It's not often you hear the adjectives "charming" and "heartwarming" applied to a zombie film, but I'm going to do it. Not that you'd really understand if you just watched the first half of this film, which appears to be a rather amateurish all-in-one-take (hence "one cut") zombie film (filmed through a filter that makes everything look sickly) about an amateurish film crew making a zombie film who are attacked by genuine zombies. The film-maker (pictured above with the beard) turns out to be a total psycho, who performs a blood ritual specifically to raise the dead and then keeps pushing his hapless young cast into the path of the resulting zombies just to get good footage. You develop a special loathing for this character and are happy to see him meet a grisly fate. But then the film ends (with what looks like a crane shot) and the credits roll. And then a new film begins, featuring all the same characters, except with the obnoxious director now as the protagonist. I can't say any more without spoiling it, except, although this second half is slow to start, the payoff is very much worth it, and it is not only wildly enjoyable in its own right, it makes you reevaluate just about everything you saw before. Check this one out! It was, itself, a very low-budget production (I can't keep track of the levels of meta we've reached by this point) and released in just one cinema in Japan, but word of mouth spread like wildfire and it became an indie hit. Even if you don't like zombie films (and perhaps especially then) you will enjoy this, trust me.
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