'One Cut of the Dead' (2017)



My journey to watch every single zombie movie ever made, that I can get my hands on anyway, continues with a movie that I'd heard a lot of good things about but never seemed to find the time to watch... until now.

'One Cut of the Dead' is one of those films that seems to keep popping up in various '20 Zombie Movies To Watch Before You Die' (or become one of the living dead) lists but you never seem to find out quite why, just that you really need to watch it. Almost like they are trying to hide something about the movie... I'm normally a little wary of this approach (as I've been burnt before by films that shouldn't have been on those lists at all) but I figured it was way past time that I gave 'One Cut of the Dead' a go... so I did :o)

'One Shot of the Dead' tells the tale of a low budget Japanese zombie movie being shot in an abandoned water filtration plant, rumoured to be the site of experiments carried out by the military. Shooting is not going well at all and the director, Higurashi, quits the film in disgust. Suddenly, the cast and crew find themselves in the middle of a real zombie outbreak and Higurashi decides to make the most of the opportunity to add some real zombie action to his movie. The camera is rolling again and it won't stop until the film is done.

'One Shot of the Dead' is a really difficult film to talk about as, to be honest, it's such a good film that I really want you to watch it for yourself and have the experience that I did.
I'm not going to lie though, the first half an hour looked awful. Funny but a bit stilted and flat (even when the real zombie apocalypse kicked off). At this point, I was glad that I was watching it with a free Shudder trial instead of having bought it.

And then the second half of the movie kicked in and everything changed.

Like I said earlier, it's really difficult to talk about without giving away spoilers (and I really don't want to give any spoilers for this film of all films) but lets just say, the whole of the film just changed. All of a sudden, all the negative bits in the first half suddenly made sense and I was just laughing my head off watching it all come together. All of a sudden, there was a real charm to 'One Cut of the Dead' and you realise that it was there the whole time; you just have to see it all for it to make sense.
It's not often that a zombie film makes me feel happy ('Little Monsters' is the only other one that I can think of right now) but I came away from 'One Cut of the Dead' with a big grin on my face because I got blindsided, in the best way, by how happy this movie is. And then I went and bought myself a copy because it's worth having, even after my Shudder trial ends.

If you haven't seen 'One Cut of the Dead', you really need to do something about that; even if you wouldn't normally watch a zombie movie at all. Trust me, it's worth it.

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