Hooptober 12: 1/31

Here we go, first Hooptober film for this year’s spooky season!

One Cut of the Dead is the Japanese zombie version of Noises Off! that I never knew I wanted. Some of it is very slapdash, the music is terrible (perhaps because I’m conditioned to close the pop-up window whenever this kind of music plays in a random AI slop game ad), but it’s got heart and cheek, and don’t zombies just love some fleshy body parts.

I was also impressed with the little gags in the second half that put some scenes from the first half into context and which I just took at face value at first. A bang on the door? A little small-talk about hobbies? The camera just lying on the floor for a good minute? Why, it’s all creative liberty!

It reminded me of the time when I had a theatre group with friends and the audience never questioned all the stuff that went wrong on stage. One evening, one of the legs of a chair broke off, so we had to improvise blocking as nobody could sit on it anymore. We also used the chair leg as an impromptu phallic symbol during a lengthy monologue about the patriarchy. After the performance, audience members asked how we prepped the chair leg to break off and how we timed it so well. That’s the art of the thespian, everybody.