One Cut of the Dead

Sit through the rough first 37 minutes. That instruction is the whole review and obeying it is the entire experience.

The film opens with a single-take zombie short shot at an abandoned water filtration plant. It is amateurish, the performances are strange, the camera does odd things, and there are long dead pauses.

Then the film starts again and explains itself, and everything that looked like incompetence turns out to be load-bearing.

Shinichiro Ueda made it with a cast of unknowns from an acting workshop for about 25,000 dollars. It opened on two screens in Tokyo and word of mouth carried it to over 30 million.

It is a comedy about production, not a horror film, and it is one of the most purely enjoyable things on this site.