Hash Import 2026 05 18 12 34

One Cut of the Dead (2017)

½ — One Cut of the Dead (2017)

Shinichiro Ueda made One Cut of the Dead on a budget of roughly $25,000 (around three million yen), shooting with students enrolled at ENBU Seminar, a Tokyo performing arts school that co-produced the film as part of its professional development programme. Ueda had previously directed short films and the low-key comedy Gels (2013), and was largely unknown outside Japanese indie circles when this project went into production in 2017. The film opened to almost no attention, playing a handful of screenings before word of mouth turned it into a phenomenon, eventually grossing over $27 million worldwide against that tiny budget. It rode a mid-2010s wave of affection for self-reflexive horror, arriving in the same cultural moment as a renewed international appetite for Japanese genre cinema following years of relative quiet after the J-horror boom of the early 2000s.

One Cut of the Dead (2018) is widely praised as a clever, meta, low-budget triumph, but for me, it’s an insufferable mess that doesn’t earn its acclaim. The film opens with what seems like a single 37-minute continuous zombie take (clumsy camerawork, terrible acting, chaotic direction) and I sat through it thinking: "This must be intentional satire" and even other reviews said "don't worry, it takes a while but it comes good" but then comes the twist: it’s not real zombies attacking a crew (as the premise states); it’s just a film-within-a-film, and the rest of the movie becomes a behind-the-scenes look at how this awful production came together. Here’s the problem: the premise is misleading. Audiences are sold on the idea of a film crew being attacked by 'real' zombies during a live shoot, a wild, high-concept horror-comedy hook. But that never happens. It’s all fake, staged, and retroactively explained as a poorly made indie film. So the “twist” isn’t thrilling or profound, it’s a bait-and-switch. Instead of escalating tension, we get improv comedy, slapstick bickering, and forced quirkiness disguised as charm. The first act is gruelling to sit through if you think you’re watching something genuinely out of control. And the second half justifies nothing. The acting remains wooden, the writing flat, and the much-lauded “meta” structure feels more like an excuse for amateurish filmmaking than a bold artistic choice. It’s ambitious, but it fails on almost every level while pretending to be genius. Call it experimental if you want. I call it tedious, dishonest, and one of the most overrated films in recent memory. Absolutely awful.

Rating: ½ | Year: 2017 | Watched: 2025-09-27

View on Letterboxd →

Where to watch (UK)

Stream: Shudder · Shudder Amazon Channel
Rent: Apple TV Store · Rakuten TV · Amazon Video · Google Play Movies
Buy: Apple TV Store · Rakuten TV · Amazon Video · Google Play Movies
Physical: Amazon UK

Affiliate disclosure: Movies With Macca may earn a small commission on purchases or subscriptions started via these links. It costs you nothing extra.

Related on Movies With Macca

One Cut of the Dead (2017)

Read more

Invasion of the Body Snatchers (1956)

Fantastic Planet (1973)

Viy (1967)

Alice in Wonderland (1951)