Sixteen More Screams For Halloween: Day 6 (One Cut Of The Dead)

KEEP FILMING, ASSHOLE, I WANT THAT
PALME D'OR!!!

So this film was on my radar for a while, having been watched by a pal or two of mine. I thought for the longest time that I'd gotten the main "twist" of the film via osmosis by sheer accident, and I'd ruined what would otherwise have been a subversive masterpiece. Cue my surprise when I turned out to be completely wrong, and the movie twisted itself in a way I did not expect but found utterly welcome. As such I have to tackle it a little differently and actually kind of care about "spoilers", so if anything I say about the movie in the next two paragraphs intrigues you, then please close the tab and seek out the movie and come back. There. I gave a bit of advice, now I can say whatever I want.

Right then. One Cut Of The Dead has a simple premise, but not an unwelcome one that isn't genius. It is a film about a group of people in Japan making a zombie film, who are then besieged by actual zombies as part of an insane plot by the director to make the movie more realistic and must now survive an onslaught of the living dead. It is also a film done in one singular take, an unbroken shot from one camera which follows the action as shit gets real. Shit gets real surprisingly fast, too: within 10 minutes we have zombies. Things progress as you'd expect in this sort of scenario: the actors slowly realize that this is not a goof or a gag, but that the production crew are really fucking dead and really coming back to life to try and bite them. As I said, the director's gone absolutely unhinged with his approach to realism, letting the zombies in as he runs behind them with a camera yelling ACTION! The sick son of a bitch. HAHAHA YES YES NOW YOU'RE REALLY SCARED AND RUNNING FOR YOUR LIFE! YOU'RE GOING TO GET KILLED BY A ZOMBIE AND I'M GOING TO GET SO MUCH MONEY AND SO MANY ACCOLADES FROM YOU FUCKING DYING IN MY MOVIE! ACTION, MOTHERFUCKERS!

Things escalate, and they escalate really fast. You get the typical ambiguity over someone getting bit and the want of one person to kill the soon to be zombie now while the other wants to protect them, there's lots of struggling and fighting and running, and then there's one final girl left who snaps and kills this sociopath director. Mmm, the catharsis. You can almost hear his pleas. NO DON'T HURT ME! IT'S YOU WHO'S SUPPOSED TO DIE IN THE PICTURE, NOT ME! EVERYONE BUT ME HAS TO DIE SO I CAN MAKE MONEY OFF THE PICTURE! I WAS GOING TO GO TO CANNES WITH THIS FILM NOOOOOOOOOOO!! There's just one small problem with this escalation and resolution; it's only 35 minutes into the picture, and we have one living Final Girl left. Here is where you should bail if anything I have said intrigues you, because...

That's the end of One Cut Of The Dead. Sort of. The actual "meta zombie movie in one take" thing is only 35 minutes long. There is still, however, 60 minutes of run time left. What the hell could it be used on? This is the "twist" of sorts, as things rewind back in time a month and we get to see the making of the in-universe One Cut Of The Dead. The 90 minute run time breaks neatly into three acts. Act 1 is the actual in-universe film done in one take with the zombies and stuff, the horror movie I was expecting going in. Act 2, then, is the pre-production of the film. We get to meet new behind the scenes characters like the director's daughter, an aspiring moviemaker herself and someone who's quite charming. Hell, even the director seems like a down to earth guy. He was only playing an avant-garde jerk in his own movie, see. He and his wife aren't even supposed to be in the movie, but end up becoming impromptu understudies as the show must go on...and go on it does, in Act 3.

The third act of this movie is genius. You get to watch One Cut Of The Dead again, but with an eye behind the scenes. With this broader scope, the truth is revealed. One Cut Of The Dead is a production barely holding itself together. You got a zombie actor who's passed out drunk and puppeteered by the director offscreen, whole scenes improvised by the other three leads to stall for time while mishaps are dealt with, a guy who fucking has diarrhea and is shitting in the woods between scenes, and even the director's wife going full method actor and having to be put in a sleeper hold to get her in place for her big death scene. It's utterly absurd, and I am here for it. Every weird little idiosyncrasy in One Cut Of The Dead is explained away by this third act in the most hilarious way possible, right up to "wait how did they do a crane shot if it's a one take film"? It's a horror/comedy that has perfectly segmented its horror and its comedy, with a brief bit of setup in the middle. I love it.

That's what I got to say about the movie. Even if you did read ahead before seeing the movie... Fuck it, go see it anyway. Maybe the impact will be lessened, but who gives a shit? See the movie. Hell, if you got this far and want to live vicariously, watch it with a friend who is going in blind. Watching spooky media with pals is some of the most fun you can have in the spooky season, and this movie ended up being a lot of fun in its back half. I didn't even find the one-take zombie movie a slog, as I was invested in where it would go next. What a film. I have no idea what I'll watch next, but I hope it's this interesting.