife (who eventually would play the makeup lady) are discussing the film project. The director’s daughter just got fired from a job teaching acting, and she has a crush on the actor who will eventually become the leading man.
We then get a large number of scenes where the actors rehearse and organize for the filming. These are funny at times, but are at least based on the sort of thing that would go on before a real film shoot. Things go wrong, and the actors and crew have to deal with it– they can’t stop filming because this is all live. We see how everything was shot, and how half of it wasn’t scripted and the other half was improvised because of problems during the live shoot.
Eventually, we see that everything we saw in the uncut part of the film actually makes sense.
Commentary
This was really well done. Even ignoring that the first 37 minutes really was all done in one take, the second part, where we see the actors putting it all together was just as good. All of the things that don’t quite make sense or look like mistakes or plot holes the first time around are explained eventually. Zombies that spit, shots that linger a little too long, and unexplained appearances that we mostly dismissed in the real film all have reasons behind them.
I have to wonder how much of the second part was scripted in advance or was filmed in order to make some of the mistakes in the first half look intentional? Chicken or egg here. Overall, this is very much worth a watch, especially if you’re a fan of “behind the scenes” kind of stories.