Well we’re in Shakespeare country here. One Cut of the Dead goes there, unashamedly, perfectly and so entertainingly it should be illegal.

This Japanese microbudget movie, that the actors paid to act in apparently, is nothing to do with zombies and everything to do with the reason you might be reading this review. Loving movies. The real fun to be had here is this is has been made with an obvious love of the creation of the films and real understanding of the frustrating, fun and at times bonkers processes that go into a tightly budgeted and difficult project. Without ruining the story by typing out the plotline and giving scene by scene recaps do not stop watching after the first end credits roll, apparently in some markets they did, and do not be put off by the cheapness, cheesiness and acting of the opening parts of the movie. It is worth holding on.

I’ll be honest the lengthy screaming put me off and made me consider my choice but I found out the reason and finding that reason out was worth the wait.

I would not be resorting to hyperbole if I said the last 30 minutes of the films tight runnning time not only prove to be entertainingly enlightening but genuinely, laugh-out loud, hilarious.

The opening part of the movie make you see everyone involved in one light that is basically not flattering and frankly a bit potty. Takayuki Hamatsu is the director from hell, but this turned on it’s head before the end by a charismatic and nuanced display by the actor who has one other credit to his name on IMDB. He is ably supported by all of the cast who get to play with their roles all of whom seem to have had no other acting experience with the exception of Mao who appears to be, and excuse my huge ignorance, a successful pop-star.

During the opening 37 minutes you are left hanging, no able to fully understand what is going and frankly in danger of stop viewing or letting your attention wander. I cannot emphasis this strongly enought DO NOT stop watching. Every question you ask, every annoyance you suffer by seeing what is happening on the screen, is answered and answered so well, so cleverly that you will be rooting for every character in the film.

If the ending of this film, the true ending, does not make your heart soar or even make you cry, perhaps watching films is not for you.

The whole story is directed with such subtle and consummate skill by Shin’ichirô Ueda that it takes a while after the film has finished to realise that everything you saw on the screen was meant to happen the way it did. Every single scene, every line of dialogue, every pause, all of it was planned, worked out an rehersed. This film is a glorious love-letter to low budget, fly by the seat of your pants, film-making and as such is a must watch for any and every person that professes a love of films. If you don’t love Director Higurashi and his friends at the end of the film – well, there’s no hope for you.

Every person in this film put in a great performance and were fun, interesting and quirky. They should all be so, so proud of themselves. I would be.

Finally, this film is funny, very funny.

“I’m fast, cheap, but average,” well it might have been made ‘fast’ it definitely was ‘cheap’ but there is no way it’s average.

Do yourself a favour, watch this film.

[8.0/10] The telescoping theme, which stretches from the core of *One Cut of the Dead* to its outer edges, is realism. The movie starts, and a young woman quakes in fear as a dashing zombie advances on her. The scene feels like a hundred monster movie moments, where conventionally attractive young people stand there, covered in fake blood, screaming their heads off, and none of it is the slightest bit convincing.

But then the *real* movie starts, and suddenly that’s the idea! A director, so hell-bent on getting authentic performances from his stars to revive his ailing, debt-laden career, goes so far as to unleash real zombies upon them. It’s a solid premise all on its own! The execution is a bit over-the-top, and despite the premise, the acting is a little better but not that convincing, but the notion of a Kubrickian perfectionist gone to insane and dangerous lengths to capture the realism he feels he needs to create art works as the foundation of a horror movie.

Better yet, it ties into the gimmick of the film, portended by the cheeky title “One Cut of the Dead”. There’s a bit of movie magic at play, but the film is presented as one continuous shot, without breaks in the action to mask the rough edges that clue the audience into the artifice.

Any time a film deploys a gimmick like that, it’s worth asking why. What does this add to how the film makes meaning? For a film about a director unleashing zombies on his actors, the answer is two-fold. For one thing, it creates a sense of immediacy. Without cuts, the audience is as much trapped in the scene as the performer, forcing us to process everything in real time without a chance to catch our breaths or separate ourselves from the events through the grammar of cinematic editing. The escalation, the panic, the scares all happen as a single unbroken event, reducing the mental distance between viewer and film when moments are condensed and stitched together.

