The Japanese Zombie Comedy One Cut of the Dead Has a Lot More to Offer Than Some Dazzlingly Audacious Gimmicks
Welcome, friends, to the latest entry in Control Nathan Rabin 4.0. It’s the career and site-sustaining column that gives YOU, the kindly, Christ-like, unbelievably sexy Nathan Rabin’s Happy Place patron, an opportunity to choose a movie that I must watch, and then write about, in exchange for a one-time, one hundred dollar pledge to the site’s Patreon account. The price goes down to seventy-five dollars for all subsequent choices.
Sometimes I feel like I have been working on The Fractured Mirror, my upcoming book about movies about the film industry my entire life and will continue to work on it until my dying day.
I knew that I had taken on a very time and labor intensive quest when I signed on to write The Fractured Mirror. I just didn’t realize just how much time and labor would go into it. I thought I could cover the subject in 300 films.
I just wrote up my 395th film and still have a ways to go. Let’s just say that there are a LOT of American movies about the film industry and I have foolishly volunteered to watch and write about every last one, at least from a narrative perspective. I’m going to cover a healthy cross-section of documentaries about the subject but I will have to cherry-pick if I am EVER going to finish the book.
Well-meaning souls who just want to help sometimes will ask if I am covering television movies or foreign films for The Fractured Mirror and my knee-jerk, default reaction is less “no” than “Oh God no! Jesus fucking Christ, I’m never going to finish the book as it is, for the love of god why do I do this to myself? What is wrong with me? Why would I want to pile EVEN MORE WORK on top of the massive stack I already have to do?”
Nobody needs to know all that, however. So “no” should suffice. On the surface One Cut of the Dead seems like the kind of movie that I would write up for The Fractured Mirror. It was very well-received, to the point that it appears on a number of lists of the best movies about filmmaking.
It doesn’t qualify for my book because it is not American, first and foremost, and I limited the scope of The Fractured Mirror to just American films in what is honestly not a terribly successful attempt to make the writing the book manageable and doable.
But One Cut of the Dead wouldn’t qualify for my book even if it was American because it’s ultimately not about a movie but rather a live television broadcast on a zombie-themed channel that also seems to have a web element.
It consequently would not be accurate to describe the first thirty seven minutes of One Cut of the Dead as a film-within-a-film when it is technically a live-television-broadcast-within-a-film but I’m getting deep into the kind of semantics that are very important to you if you are writing a book about the film industry (and not live television broadcasts), as I am, and very unimportant if you are not.
One Cut of the Dead opens with the aforementioned live-broadcast-within-a-film but we initially do not know that what we’re watching is a live television broadcast because the visual and storytelling vocabulary is identical to that of film, of the narrative, documentary and faux-documentary variety.
In one nearly forty minute long take we follow the shooting of a fright fable about the shooting of a zombie movie complicated by an onslaught of the real-life living dead. One Cut of the Dead initially belongs to one of many weird sub-genres I discovered over the course of writing and researching The Fractured Mirror: location-based horror.
In location-based horror movies an overly ambitious location scout takes their job way too seriously and arranges for a low-budget horror film to be shot in a place that has spooky vibes because it’s actually haunted.
In this case a deranged director chooses to shoot in a cursed building where sinister experimentation once took place, then has a pentagon painted in order to help the evil along.
The cast and crew of the zombie movies soon become actual zombies but the maniacal auteur, a stickler for realism even if it kills him, sees an opportunity in the madness and keeps filming. He’s intent on making the world’s most realistic zombie movie because it will be a documentary rather than a work of fiction.
The make-up woman’s newly developed martial arts skills receive quite a workout as she’s called upon to defend herself and the stars of the zombie movie, who have developed a romance behind the scenes that spills into the action.
I am innately skeptical of epic shots that profess to be done in a single take because movie-makers have all sorts of different ways to cheat and sneak hidden edits inside seemingly uninterrupted shots.
The internet is never wrong, however, and the internet says that One Cut of the Dead’s first forty minutes or so genuinely were shot in one uninterrupted take and that no funny business was involved.
The one take gimmick lends the proceedings a bracing immediacy. It makes the virtuoso opening feel like a first person video game in the best possible way. The sheer audacity of the film’s high-wire conceit is impressive but there’s more to One Cut of the Dead than a nifty gimmick craftily executed.
One Cut of the Dead is scary as well as funny and full of wonderfully human little moments among the carnage. The bloodshed eventually ends with a final girl standing.
At that point the one cut ends and we go backwards in our storytelling, to a novelty-crazed horror network pitching a filmmaker whose motto is “Cheap, fast yet mediocre” on a wild stunt: a horror movie shot in one take on live television.
Every halfway decent filmmaker has turned the network down but our hero is desperate so he says yes. The second act then follows the production as the filmmaker tentatively begins to execute an ambitious plan with little in the way of resources.
We learn, for example, that the actors playing the director and the make-up woman couldn’t make it, which forced the director to play the TV production’s director and his retired wife to re-enter the acting business in order to play the make-up woman.
The final act offers a behind the scenes look at the shooting of the production that takes up the first act, affording us a fascinating reverse angle on what we’ve already seen.
One Cut of the Dead ends with its cast smiling from ear to ear with pride over what they’ve accomplished for next to no money and seemingly the highest possible level of difficulty.
They’re right to be proud. One Cut of the Dead was a massive worldwide box-office hit that launched its writer-director-editor’s career. It’s an enormously clever, well-executed stunt but it transcends its gimmicky nature and works spectacularly as a horror movie, a comedy and a strangely inspirational example of the “Let’s put on a show” sub-genre. This is homemade in the best sense and boasts the ambition and audacity that define the best feature film debuts.
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