One Cut of the Dead (カメラを止めるな！) is a low budget Japanese zombie movie that became hugely popular here. I just watched it over the weekend and it was wonderful. The writing is very funny and very clever, and when it was over I found myself immediately wanting to watch it a second time.

From Wikipedia:

One Cut of the Dead was made for 3 million Japanese Yen (approximately $25,000 in US Dollars at the time) with a cast of unknown actors. It was made in eight days after director Shinichiro Ueda participated in workshops for actors and filmmakers at the Enbu Seminar drama school in Tokyo

One Cut of the Dead opened in Japan in an 84-seat Tokyo art house theater with an initial theatrical run of six days. It was showing at around 200 screens in Japan by March 2018 where it had officially grossed 800 million yen ($7.3 million)

It had been a while since its popularity blew up, but I knew only 3 things about the movie before I watched it:

  1. It’s about zombies
  2. It’s really good
  3. It’s best to not spoil the plot

It’s been remarkably easy to avoid spoilers. It helps that the plot takes some effort to describe, bue it felt like everybody genuinely wanted to share the unspoiled experience with others even as it spread through word of mouth.

Apparently a bootleg version was somehow released on Prime Video, but the international release seems to be just starting. Hopefully this film will do well overseas, too.