For another, and more importantly, it creates a sense of realism. In truth, much of that is lost in silly-looking zombie attacks and the other flavor of artifice that comes when actors are clearly waiting for their cues. But those awkward silences, the rough-and-tumble vibe that comes through when conversations and confrontations have to happen in real time, not only give the director-unleashes-zombies film a certain down-to-earth charm, but make the characters feel truer to genuine human beings and not merely characters in the story. The irony is that the cinematic device used to make the film evokes the exact kind of realism the fictional director is trying to evoke by inflicting a horror upon his actors.

And then the *real* real movie starts, and my mind implodes on itself a little bit.

What a clever twist. What a fun spin on the on-stage/backstage storytelling dynamic. And what an inventive way to spin out on what “realism” actually means when crafting a work of art, however corny or commercial, for the silver screen.

Because then the movie stops being about a zombie attack, and stops being about a director unleashing real zombies to improve his film about a zombie attack, and starts being about a real director allowing real life to work its way his movie about a fictional director unleashing (fictional) real zombies to improve his film-within-a-film. (Still with me? No? Then we better not talk about the during-the-credits scene where we see the real crew filming the fake crew filming the fake fake crew filming the actors-playing-actors-playing-actors-playing-characters.)

Diagramming out the recursive, *Synecdoche, New York*-esque layers to this one is a headache, but following the film is not. It’s a little bumpy at first, when the first set of credits roll, and a second intro begins, and now you’re suddenly following Higurashi, the director of the movie-within-the-movie about a movie-within-a-movie. The transition comes with a touch of motion sickness, as the tone of *One Cut of the Dead* switches from DIY horror film to broad if heartfelt sitcom.

In truth, that latter section is the weakest part of the film. It’s necessary to set up the essentials of *One Cut of the Dead*’s premise once it zooms out. Higurashi is a hackwork-producing T.V. director. He’s hired to make a live, low-budget zombie flick with zero cuts to launch the studio’s new zombie channel. His wife doesn’t seem to respect him and his daughter somehow seems to respect him less. He is endlessly deferential, yielding, and non-confrontational -- to his producers, to the teen idols who are his stars, to the others who want changes to the script -- to the point of being a doormat. It’s a bit of a stock setup, and the humor here goes broad to the point of eliciting eyerolls.

But then, the camera starts rolling on the film-within-a-film and *One Cut of the Dead* finds another gear. There is such supreme joy in the way that little quirks or inconsistencies in the movie the audience watched for the first thirty minutes pay off in clever and amusing ways in the last thirty minutes.

The peculiar paroxysms of one of the zombies turn out to be a result of the actor being piss drunk, to the point that Higurashi effectively has to puppeteer him. The boom mic operator trying to sneak out when the director is off his rocker is not a reflection of fear, but rather because the actor in the scene is battling a case of indigestion thanks to a nicely set up need for “soft water” for his ginger stomach. The random interludes about the makeup artist learning self-defense are not a scripted bit of foreshadowing (well, they still sort of are, which is neat!), but rather a reflection of Higurashi’s wife, Harumi, vamping for time after a cue is delayed by behind-the-scenes catastrophes and so injecting her real life self-defense class hobby into the show.

The movie is chock full of clever little touches like this, big and small, from explanations of zombie vomit, to long shots with the camera on the ground, to a peculiar zombie who menaces the female lead but never bites. (It was a cue card holder, naturally.) The thrill of seeing the eccentricities of the film’s opening act accounted for in its final reel never goes away, and if anything, only wins you over more as it goes with how sharp the setups and payoffs are.

More to the point, There is a wonderful sweaty energy to all of this. The movie feels of a piece with the “Charlie Work” episode of *It’s Always Sunny in Philadelphia*, not just in its single cut glee or well-crafted brick jokes, but the way it endears you to these characters -- bumbling, improvising, and muddling through -- while ultimately giving their all to pull this insane project off.

