To wit: “One Cut of the Dead” and “His House” have outstripped notable horror classics like “The Bride of Frankenstein” (98%), “Get Out (98%), “Jaws” (97%), “Nosferatu” (97%), “Psycho” (97%), and John Carpenter’s original “Halloween” (96%). They are also better reviewed than other comparatively low-percentage films like “The Texas Chain Saw Massacre” (89%), “The Thing” (84%), “The Shining” (83%), “The Haunting” (82%), “Scream” (81%), and “The Exorcist” (78%).
Many might consider many of the above films to be perfect, but that’s not always the case. For “The Shining,” for instance, critic David Denby felt the film to be pompous and un-scary. In the case of “The Bride of Frankenstein,” one critic named Mike Massie, writing for a website called Gone with the Twins, criticized the film’s slapstick humor, feeling it undercut the film’s potential horror.
Critics were, however, 100% united on “One Cut of the Dead,” a wild, three-part film about a low-budget horror production gone awry (based on 97 reviews). In “Cut,” a film crew arrives at an abandoned water filtration plant to film a zombie thriller … in one prolonged take. A quirk of the film-within-a-film’s production design, however, accidentally resurrects zombies for real. The filmmakers, feeling ambitious, decide to film their movie anyway, careful to keep the cameras rolling in order to save film stock. The second and third parts of the movie pull back additional layers of “reality,” pulling further and further into overlapping metanarratives about the making of “One Cut.” It’s just as much an act of media analysis as a zombie comedy.
Elisabeth Vincentelli, writing for the New York Times, felt that Ueda’s film refreshed tired meta-narrative jokes, and was refreshingly disgusting. Likewise, Variety, IndieWire, the Hollywood Reporter, and RogerEbert.com all praised the flick.
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