One Cut of the Dead

A highly original zom-com thriller from Japanese writer-director Shin’ichirō Ueda, ONE CUT OF THE DEAD is a love letter to both flesh-chomping genre cinema and resourceful low-budget filmmaking. After the first act, a gonzo zombie movie shot as a single 37-minute take, the second and third acts cleverly shift viewpoints with explanatory flashbacks, backstage revelations and film-within-a-film plot twists. Despite humble, partly crowdfunded origins, Ueda’s dazzling early feature scored critical and commercial success, earning over a thousand times its tiny budget at the box office. Feted director Michel Hazanavicius later directed a French-language remake, FINAL CUT (2022).