And yet, what stands out the most in the film’s bravura last act is the way that even in a goofy, ramshackle production like the one Higurashi’s directing for the Zombie Channel, real life bleeds in. The strange movements of the one zombie are a result of an alcoholic having the shakes. The unnerving moans of another outside the door come from a sensitive-stomached man who has the runs. The shaky camerawork of the film-within-a-film that helps layer in a sense of panic to the proceedings is a result of the camera operator, and eventually the substitute camera operator, frantically scrambling to catch everything in this shaky, half-improvised production. It is a tribute to how truth works its way into even the goofiest and goriest shows you can put on.

The comical mascot of this sense of realism is Harumi, Higurashi’s wife-turned-co-star. Her daughter encourages her to get back into the acting game, until she realizes that her mother quit acting not because she was bad, but because she got so lost in her characters that she went too far. Watching her turn steely-eyed in her efforts to chop up the female lead after her character may have suffered a zombie bite, while her co-stars, husband, and daughter all intervene to try to stop her despite being thwarted by her YouTube self-defense classes, is an unexpectedly hilarious throughline for that last dose of showbiz mayhem.

Still, the truest sense in which real life bleeds into the picture (semi-literally) is through Higurashi himself. There is poetry when the director is forced to play “Mister Director” in his own movie, because while Higurashi the real person is reserved and deferential, taking on the character of a director allows him to find his voice. The way he dresses down the idol female lead for not being able to give a convincing performance since everything she does is a lie, and slaps the teen heartthrob male lead for being a coddled twit reveals him processing real feelings that he otherwise sublimates.

Even his sense of mining chaos for the good of a film that he believes in, adds a resonance between actor and character. Sure, Higarushi isn’t unleashing zombies on his actors. But his “the show must go on” mentality despite missing performers, incapacitated monsters, a nigh-homicidal co-star, a script gone awry, a crew out of sorts, and a live television audience shows a devotion to his art that his no less sincere (albeit thankfully less malevolent) than that of the Mister Director character willing to sic the undead on his actors to get a better movie.

But the purest and most wholesome way that realism seeps into his movie is the way it brings Higurashi back together with his daughter, Mao. More than anyone involved in the orbit of *One Cut of the Dead* she believes in harnessing the truth in art. (To the point of haranguing a poor little kid over needing to cry real tears before it gets her thrown off the set of another production.) Amid this wild and wooly zombie movie, it is Mao who recognizes that for once, her father is doing something truthful and sincere in his work, far removed from the fake tears offered to his network T.V. star or pop idol princess.

There is something stirring about the fact that it’s her who springs into action to save the film when the production starts going off the rails mid-filming and the producer threatens to pull the plug. For all that Higurashi shares a caustic laugh with his friend over estranged daughters and drink, he chugs booze himself while looking over photos of his daughter as a girl, sitting on her father’s shoulders, camera in hand, enamored with her father’s work. The poetry of how the filming of the movie ends, with Mao once again on her father’s shoulders to get the final shot after the crane broke, is heartening to the last, a wonderful sign of reconciliation and mutual understanding between parent and child. That is the realest thing to emerge from *One Cut of the Dead*.

It is symbolic, then, that the climactic final shot of the film -- a crane shot that gazes down at the female lead with eerie atmosphere -- only happens through the cooperation of a human pyramid. Against all odds, it speaks to Higurashi’s ability to unite this motley crew of phony day players and punch-clock crew members under his frantic but committed vision for this piece.

Therein lies the deepest truth of *One Cut of the Dead*, and something that unites it with other movies-about-movies like *Ed Wood*. When watching the film-within-the-film that occupies the first thirty minutes, it’s easy to chuckle at the mishaps or awkward points that fail to meet our viewing standards. But even in the shakiest of productions, there are scads of real people, giving it their all to bring something to life.

That it works at all is amazing. That the process produces anything great is a miracle. And that it produces inventive movies like this one is a blessing. Movies do not always adhere to realism, even in the manufactured form that Hollywood tends to traffic in. But *One Cut of the Dead* is a reminder that whatever makes it to our screens, there is something and someone real behind it, and the truth of that cannot help but reach us, in ways we may never even realize or see.